There are two exceptional concerts of West African music playing back-to-back this week in Prague: Afel Bocoum & Akibar of Mali are appearing at Lucerna Music Bar, and the following night the Gangbé Brass Band from Benin will perform at Všebaráčnická rychta.

Afel Bocoum, a nephew of Ali Farka Toure, collaborated with Mali's most famous guitarist for many years. Since the death of Farka Toure this year, his magical Malian desert-blues guitar sound lives on through Bocoum, who plays the same double-string guitar, known as a njurkel, as well as a calabash (percussion) and the instrument that inspires him the most for his own compositions, the njarka, a single-stringed violin.

Bocoum will be playing for the first time ever in Prague with the group Alkibar, which means "messengers." He sees himself as a musical ambassador for the people of Mali. In an interview for RFI Musique, Bocoum explained, "My aim is not just to make an album, but to reach out and touch the maximum number of people possible so that we're all on the same wavelength. My songs are about Mali, Africa and the state of the world in general."

The music carrying Bocoum's message is just as calm and hypnotic as Farka Toure's, with the meditative, repetitive song lines layered over each other with circular rhythms and interspersed with powerful solos on njurkel and njarka.

While the colorful parade of African musicians known as the Gangbé Brass Band serves up an altogether different sound, this ensemble also carries an important message to its audience — singing loud not only about life in general, but political injustice in Africa and the tribulations of women in all cultures.

For instance, the Gangbé song "Oblemou" (Do Not Betray Me) begins as a chorus: "A young man falls under the spell of a charming girl, gets close to her, tells her he loves..." By the end of the song, however, the love story has gone sour: "Some time later, she becomes pregnant. She gives birth to a charming baby boy for our friend, who will never meet his father, already left somewhere else."

Gangbé's songs are sung in several languages indigenous to Benin, including fon, ngou, mina, yoruba, évé, as well as French. But don't mistake Gangbé for a vocal-based preacher's group, because more than anything else, the band is a brass and percussion explosion.

With seven horns and two percussionists, the Gangbé starts their performance with a parade, as all 10 musicians march into the concert room single file wearing noble costumes, blowing on horns, banging on drums and chanting. Once onstage together, they launch into a raucous celebration of their unique blend of jazz, Afro-Latin, traditional folk-roots and voodoo music of Benin.

This is exactly how their last concert in Prague, at Všebaráčnická rychta a few years ago, unfolded. Returning to the same stage in Malá Strana, the band should have no problem once again creating an ecstatic room of revelers.

The word "gangbé" means the sound of metal, and so the group's assorted horns (trumpet, trombone, saxophone and euphonium) rarely let up during their performances, which segue remarkably from high-life to Afrobeat (the irresistible funk-jazz of Fela Kuti, the late Nigerian band leader and political activist) or to JuJu (the more upbeat sound of Nigeria's King Sunny Ade). Because of their unlimited influences, in a flash, Gangbé can just as easily sound like a German or Czech brass band, a Bourbon Street funeral band or an Afro-jazz orchestra.