.Longtime fans may miss the more emphatic singing of Maal's previous recordings -- his power is showcased here only on the flamenco-tinged "Dakar Moon" -- or wish that he hadn't ceded so many vocals to Sciubba. On its own terms, however, "Television" is a success. Such songs as "Miracle" and "International" claim the whole world with a gently lilting assurance.Click to read the full article
Often when we see or hear reports about Africa, the news is of famine, disease or war.Read More
Youssou N'Dour wants the world to know that the mother continent is full of joy, and the place where the world's most vibrant sounds have their roots.
That's the message of the Senegalese singer's new album, Rokku Mi Rokka (Give and Take), released recently on Nonesuch Records. N'Dour and his African big band, the Super Etoile of Dakar, on tour to promote the album, perform tonight at Gusman Center, 174 E. Flagler St., Miami.
In N'Dour, concertgoers will encounter a masterful singer of the contemporary pop music known in the Wolof language as mbalax. But N'Dour, who got his start singing a blend of Afro-Cuban and African genres, fuses his art with international influences, including Cuban music, reggae and the blues.
"In Africa, we get excited when we hear these rhythms, because we feel them, they are ours, but they left Africa with the slaves a long time ago," N'Dour said through publicists. "Rokku Mi Rokka means, 'You give me something, I give you something' and that's the message of the album: We have received a lot from the developed world, but remember that we brought a lot, too."
The album's 11 tracks celebrate Senegal's culture. Bajjan (The Father's Sister) is an ode to women who maintain family traditions; Sportif is about wrestling, a popular sport in Senegal; while 4-4-44 commemorates Senegal's independence on April 4, 2004.
Besides the Super Etoile ensemble, the album features collaborations with impressive artists. Malian musician Bassekou Kouyate, a member of Ali Farka Toure's band, plays ngoini, a four-stringed precursor to the banjo on Sama Gammu (My Rival). Balla Sidibe and Rudy Gomis of Orchestra Baobab add vocals on XEL (Think).
The greatest contemporary singer from Senegal and possibly all of Africa, Youssou N'Dour travels the world with and in his music. He has collaborated widely with the likes of Sting, Peter Gabriel and Neneh Cherry, who appeared on "7 Seconds," a 1994 European hit. Yet N'Dour's most interesting ventures mesh Senegalese styles not with Anglo-American pop, but with other African music. Cherry returns for N'Dour's new "Rokku Mi Rokka," rapping and singing on the disappointing "Wake Up (It's Africa Calling)." But that attempt at crossover is an anomaly on an album that draws mostly from a closer source.
N'Dour's marvelous previous set revealed its inspiration in its title, "Egypt." On "Rokku Mi Rokka," which translates as "give and take," the singer-songwriter supplements his usual crew with players from nearby Mali.
Aside from "4-4-44," a simplistic tune that adds a horn section, and "Wake Up," the album's sound is intricate, indigenous and characteristically exhilarating. This isn't folk music: The five numbers featuring Mali's Bassekou Kouyate on ngoni (a West African lute also called the xalam) are spare and more traditional, but such exuberant songs as "Pullo Ardo" and "Baay Faal" include synthesizers and strings. While both modes succeed, the most striking selections are such Kouyate-driven ones as "Dabbaax," which have an ease that's rare in N'Dour's work yet suit his supple high tenor.
Whoever coined the term "intelligent dance music" was probably thinking of digital basslines and tricky breaks, but the phrase will also do nicely for this set of newly recorded songs by the legendary Senegalese band. Orchestra Baobab, who reformed in 2001 after a 16-year break, are masters of an urban style that pairs rippling, fast-flowing guitar lines with impassioned vocals and sophisticated dance rhythms. These move effortlessly from rumba, reggae and highlife to more indigenous grooves such as mbalax and their own "mbalsa", an infectious salsa hybrid heard on the track Ami Kita Bay. The four vocalists - augmented by Youssou N'Dour for a new version of their 1970s hit Nijaay - are superb. Nick Gold's production and sequencing ensures we are never bored: there is always a new voice or groove around the corner. Star of the show, as always, is musical director and guitarist Barthélemy Attisso, whom I once compared to Hank Marvin and Mark Knopfler; that wasn't hyperbole.
Over the past decade or so, Youssou N'Dour's career has expanded along the lines of liberal chums such as Sting and Peter Gabriel, with the African star becoming a sort of global ambassador. The most recent example was his role as the Anglo-African abolitionist Olaudah Equiano in the William Wilberforce biopic Amazing Grace. But N'Dour's musical career has suffered somewhat from the expectations aroused by the hit "7 Seconds".
The opening track here, "4-4-44", is symptomatic of this as he tries to inflate an average song into a pop hit; and many other tracks move away from his usual mbalax grooves in search of a broader audience – most successfully on "Sportif", which has an appealing New Orleans second-line flavour. The album's saviour is Bassekou Kouyaté, the ngoni (African banjo) player, whose frisky contributions are a delight. But a veil should be drawn over the concluding "Wake Up (It's Africa Calling)", an ill-judged, pompous attempt by N'Dour and Neneh Cherry to repeat the success of "7 Seconds".
Asked about what might be expected on the new album by Orchestra Baobab, the Senegalese group’s 62-year-old guitarist Barthelemy Attisso pointed out that his band had been playing in the same style since 1970. The likelihood of them changing at this point was not great. As he put it: “We don’t want to change our style or we would lose our identity.”
If Attisso was ever going to cater to changing tastes, he would have done it 25 years ago, when his group’s hybrid of Nigerian high life, Cuban rhythms and B. B. King steals were usurped by the percussive street music known as mbalax. If mbalax was Senegal’s punk, Youssou N’Dour was its Joe Strummer. N’Dour became a star; Attisso put down his guitar and became a lawyer for 14 years.
Orchestra Baobab’s music was always that of the status quo. But in the 1970s, Senegal had a cool status quo. Leopold Senghor, the President, was a poet who championed a progressive strain of Afrocentricity called “Negritude” and Orchestra Baobab were his favourite emissaries of it – so much so that the group had a club built for them.
Made in Dakar might indeed have been made in Dakar, but for musical provenance, you’d need a box of pins to represent these songs on a map. Such is the brassy Cuban uplift of Ami Kita Bay that the song doesn’t need to do much other than repeat its main refrain. In Sibam Medoune Diallo’s vibrato pinballs from one minor chord to another and still sounds like great party music. By contrast, abetted by a sad saxophone, the melancholia of Aline seems connected to the Cabo Verdean blues of Cesarea Evora.
With five vocalists, it’s not always possible to discern who you’re listening to. But, on a re-recording of the group’s 1974 hit Nijaay – a song originally written and sung by the group’s late singer Laye Mboup – there’s no mistaking the voice of a guesting N’Dour. His presence seems significant. During Orchestra Baobab’s dormant years, N’Dour westernised his sound. But as the success of artists such as Tinariwen confirms, we Westerners never wanted our African music to sound like Elton John in Lion King mode. We wanted a joyful racket made in some remote club that we might never get to – the Club Baobab perhaps. Judging by the intensity of his performance, maybe he did too.
“The music and inspiration on this album are from the north, from the desert, from parts of the country that border on Mali and Mauritania. People from those countries will know and understand this music as well as people who come from the centre of Senegal” N’Dour says.Read More
“Some people might think Senegalese music means mbalax, which is Wolof, the most important language in the country, everybody speaks it. But all my life I have been saying that this is not the only music we have in Senegal, we have a wide range of sounds and rhythms. When it came to writing the songs for this album, I wanted to use different sounds.
“Sometimes you will hear a little blues on the album, a little reggae, a bit of Cuba. In Africa, we get excited when we hear these rhythms, because we feel them, they are ours, but they left Africa with the slaves a long time ago. Rokku Mi Rokka means ‘You give me something, I give you something’ and that’s the message of the album: we have received a lot from the developed world, but remember that we brought a lot, too.”
For the recording, N’Dour returned to the band he helped form a quarter of a century ago, the Super Etoile, and old friends Habib Faye (bass), Babacar “Mbaye Dieye” Faye (percussion) and Papa Oumar Ngom (guitar), who have been part of Youssou’s circle for more than 20 years. “They are not from the north, but they are Senegalese, they understand exactly what is happening in the north, the south, and the centre.”
There are a few additions to the team, too. Neneh Cherry, duets with Youssou on “Wake Up (It’s Africa Calling)”. (Cherry and N’Dour previously recorded the hit song ‘7 Seconds’ in 1994). “We’re not trying to have another ‘7 Seconds’ as this is a much more African-sounding song, featuring our instruments, such as kora,” N’Dour says.
In the smart Point E district of the Senegalese capital, Dakar, a cosy outdoor restaurant with the ghastly name Just 4U has become a key fixture of the west-African music circuit. Cheikh Lo has a weekly residency, local hip-hop trio Daara J make regular appearances, and the country's two superstars, Youssou N'Dour and Baaba Maal, made a historic appearance together on the venue's little stage this summer. And it is here, at midnight every Saturday, that the venue is home to another west-African music legend - nearly four decades since they first got together and six years on from their dramatic reunion, following a 16-year split.
On a good night, Orchestra Baobab are still one of the most joyous, rousing bands on the continent, and a special show at Just 4U to mark the launch of their first studio album in five years provides further evidence that the gentlemen of Dakar are not finished yet. There are 11 band members on stage, mostly dressed in brightly coloured shirts, and augmented by friends playing extra percussion and brass. They play for three hours but sound as if they could have continued until dawn, constantly changing styles in a cheerfully sophisticated, rhythmic and melodic show that features their full array of lead singers (they have five to call on) and backing work that matches congas, timbales and drums with brass and the remarkable guitar work of Baobab's founder member and chef d'orchestre, the quiet and bespectacled Barthelemy Attisso.
"We have had the same style since 1970," Attisso, 62, says before the show. "We were the first band to mix traditional music with modern dance styles. We don't want to change our style or we would lose our identity." Rudy Gomis, the easy-going 60-year-old singer, who also joined Baobab at the start of their career, says the fundamental sound has never changed. "It's a salad," he explains, "a mixture of Cuban songs and influences from Senegalese griots [traditional hereditary singers], and from the Congo, Nigeria, France and America, played by a Pan-African band with members from Senegal, Togo, Morocco and Guinea."
That old Baobab formula is still intact, and the band has survived - with substantially the same lineup they started with - because they have lost neither their enthusiasm nor the element of surprise in their songs. Watch them on stage or listen to the new material or reworked old favourites on the new album, and you can hear not just African and Cuban influences but echoes of everything from ska to jazz and country. This is thanks largely to the arrangements and inventive instrumental work of Attisso, perhaps the most unlikely guitar hero in Africa, simply because this is not his full-time job.
In a miracle of time management, Attisso combines his key role in Orchestra Baobab with his practice as a commercial lawyer, based not in Senegal but in Togo, which is not even a neighbouring country in west Africa. Even now, he only joins the band "for tours or for major events like this, so I spend about half my time with Baobab".
Attisso first arrived in Dakar in 1966 to study law, "but I found I needed money to pay the law school, so I had to find a night job. I thought of becoming a concierge, a bouncer at a bar or a cashier at a club, but I thought that would be boring, so I decided to become a musician." He spent two years learning the guitar and listening to the Congolese guitarist Doctor Nico, Cuban piano styles, Django Reinhardt, BB King, Wes Montgomery and Carlos Santana. These, he says, are still the only records he plays, "because I'm still learning from them".
By 1968, he was working in the celebrated Star Band of Dakar's Club Miami, alongside singers Rudy Gomis and Balla Sidibe, who would both later be invited to join him in a new venture, Orchestra Baobab. The group was the house band of Club Baobab, a basement nightclub owned by the minister of finance, who just happened to be the younger brother of Leopold Senghor, the Senegalese president. Senghor's "negritude" policy included the promotion of African music in his newly independent state and Orchestra Baobab were among its beneficiaries. The band remained at Club Baobab for seven years, playing four nights a week to a sophisticated clientele that often included the president and his guests, developing their style of mixing current hits and popular foreign favourites with the music of the Senegalese griots. In the process, Orchestra Baobab became the best-loved band in Senegal, outgrowing even the fashionable Club Baobab. "We wanted more money and bigger places to play," said Gomis. "And we were frustrated when our friends couldn't get in to Baobab see us, while political figures could."
At their height, they were playing stadiums across the country, but when mbalax, the percussive street style popularised by Youssou N'Dour, swept Senegal Orchestra Baobab's gentle, melodic style suddenly fell out of fashion. By 1985, they were forced out of business. "It was good for us," claims Gomis now, "because the incredible success had gone to the heads of some of our musicians. But I never thought we would get together again." Gomis went on to develop a solo career, while also working as a language teacher; Attisso returned to the law. "I thought it was all over, so I simply parked my guitar," he says. "I occasionally listened to the old music with nostalgia, but I never had time to keep practising."
That could well have been that, if western audiences had not started to take an interest in African music during the 1980s and 1990s. In 2001, a classic Baobab album, Pirates Choice, was rereleased in Britain, and in the same year the band was invited to reform for a special concert at the Barbican. It was, Attisso says, a frightening request. The lawyer had not picked up a guitar for 16 years and had forgotten how to play. "I told my wife that I had lost my touch but that my band members needed me," he recalls. "She replied that I could accomplish anything if I put my mind to it, and so every night after work I would practise until 2am, or right through the night, until I could play again." Orchestra Baobab were reborn, and N'Dour, the man who helped put them out of business, has proved to be a massive help in their revival. Along with World Circuit's Nick Gold, he co-produced their 2002 comeback album Specialist in All Styles, and he makes a rousing appearance on the new album, Made in Dakar, which was recorded in his Xippi studio.
Mbalax is still hugely popular in Senegal, but Orchestra Baobab have found a new audience, both back home and in the west. "Music is like fashion," says Gomis. "It comes and goes. The world stopped for us when the band stopped, but now the world is moving again."
If the patois of hip-hop is slang, its attitude is subversivness in baggy jeans and its beats can very well border on the rude. A refined namaste and a polite satsriakal that will make your grandma happy can sound strangely out of place on a rapper’s lips. But then the Senegalese band Daara J, which sings in the tribal language Wolof, English, French and Spanish, wants to break stereotypes. In the Capital for Alliance Francaise’s Francophone Week, they belted out an unusual blend of bhangra, reggae and African music. And N’Dango D, Aladji Man and Faada Freddy, who make up Daara J, say they want to talk love, not war.Read More
“Our music is derived from the Senegalese oral tradition of tasso and we use it to discuss environment, the living conditions and the country’s situation. But we also want to say that Africa is about youth and great music,” says 33-year-old N’Dango D, before they head home to Dakar, Senegal. “Through our music, we are also trying to break the dark image of Africa, often associated with AIDS, drugs and poverty.”
