Artist: Etoile de Dakar, Youssou N’Dour
Title: Once Upon a Time in Senegal – The Birth of Mbalax 1979 – 1981
Label: Sterns
Genre: World : African
UPC: 740042305427
Territory: World
Release Date: 05.10.10
There are not many African artists whose names are as well-known as Youssou N’Dour’s. And it’s not just his ‘7 Seconds’ duet with Neneh Cherry, or his frequent collaborations with Peter Gabriel and others. No, you don’t reach his status just by who you hang out with; you get there by who you are and what you do. On one level the double album of Once Upon A Time In Senegal form a chapter in the story of who Youssou N’Dour is and how he got there. But on another they show him simply as an equal member of a band … a band in the right place at the right time and doing absolutely the right things. As guitarist and sometimes band-leader Badou N’Diaye says, “When a group of people play together and it works, everyone knows what is happening.” That brief but vital moment in time is captured in these 23 tracks selected from the cassettes that Etoile de Dakar recorded between 1979 and 1981. Several have never been released outside of Senegal, and all have been sensitively re-mastered from the earliest available audio source. These are the best sounding recordings of this material available … bar none!
Vocalist Youssou N’Dour is one of the most celebrated African musicians in history. A renowned singer, songwriter, and composer, Youssou’s mix of traditional Senegalese mbalax with eclectic influences ranging from Cuban samba to hip hop, jazz, and soul has won him an international fan base of millions. In the West, Youssou has collaborated with musicians Peter Gabriel, Sting, Alan Stivell, Wyclef Jean, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Dido and others. In Senegal, Youssou is a powerful cultural icon actively involved in social issues. In 2004, Rolling Stone described him as, in Senegal and much of Africa, “perhaps the most famous singer alive.”
N’Dour helped develop a style of popular music in Senegal, known by its Wolof language name of mbalax. Mbalax is a blend of the country’s traditional griot percussion and praise-singing with the Afro-Cuban and Haitian kompa arrangements and flavors which made the return trip from the Caribbean to West Africa in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s and have flourished in West Africa ever since. Beginning in the mid-1970s the resulting mix was modernized with a gloss of more complex indigenous Senegalese dance rhythms, roomy and melodic guitar and saxophone solos, chattering talking-drum soliloquies and, on occasion, Sufi-inspired Muslim religious chant. This created a new music which was at turns nostalgic, restrained and stately, or celebratory, explosively syncopated and funky. Younger Senegalese musicians steeped in Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, James Brown, and the whole range of American jazz, soul, and rock music, which Senegal’s cosmopolitan capital, Dakar, had enthusiastically absorbed, were rediscovering their heritage and seeking out traditional performers, particularly singers and talking drummers, to join their bands. (The griots—musicians, praise-singers and storyteller-historians—comprise a distinct hereditary caste in Wolof society and throughout West Africa.) As it emerged from this period of fruitful musical turbulence, mbalax would eventually find in Youssou N’Dour the performer who has arguably had more to do with its shaping than any other individual.
Check out Once Upon A Time In Senegal to see where Youssou and Etoile De Dakar and how the phenomenon of mbalax began!
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Tags: Africa, Etoile de Dakar, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, Senegal, Sterns, Sting, Y La Bamba, Youssou N'Dour
