Made In Dakar

What an irony it is that Youssou N’Dour has become one of Orchestra Baobab's staunchest defenders for the last five years. The Senegalese singer was the quintessential symbol of the mbalax music that helped bury the band in the mid Eighties. They came out of sixteen years of silence to release their 2002 album Specialist in All Styles, an album which was deservedly nominated for a Grammy Award and bagged two BBC Radio 3 World Music trophy in 2003. Fours years on, and it looks like they have another superbly crafted album on their hands which relies on the successful alchemy of the old and the new. And this time, N’Dour evens sneaks in a few bars of his distinctive voice in the moving song “Nijaay”.

His soaring vocals are matched by young Assane Mboup whose timbre stamps this October release with a maturity that belies his age. The two singers meet in the aforementioned “Nijaay”, a vibrant homage to the late Laye Mboup. Mboup’s tragic death in 1974 robbed Senegal of one its leading compositional lights. This enduring song is given a rich uptempo beat by the ageless Barthelemy Attisso who arranges all 11 songs here in his characteristically assured way. Attisso was at the heart of Orchestra Baobab from the start. This remarkable guitarist might be 62 years old, yet he dictates the complex rhythmic changes with an energy more akin to the teenager he was when he first arrived in Dakar 41 years ago. “We have the same style since 1970,” he told Guardian reporter Robin Denselow last month, “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.”

There is little risk of that with this slick marriage between Senegal’s golden era and the sophistication of modern recording methods. Most of the tunes have become standards over the decades, with only four songs - “Jirim”, “Ami Kita Bay”, “Aline” and “Colette” – being added to the vast repertoire of the seven-man band. “Ami Kita Bay” is pencilled in by another veteran, Rudy Gomis, and is one of the highlights of this World Circuit release. Here again, Attisso’s guitar features prominently as does the talking drum that is effectively exploited in many of Baobab’s songs.

The album features a diversity of styles that do honour to Africa’s musical open-mindedness: mbalax and rumba mix in effortlessly with cha cha cha or the Cuban guajira rhythms that boomeranged back across the Atlantic fifty years ago. Constantly, the Baobab dip into jazz, blues and even ska to pepper their suave repertoire. The band’s soft yet dancy tunes are what set up Nick Gold’s quest for similarly lilting works in Cuba a decade ago. He was the one who re-released the Orchestra’s forgotten gems in the late Eighties and early Nineties, in a long quest to bring the band out of retirement. Gold has remained faithful to the sophisticated style that brought Baobab such fame 30 years ago. It is not certain that this talismanic group repeats the success it enjoyed with Specialist in All Styles in 2002. But they prove here that they have been able to inject new blood and styles into a successful formula without losing anything of the identity they began forging 37 years ago.

October 2007

Daniel Brown

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