Realities interlace as the global dance of culture creates confluences such as this: a traditional West African artist who first performed at a circumcision ceremony can now achieve world renown touring and recording with the likes of English Progressive Rocker Peter... [more]

Realities interlace as the global dance of culture creates confluences such as this: a traditional West African artist who first performed at a circumcision ceremony can now achieve world renown touring and recording with the likes of English Progressive Rocker Peter Gabriel. This pan-cultural path belongs to Youssou N'Dour, premier practitioner of the Senegalese pop form known as mbalax, a convolution of influences, opposites, and syntheses. When Latin music bounced its African influence back to Senegal, it first sang in French and Spanish and made rumba. When the music was thus infused with Cuban rhythms and Spanish guitars, the native Wolof tongue began to reassert itself, and the result was mbalax. The Moorish and Arabic wails of prayer from neighboring Mali embroidered the melodies of the traditional "griots," who are the living music-making history books of the Savannah belt. Highlights of such cross-cultural ricochets include a 1970s-era Etoile Dakar covering the Detroit Spinners' "Rubber Band Man," breaking out of the middle eight into a Wolof rap that urged the world to discover the sound of mbalax! More recent sub-Saharan pop stars to emerged from the mix include Kin Lam, the first woman to front her own mbalax band. The talking drum and bardic singing traditions are as much a part of the Savannah belt's make-up as the Baobab trees, namesakes of long-lived mbalax progenitors, the Orchestra Baobab. It is fitting that this virtuosic band, with its merging of song and rumba with traditional Wolof language and rhythm, should be linked to the tree that, as legend has it, was planted upside down by merry gods. With its roots in the sky, it may thus be likened to an antenna tuned to the signal of a Cuban music that was itself a reply to the voice of the African Diaspora. [show less]