Dakar Heart is Jimi Mbaye's debut solo album. Created at his friend and lifelong collaborator Youssou N'dour's Studio Xippi in the rue Parchappe in the Senegalese capital, this record taps into the energies of Dakar's pop scene (a scene which Mbaye has in no small measure helped to create), while subtly conserving, notwithstanding Mbaye's originality, the key elements of the age-old aesthetic of the West African musical soul. Mbaye, who as a ten-year-old roaming the streets of Dakar's "Khourou Nar" neighborhood fashioned his first instrument from discarded gasoline cans and nylon fishing string and taught himself to play, is a musical polymath at home in many traditions.

Nevertheless, there are few affectations in Mbaye's playing, singing and songwriting. Seldom does he stray from the direct communication, the unnameable intimacy, which distinguished a Robert Johnson, an Otis Redding or Mbaye's own namesake Hendrix (or, closer to our present moment, a Van Morrison or a Joan Armatrading) from any who pretend to their degree of connection to a listener. Never estranged from the ethos of Senegalese musical culture, griot riffs and all, Mbaye (like these predecessors) transforms roots music, propelling it to the level of universal feeling.

The highest complement one musician will ever pay to another is to say that his sound is personal - unique to him. This is precisely what Youssou Ndour says of Jimi Mbaye. John Coltrane said the same thing of McCoy Tyner, and it is so very true that no one plays guitar or sings quite like Jimi Mbaye. He is widely acknowledged to be Ndour's musical alter ego, as lead guitarist the creative heart of Ndour's "Super Etoile" band, arguably the best and certainly the best-known and most consistently popular African pop band in the world in our era. If, as Robert Christgau has written, Ndour is "the one African who is progressing inexorably toward the world-pop fusion everyone else theorizes about", Mbaye has been at the same time both the engine and the conscience of this progression.

Sometimes the uniqueness in Mbaye's playing has to do with what Mbaye calls the "African scale" he uses, when he makes the sound of his Fender Stratocaster uncannily resemble the sound of the traditional Senegalese "guitar" known as the xalam. Mbaye has popularized this style in Senegal and exported it around the world with Ndour and the Super Etoile. Many have tried to copy it. Still, each time one hears a figure in the style from Mbaye himself it sounds unmistakably his own - natural, ingenious, a figure sprung from the musical recesses of what Ndour and Mbaye both refer to as l'Afrique profonde ("real Africa"). Other times, playing well within the common vernacular of modern rock (sometimes blues) guitar, Mbaye crafts another kind of elegant figure, brimming with a rare simplicity, full of emotion that no one else (short of Eric Clapton or Mark Knopfler, perhaps) could invoke from the same notes.

The uniqueness of Mbaye's singing (whether in Wolof, English or French), and of his songwriting, lies in its freshness and warm-heartedness, in a certain resonance of sincerity, of unadorned feeling. Staying clear, on one hand, of the packaged exoticism of the major labels' world music "African hopes", and on the other hand bearing but little resemblance to the African artists who make records for purely traditional taste (records not meant to be pop records at all), Mbaye, like South Africa's Vusi Mahlasela and perhaps a handful of other undiscovered singer-songwriter talents in Africa who have not yet been absorbed into the media machine but who surely would, if heard, impose themselves on a clued-in public's imagination, is a real original, an artist with the sometimes patient, sometimes lolloping delivery inherent in Senegalese mbalax and the underlying tranquil power of a genuine star.

Africa south of the Sahara has given the world several remarkable guitarists. Hailing from different regions, working in different guitar idioms, they have all found ways to assimilate currents of inspiration from around the world into their deeply African playing. One thinks first of Barthélémy Attiso from Senegal's Orchestre Baobab, Mali's Ali Farka Touré, Cameroon's Francis Bebey, Nigeria's unsung Bob Ohiri, and from South Africa the absolutely sui generis Philip Tabane. What is more, who will dispute that the African diaspora gave to "Western" rock - in the persons of Chuck Berry and Jimi Hendrix (without even speaking of the bluesmen who preceded them) - two of its most important pillars?

Jimi Mbaye is of this lineage of idiosyncratic yet seminal guitar geniuses. Africa is a continent of gentle spirituality and Jimi Mbaye is Africa's son. Having, with Ndour, set a glorious standard for Senegalese pop, Mbaye now lays bare, with this album of imaginative and compelling material, some of the continuities between Africa and the rest of the world's pop which, if truth be told and reflected on, ought really to be considered Africa's progeny.