Today's popular music in Senegal, known in the Wolof language as mbalax ["UMM BAH-LAAKH"], developed as a blend of the country's traditional griot percussion and praise-singing with the Afro-Cuban arrangements and flavors which made "the return trip" from the Caribbean to West Africa in the 1950s and 1960s (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 indescribably funky. Younger Senegalese musicians steeped in Jimi Hendrix, Santana, James Brown, and the whole range of American jazz, soul music and rock, 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.) 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.
N'Dour, born in Dakar in October 1959, is a singer endowed with remarkable range and poise, and, as a composer, bandleader and producer, with a prodigious musical intelligence. He absorbs the entire Senegalese musical spectrum in his work, often filtering this through the lens of genre-defying rock or pop music from outside Senegalese culture, always delivering memorable performances both in concert and on record. N'Dour has made mbalax famous throughout the world during more than twenty years of recording and touring outside of Senegal with his band, The Super Etoile.
N'Dour solidified his leadership of The Super Etoile by 1979 (after having recorded twelve cassette albums in Senegal with two earlier incarnations of the group, The Star Band and Etoile de Dakar), and launched an international career with the help of the Senegalese taxi drivers' fraternal associations in France and Italy (and a small circle of supporters in England). His beginnings were inauspicious. As a willowy teenager, he hustled pirate gigs in the parking lots outside certain of Dakar's dance clubs to which he and his bandmates had uneasy or no access, his distinctive voice earning him a reputation as a boy wonder and the occasional live amateur-hour slot on the National Radio. As early as age twelve, N'Dour had also been performing at neighborhood religious-ceremonial occasions in the hard-bitten Medina section of the city where he grew up as the first-born child of a pious auto mechanic, Elimane N'Dour, and his wife, N'Deye Sokhna Mboup, herself of griot origin and an occasional performer in the ceremonies of the Medina neighborhoods.
Twenty-odd years later, N'Dour and The Super Etoile, acknowledged today as Africa's most popular live band on a worldwide scale, play challenging Senegalese roots music with what The Los Angeles Times says is "a joyous precision". A SPIN reviewer has enthused that "Youssou N'Dour has more talent in his thumbnail than most so-called pop stars have in their entire being". Responding to the experimental and introspective side of N'Dour's critically-acclaimed major-label albums SET (Virgin, 1990), EYES OPEN (Sony Music, 1992) and THE GUIDE (Sony Music, 1994), The Guardian (London) has called N'Dour's music "the finest example yet of the meeting of African and Western music: wholesome, urgent and thoughtful."
Peter Gabriel (N'Dour's friend since their duet on the classic "In Your Eyes" track from Gabriel's 1985 album SO) has proclaimed N'Dour, as a singer, simply "one of the best alive".
SET figured in a Billboard list of top world music albums of all time while, back in Senegal, the urgent moral appeals sung by N'Dour throughout that album generated a groundswell of direct action by young people in the ghettos of Senegalese cities. Their efforts culminated in an extraordinary urban ecological movement known as "Set-Setaal" ("Be Clean"), which included massive clean-ups, painting and refurbishing of housing and improvement of water-supply and sanitary facilities, all without government intervention. (The aftermath of the release of SET is but one example of the impact N'Dour has had on Senegalese youth.) After SET's release, Rolling Stone judged N'Dour's potential long-term impact on African music fans and general audiences alike, so promising that "if any Third World performer has a real shot at the sort of universal popularity last enjoyed by Bob Marley it's Youssou, a singer with a voice so extraordinary that the history of Africa seems locked inside it".
Rolling Stone said of EYES OPEN that N'Dour had "created a musical context that's as large with possibilities as his sinuous, spine-tingling singing an epic-sized record that lays claim to a universe of pop while never dropping its West African accent." N'Dour's trilingual hit "7 SECONDS" from THE GUIDE (a duet with Neneh Cherry), was named Europe's Song of the Year at the May 1995 World Music Awards in Monaco and won numerous other honors, staying near the top of the pop charts in most European countries for a long period. "7 Seconds" is N'Dour's most commercially successful composition abroad to date, having sold more than two million copies worldwide as a single.
N'Dour's extensive touring in Europe, the Far East and Africa has not yet been matched by a regular slate of American appearances, but with the present American release of JOKO on Nonesuch that is likely to change. A full American tour is promised for 2001 with selected dates scheduled for the fall of 2000.
N'Dour's release of JOKO on Nonesuch, his first US release in six years, is a continuation of the daring musical enterprise which has become his hallmark. Seeking strength in roots while at the same time exhibiting a musical reach not often seen in African pop music-- nor in pop music as a whole, for that matter-- JOKO seems likely to be viewed as his most mature and coherent work to date.
N'Dour, who The Village Voice's Robert Christgau calls "the one African moving inexorably toward the world-pop fusion everyone else theorizes about," has quietly but steadily captured the affection of a diverse, multi-ethnic, genuinely international audience, urging the infectious urban rhythms of mbalax beyond Senegal and beyond the territory of the "world music" aficionados outside of Senegal who first were attracted to him. European and Japanese critical response to an earlier release of JOKO in those territories highlighted the originality and audacious character of this album, and, above all, a certain stunning "freedom," described here by Bertrand Dicale in France's prestigious Le Monde de la Musique:
This freedom is striking from the very beginning: in the combinations of electronic drumming and natural percussion, of pop harmonizing cheek-by-jowl with the recognizable traditional timbre, of the Wolof language with rock guitar. We are accustomed to the superimposing and mixing of technical, material and cultural elements, but this is a different story: This is no mere amalgamation. This is consanguinity.
Youssou N'Dour demonstrates in JOKO a kind of absolute delocalization of inspiration. It's not about globalization, in the sense of producing Western commercial music everywhere, but something else, which liberates music from its first contexts. This may very well be a historic record.
Throughout his international career, just now poised to spill over into North America after years of success in Africa, Europe and the Far East, Youssou N'Dour's rootedness in Senegalese music and storytelling remains the bedrock of his artistic personality. Dubbed "the protector of today's Dakar Overgroove" by Robert Christgau, N'Dour maintains a sound that is highly personal and innovative, a synthesis of musical language and culture. On the foundation of this personal sound, Youssou N'Dour remains a cultural icon in his country and in the worldwide Senegalese diaspora.
For more information: Debbie Ferraro, 212.275.4917
Fax 212.315.1124 / email Debbie.Ferraro@warnermusic.com
Nonesuch Records, 75 Rockefeller Plaza, 8th floor, New York, NY 10019