![]() ![]() ![]() The beginnings in Dakar had been less auspicious. N'Dour solidified his leadership of the Super Étoile by 1979, having retained the essential personnel from earlier incarnations of the group, and he soon thereafter launched an international career with the help of a Senegalese taxi drivers' fraternal association in France and a small circle of supporters in England. Peter Gabriel, whose duet with N'Dour on a song called “In Your Eyes” on Gabriel's album So (Virgin/Geffen, 1985) defined a truly memorable moment in the history of rock, has proclaimed N'Dour, as a singer, simply “one of the best alive.” ![]() National Public Radio and Rolling Stone contributor Robert Christgau, the dean of American rock music critics, has consistently clamored for an ever-wider recognition of N’Dour’s gifts, variously calling N'Dour “the world's greatest pop vocalist” and, most recently, “the world's most consistent record maker this decade.” He has written that N’Dour is “the one African moving inexorably toward the world-pop fusion everyone else theorizes about.” Named “African Artist of the Century” by the English publication fRoots at the threshold of the year 2000, and to the “TIME 100” in 2007, TIME magazine’s annual list of “the hundred men and women whose power, talent, or moral example is transforming the world," N'Dour has made mbalax famous throughout the world during nearly 30 years of recording and touring outside of Senegal with his band, the Super Étoile. The New York Times has described his voice as “an arresting tenor, deployed with prophetic authority,” one that “soars heavenward with passion and then wafts tenderly toward earth.”Īs a craftsman of an inimitable brand of ensemble music, N'Dour absorbs the entire diversity of the Senegalese musical spectrum in his work, often filtering his country’s musical heritage through a modernist lens of genre-defying rock or pop music from outside Senegalese culture. (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 and songwriter who has had more to do with its shaping than any other individual.īorn in Dakar in 1959, N'Dour is a singer endowed with remarkable range and poise, and, as a composer, bandleader, and producer, with a prodigious musical intelligence. ![]() Younger Senegalese musicians steeped in Jimi Hendrix, Carlos 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. This created a new music which was at turns nostalgic, restrained and stately, or celebratory, explosively syncopated and indescribably funky. Today's popular music in Senegal, known in the Wolof language as mbalax, 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 1940s, '50s, and '60s and have flourished in West Africa ever since.īeginning 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. ![]()
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