Thursday, November 29
Africa's Superstar
Youssou N'Dour
LAXSON AUDITORIUM | 7:30 p.m.$30 Premium | $25 Adult
$23 Senior | $20 Student/Child
"Youssou N'Dour . . . heralds the possibility of a new pop world order." — The Washington Post
Youssou N'Dour and his band play modern Senegalese music, known in the Wolof language as mbalax ("Umm-Bah-Laakh"). Mbalax is an enchanting blend of Senegal's traditional percussion and griot singing combined with Afro-Cuban and indigenous dance flavors. N'Dour has garnered much attention in the United States, including nods from Peter Gabriel, Sting, and Wyclef Jean. The Los Angeles Times noted that N'dour's music was "the finest example of the meeting of African and Western music: wholesome, urgent and thoughtful."
N'dour (born in 1959 in Dakar), a vocal artist with incredible range and poise, simply dubbed "the West African Sinatra" by New York Newsday after one stirring concert in Manhattan's Hammerstein Ballroom, has made mbalax famous throughout the world in more than twenty years of touring outside of Senegal with his band, the Super Etoile, having begun as a teenager. The Supet Etoile "plays with a joyous precision," The Los Angeles Times noted, and The (London) Guardian has called their music "the finest example yet of the meeting of African and Western music: wholesome, urgent and thoughtful."
Admired by the likes of Peter Gabriel, Sting and Wyclef Jean, each of whom has collaborated with N'Dour on songs on N'Dour's Joko (released in 2000), and other contemporaries from the world of rock, N'Dour, who The Village Voice's Robert Christgau says is "the one African moving inexorably toward the world-pop fusion everyone else theorizes about," has quietly but steadily captured the attention and the affection of a diverse, multi-ethnic, genuinely international audience, urging the delicious urban rhythms of mbalax beyond the territory of the world music aficionados who first were hip to him.
As Peter Gabriel himself so succinctly put it, "Youssou N'Dour is now one of the best loved voices in the world." Another commentator has said that N'Dour's music "encourages you to think globally while dancing locally." Yet for all of its openness toward other musical cultures, for all of N'Dour's wit and cosmopolitan grace, mbalax remains an edgy, idiosyncratic music now so much a part of the Senegalese national identity as to be almost indistinguishable from it. N'Dour consequently finds himself nothing less than a cultural icon in his country and in the Senegalese and West African diaspora, including in the United States. Throughout an astonishing international career, N'Dour's rootedness in Senegalese dance music and singing remains the hallmark of his musical personality. Again, Christgau: "crossover ambitions notwithstanding, the protector of today's Dakar Overgroove still turns out to be none other than the incomparable Youssou N'Dour."
If you enjoy this performer, you might enjoy:
Zap Mama
Global Drum Project
Musafir
Angelique Kidjo
Chava Alberstein
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
Peru Negro
Tiempo Libre