ART95 (2022) Drawing by Sewa Situ Prince-Agbodjan

Youssou N'Dour
Little prince of the Dakar medina from his tender youth, Youssou Ndour now evolves in an ample matrix, of which he listens to the sounds, the moods, the successes: Africa. Youssou's Africa is a living continent, always on the move. It is therefore an open and enlightened album that the Senegalese artist offers us. Youssou Ndour never hid the importance he attached to linking the past to the future. If Dakar is an on-line capital, if the Medina has taken the turn of electro, the griots, the Sufi brotherhoods and enlightened Islam, always have, and perhaps even more today, their place. So this is the wood that History is made of, baobabs, casuarinas, fiber optics. In the Africa of Youssou Ndour, modernity is a question of lineage, this chain brings birth and death, nourishes and recreates. In the great golden hood of African music, History has drawn a nugget: Babatunde Olatunji born in Nigeria in 1927, died in 2003 in the United States where he had settled. A composer and percussionist adored by the jazz avant-garde of the 1950s, Babatunde Olatunji was also copied by a master musician, Serge Gainsbourg, who had listened to Drums Of Passion, an album produced in 1959 by John Hammond. Afterwards, Gainsbourg returned to César what was due to César by reattributing to “Baba” the authorship of three titles of Gainsbourg Percussions (1964). Babatunde Olatunji was a pure Yoruba as much as Youssou Ndour is both Serer, Toucouleur and Wolof. The Nigerian drummer, an equal rights activist in the United States, also sang, with remarkable incantatory freedom. Youssou Ndour chose to dress up his art by covering two of his songs, My Child and Dakuta, "respecting his voice tracks, but modifying the musical production". At the helm, very present on History, the young Nigerian Spotless (Augustine Huche Ezra), who had collaborated on Youssou Ndour's previous album, Africa Rekk (2016). Fresh, balanced, knitted on the guitar, dancing, the two titles of the Nigerian precursor go through the years in weightlessness. Youssou Ndour displayed an astonishing early career – he started singing at the age of 13, in the early 1970s, founded his orchestra, the Super Etoile de Dakar, in 1979 – he applied his desire to explore the past to his own songs. So does he dress up Salimata, published in 1989 on the special album Set Jamm, released when Youssou Ndour, spotted in Senegal by Peter Gabriel, was preparing to enter the world-music circle with the album The Lion. "It's a love song, explains Youssou Ndour, who says: "I got up one morning, I went out and I met a beautiful young woman, and it was love at first sight! Her name is Salimata

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Youssou N'dourYoussou's AfricaSenegalese ArtistIslamMedina