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This is a month busy for West African superstars who have become working-time policies, making surprising but welcome yields. Depending on Youssou N'Dour comes Salif Keita, his Malian equivalent in stature. In 2019, the “Golden Voice of Africa” announced that he was retiring from music to play drafts in the shade of his mangoes, which nobody thought about it.
Indeed, in 2023, he was attracted to a festival in Kyoto where, in his hotel room, he recorded most of the So KonoMandinka for “in the room”. Badie Tounkara, underlie Keita's acoustic guitar on Ngoni, and Mamadou Koné Salant the rhythm with the strange tap of the calabasse. On albums and in concert, Keita tends to bomb imperial. Sometimes his audience live would be entitled to acoustic guitar patterns and intimate voices – and now, for the first time, this side of him can be properly heard.
Most of the repertoire is old, but the songs clearly pass through their new arrangements. On 2009 The difference“Gaffou” was elegant; Here, reborn like “Awa” (an African related “Eve”), his praise of women is warm and insistent. The “Laban” Loping, from 2005 M'm'biris stripped of its comfortable reverberation and its majesty tumling, its roots in the more clearly exposed blues desert. From the same album, “you will miss me” is just as provisional: where the weak Cuban swing of the original assured to the narrator that his love would not be attracted by the delights of Ouagadougou and Dakar, this reading seems less convinced. The unloved album TaleFrom 2012, gives a new re -registration of “Tassi”, a compassionate song on mourning.
The highest point, however, is new: “Kanté Manfila” pays homage to the comfort of Keita in the ambassadors and on some of his subsequent solo albums, died in 2011. The song fades suddenly, as if we suddenly intrude from old late friends by exchanging complex musical patterns under the trees in Mango; When he takes his leave in the same way, it seems that music continues forever.
★★★★ ☆
'Salif Keita' is published by any format
