Music  |
| Youssou N’Dour,‘Africa’s most celebrated combination of musician and statesman’, in Dakar last year |
A quiet corner of the 13th arrondissement. In the factory across the road, France’s state tapestries are woven. On this side, in a plush underground recording studio, weaving of a different kind is going on. Tyrone Downie, a veteran reggae producer, and Timour Cardenas, his engineer, are listening intently to playbacks, occasionally sprinkling some echo on to the lead vocal or frowning at particular pieces of phrasing.
The singer himself buzzes at the intercom and wanders down from the Rue du Reine Blanche in a stripy jumper and black beanie hat. It is a low-key entrance for a major-league star: Youssou N’Dour, the Senegalese singer, activist, aspirant television mogul and, perhaps, future politician.
For more than 30 years, N’Dour has been at the forefront of Senegalese music. Mbalax, the fast, snappy dance music he invented and named as a teenager with Étoile de Dakar, has become the country’s dominant musical form. His international solo career started in 1984 with Immigrés, which he recorded in Paris at the behest of the Senegalese Taxi Drivers’ Association. It led to collaborations with Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon, and a series of albums for big labels. “Seven Seconds”, his duet with Neneh Cherry, a huge hit throughout the world, is the bestselling record by a Senegalese musician.
Moreover, N’Dour is probably Africa’s most celebrated combination of musician and statesman. He is an ambassador for Unicef, the children’s charity. He has set up foundations to fight malaria and to support children, and has long been an advocate of women’s rights. The last time we spoke, at this summer’s Womad festival in the UK, he was launching a campaign to encourage west Africans to use malaria nets in an attempt to eradicate the disease. At our previous interview, he lodged his application for the post of minister of culture in a future United States of Africa. One-to-one, he is serious and intellectual, even earnest. He saves his highest-wattage charisma for the stage.
Last month, he turned 50. Sitting on the floor of the Paris studio during a break in recording, he is clearly in a state of denial. “I’m not feeling any different. But people know you’re 50, and they change the way they see you a little bit. Otherwise everything’s fine. In my head, I’m not 50.”
But as if in acknowledgment of his seniority, he has started to act as a mentor to younger artists. He is the musician in this year’s Rolex Mentors and Protégés Arts Initiative scheme, a two-year programme that matches established figures in music, dance, film, visual arts, theatre and literature with up-and-coming protégés. A friend introduced him to the Swiss watchmakers.
“I met them and they were really interesting and we talked about art. I was very surprised. They described the mentors [scheme], and I thought, ‘great’. They wrote a letter asking if I was ready to be a mentor and I said, ‘Next year, yes.’ ”
From the four musicians Rolex suggested, N’Dour chose as his protége the Honduran singer Aurelio Martinez. N’Dour struggles to explain precisely why he picked Martinez. “His voice, his feeling, his approach, and where he was coming from,” he says.
Martinez is a Garifuna musician, from a community descended from slaves shipwrecked, and therefore liberated, in Central America in the 17th century. The music of the Garifuna, a mixture of African and indigenous Indian music, was popularised by Andy Palacio, a cultural activist who died last year. Martinez is following in his footsteps. He is also a politician, the first black senator in Honduras.
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| On stage with Aurelio Martinez in Vienna in June |
Martinez saw up close what musical stardom is like. “He saw how having a team was important for an artist, and he described how he’d need to have more respect for a team. He saw all the majors, the showbiz, but he described my simplicity and the way I work day to day, touring, being on stage.”
N’Dour, too, insists that he has gained from the Rolex pairing. “I want to encourage all the artists around the world to support this initiative. It’s a great experience. Not only for the people you’re going to mentor, but for you.”
As well as the formal arrangement with Martinez, he supports other aspiring singers. “There’s a young musician called Ba Moody, coming from the north of Senegal. I’m producing his album next year. His music is really soul music, Mauritanian and Senegalese.”
He looks back on his own experience of mentorship. As a child, he absorbed music from “my grandmum and everything around me. But one of the important things was the keyboard player in the group Xalam, Henri Guillabert. I was really young and I had a lot of encouragement from people to be a singer, as I was in a theatre troupe. But my father and my grandfather insisted that I keep in school.”
Although his mother’s family were musicians, N’Dour was not from a griot family, the hereditary musical dynasties of west Africa. “My father didn’t go to school. He dreamed of having his son go to school, to have a little bit of an intellectual [career]. At the beginning he said, ‘I don’t want you to be a musician, it’s too dangerous.’ ”
So encouragement from a member of Xalam, at the time one of Senegal’s most celebrated groups, was vital. “On the way from my house to school, there was Henri Guillabert. I passed by there in the morning and, if I finished at midday, he would invite me in and I’d sing and he’d play. For a year, every day I’d have this little 15 minutes. He was really my teacher.”
Later, when his international career took off, he learnt from his new-found rock star friends, in particular from Peter Gabriel, with whom he made songs such as “Shaking The Tree” and “In Your Eyes”, the latter of which is lifted on to a new plane by N’Dour’s soaring lead-in to the chorus. “Those people were more sure than me. I remember the first time with Peter Gabriel. I’d sing something and say, ‘Peter, do you think it’s good?’ And he’d say, ‘Yes, it’s good. It makes you more confident.’” N’Dour joined Gabriel on the road, both for So and on a portmanteau tour to publicise Amnesty International. “When we toured together, every day I learnt something,” N’Dour recalls.
At the same time, westernising his music diluted what was most distinctive about it. “People who like my music outside of Senegal, outside of Africa – what they advised me is, keep my roots.” (He does, though, recall with horror an attempt to persuade him to record an album in Japanese.) His last few albums have returned to his home musical ground.
The disc on which he is working in Paris, though, is something of a new departure, a reggae album. Many tracks are reworkings: “most of the songs are coming from my old repertoire, to give them a second chance.” But there are new songs, including “Hommage à Marley”, whose title tells its own story. “I’m a big fan of Bob Marley. He was our grandfather, he travelled to the world.”
If the astringent urgency of mbalax is a far cry from reggae, N’Dour is unperturbed. “Song is song. My experience is, if you have a good song, you can move in one direction or a different direction.”
His previous experiments with changing style, including an album with an Egyptian orchestra, have proved a hard sell in his home country. He is confident that things will be different this time around. “At this moment, people coming from Senegal are more ready to listen than only dance. The past was dancing, moving: in Africa everything was happening because of dance. Now people are more ready to listen to something and to appreciate something melodically.”
To record the album, he has been working with Tyrone Downie, the keyboard player with the Wailers. For the past 12 years Downie has lived in Metz (though every year he swears he will return to Jamaica), and his French would satisfy an Academician. He says: “I recorded some demos, Youssou sang over them, and I said, ‘We have to go to Jamaica.’ ”
They convened at Tuff Gong studios in Kingston, Bob Marley’s former recording venue, with a band that included Shaun “Mark” Samson and Mikey Fletcher from Shaggy’s band, and the former Wailer Earl “China” Smith on guitar. “We recorded there for 10 days – the man might have been there for three.”
Now in Paris, some of N’Dour’s vocals are being re-recorded as he changes the lyrics. One track he is working on, “Leth Mu Mba Nga Firi Ma”, means “You can braid or unbraid my hair”, in Senegalese culture an expression of absolute trust. N’Dour’s voice has a light spring at the end of each line, and Downie and Cardenas make him re-record the odd phrase, doubling the vocals down an octave for extra weight. “Comme une petite voix dans ma tête [like a small voice in my head],” suggests N’Dour, obediently taking his place at the microphone. The horns, recorded in Kingston, blast through the studio speakers. Downie, playing a tiny keyboard into the mix with one hand, groans with deep appreciation: “Yesss, papa!”
The next song, “Picc Mi”, celebrates financial independence. It is harder-edged than its predecessor, with wah-wah guitars and echoing melodica, but also the crackle of Senegalese sabar drums. N’Dour’s high voice, as he sings the melody, waving a hand to feel his way into the rhythm, brings to the Yard the voice of the imam.
A final polish at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios should see the album ready for release in March. “I see it as May,” warns Downie. “You know how busy he is,” he adds, with the solidarity of a fellow victim of N’Dour’s elusiveness. It is, as yet, unnamed: it may be called Remember; it may be called Jaar-Jaar, a Wolof phrase referring to the path of the ancestors into slavery.
Whatever the name, Downie is bullish about its prospects. “You’ve never before had Afro-Islamic melodies in roots reggae. That’s something new. And it’s great that an artist this big, with this longevity and talent, is making a traditional reggae album in the 21st century. Reggae, for young people, is historical music, it’s like jazz. Youssou validates it, makes it timeless.”
‘I Bring What I Love’, a documentary film about Youssou N’Dour, will be released in Europe in 2010, with an accompanying soundtrack on Nonesuch
Aurelio Martinez plays at the Union Chapel, Islington, London, on December 4. www.ft.com/rolexarts
