Balla Sidibe—one of the original front men of the legendary afro-pop band Orchestra Baobab—has gone to see what’s coming for all of us. You can watch the late Sidibe sing lead (and dance) here as Baobab does a charming version of a song that dates back to the 70s, “On Verra Ca.” 2020 is the 50th anniversary year of the band’s founding.
This next song is another Baobab classic. It’s the track that got me on board their train to heaven.
I first heard “Autorail” in the mid-90s, long after the first versions of the group had broken up. Baobob had been the biggest band in Senegal in the 70s, but they lost their hold on the next generation and faded out in the late 80s. In the 90s, though, their old records found a new international audience. They reformed in 2001, making new CDs and touring the world.
Their music worked for almost everyone everywhere. Here’s my late brother reminiscing about playing their CD’s on the rooftop of his mother-in-law’s house in Dominican Republic:
He felt like hearing a swinger right away and didn’t want to jump around through tracks to find the right one so he put on Orchestra Baobab which guaranteed life at the first song and then everlasting. There are records like that. But are there more or less of them as one moves along in years? There are different reasons the answers to that can move around too. Aint life grand? The Orchestra’s latin beat ditties exploded from the minds and ears of Senegalese percussionists, and overflowed with African voices rich as five-flowered honey from the Loire Valley. These cuts always made instant dance steps happen when the servants smiled by. His DJ self loved that Baobab. He was alone up there and tapped his feet with his heartbeat.
My own heart rose the first time I got to see Baobab live. Never imagined that would happen since I’d locked on them in the mid-90s long after they’d split up. So it was near-eerie, as well as thrilling, when I heard them crank up the chords to “Autorail” at a Summerstage concert in Central Park. They played that show in the summer after 9/11, and I remember the thought came, unbidden, that maybe the healing really had begun…
My mellow, though, got harshed by a tone that came straight out of NYC insiderdom. Baobab was the opening act that afternoon for Mali’s Rail Band. A pedantic MC introduced that group by telling the crowd we were now going to hear “the world’s greatest guitarist.” He was talking up the Rail Band’s mainstay Djelimady Tounkar. No doubt that MC meant to give Tounkar dap (as well as showcase his own expertise), but his pronouncement implicitly slighted Baobab’s lead guitarist, Barthélémy Attisso, whose playing the audience had just relished. I’m guessing the comment went right by Attisso. (His style suggests he’s never aimed to be a guitar hero.) But on that sunny day in the park, nobody needed that white wannabe authority to turn an African dance party into an occasion for his personal award tour. There are moments when an impulse to judge is at odds with an instinct for happiness. Mighty explainers aren’t always wrong to persist but they may end up exposing their own blankness to what’s ripe there in front of them.
Which reminds me of another New York expert’s conflicted take on music made by the vocalist, Thionne Seck, who sings lead on this next Baobab classic—a praise song to the founder of a syncretic Sufi sect whose tolerant variant of Islam offered the ummah an exemplary alternative to Islamo-fascism and Arab supremacism in the wake of 9/11.
Robert Christgau—”Dean” of New York’s rock critics—has come hard from on high at Thionne Seck over the years, even as he gave a post-millennium Seck solo CD a high grade. This is how Christgau started his capsule review of that CD: “Seck is mbalax’s second banana, a leather-lunged griot renowned for lyrical wisdom whose work has never translated with anything near the fluency of Youssou N’Dour’s…” What comes across in this prose is Christgau’s own will-to-power—that “second banana” tells you more about him than the Senegalese music scene[1]. Hierarchy will be maintained even if the Dean must nod to someone who’s not a pet: “But though the big man still sounds somewhat grand and stentorian to non-Wolof ears, the novelty factor and the alien melodic input put his wisdom across—if not as ideas, at least as an idea. A-”
Thankfully, Thionne Seck has never needed Christgau’s self-regarding tokens of assent. He still performs regularly, reaching deep Senegal with his undeniable voice.
Note
1 That scene has never been ruled by Christgau’s two hierarchs. There have always been vital male singers besides N’Dour and Seck. Baaba Maal, Omar Pene, Ismail Lo, and the late Ndungo Lo come immediately to mind. (Not to mention Sidibe and his fellow Baobab front man, Rudy Gomis.)