Wasis Diop

Renaissance

Paris 

22/10/1998 - 

With the support of Wally Badarou, his co-producer, and assisted by the vocals of Beth Hirsch, the singer in Air, and the Mali couple Amadou and Mariam, Wasis Diop has found the limelights again with a new album about renaissance, starting again.

So here he is the man who saw the man who saw World Music and adopted it. This Senegalais has moved his long limbs to a lot of places in the world and has picked up sounds here and there enabling him to weave his own music.

After his hymn to Africa, "African Dream", which opened his previous album, "No Saint" in 1995, "Soweto Daal" is more ceremonial, less cheery, but just as moving.

The album is dedicated to Léopold Sédar Senghor, the ardent defender of African culture, Nelson Mandela, the symbol of African resistance, and Daïsaku Ikéda, the praiser of Buddhism, the philosophy which helped Mandela in prison and inspires Wasis Diop each day.

"Toxu" means renaissance in Wolof. It is true that he needed to be re-born and recover from the praises he had received for "No Saint" in 95.
"Toxu" is a curious, attractive mixture of ethnic music and progressive Rock. Thus, in "Soweto Daal" there are temperate sabars in the middle of a hymn to rock. Conversely, Wasis called upon his cousins from Mali, Amadou et Mariam, to remake one of the rock hits of the eighties, "Once in A Lifetime" by the Talking Heads. "In my opinion, they are the first rock group to have sung World Music consistently" declares Wasis, who is to sing the song soon with David Byrne, the singer of Talking Heads, in an American television studio.

"Toxu" is without a doubt the album which will allow Wasis Diop to concretise his position as the great alchemist of World Music while not losing his steady common sense and a touch of ireony when, as in "Samba le Berger", he makes wry comments on the fate of his brothers in France : "Samba n'aime pas les charters / C'est pas pour faire le fier / C'est juste que c'est trop d'honneur de voyager en charter avec des garde du corps"... ("Samba is not keen on charters/ It's not because he's proud/ It's just that he's too shy/ to take a charter with bodyguards"… - a reference to the police repatriating clandestine immigrants).

Wasis Diop Toxu" Mercury (Mercury) 1998

Frédéric  Garat

Translation : Julie  Street