Cherif Mbaw opens out to the world

New album

Paris 

14/10/2010 - 

His features are angelic, his voice womanly, and fine plaits wind round his broad shoulders. Cherif Mbaw plays on his ambiguous charms without overdoing it. Portrait of the author of Sing For Me, his new album.

Off stage, Cherif Mbaw keeps himself to himself; on stage, he tends to let himself go. There is an aura of gentleness about the Senegalese singer, born in Casamance on Christmas day 1968. Although keen not to be a griot’s child, and despite being discouraged, as a young man the path he chose to make his own was music.

The revelation came to him twenty years ago, when he was living in one of Dakar’s working-class neighbourhoods training as an apprentice carpenter. “One of our customers was Youssou N’Dour. I heard that he was looking for singers. I went to his house and he suggested trying me out at the Thiossane Night Club. He told me that I had potential and that I should work on my singing for a month with a voice teacher. But the teacher just told me to learn to read music and to follow my own path.”

That day changed the destiny of the man now so often compared to You. “There are worse yardsticks! But I wasn’t out to imitate the inimitable.” Especially since his real godfather is Baaba Maal, another customer at the carpenter’s, with whom he went on to develop a close relationship. “He was like a big brother to me. He even gave me money to buy supplies and made sure I signed up at music school.”

While pursuing his apprenticeship, the young carpenter nourished his musical side by listening to free jazz and symphonic music and then starting up a duet with a classical guitarist, Fada N’Dyae. His intention was not to limit himself to the mbalax, following an intuition that his future lay elsewhere.

Busking days

In 1994, he arrived in Paris, having won a Unesco grant to study music. He soon found himself penniless, “The money had just vanished!” So he went down into the Paris Metro to perfect his repertoire before enrolling at Créteil conservatoire in 1997 as promised, to study classical guitar.

But it was down in the subway’s bowels that the licensed busker found his audience. While some hurried by, others pricked up their ears, including one impressed producer. As the new millennium dawned, Cherif Mbaw signed his first CD: Kham Kham,  "knowledge" – eleven songs that showed off the melodist’s talents. Accompanying him were musicians from varied backgrounds, like Cuban Omar Sosa on piano and Debashish Bhattacharya on slide guitar. This opening out to the world was to become one of his undercurrents. “I’ve always tried to take Senegalese music into other worlds by introducing foreign instruments, like this time the pedal steel guitar and the lap steel guitar. This album moves towards rock, pretty close to Ben Harper.”

Almost ten years later, after a second, barely noticed, opus, Cherif Mbaw is back at the forefront, with an album inspired from all of his travels and meetings with people like Amadou and Mariam, Neneh Cherry and Erik Truffaz, and especially Tracy Chapman, for whom he played support act 25 times in 2006, including a memorable date at Olympia. “That experience made a deep impression on me in terms of musical arrangement. Her creative perfection really gave me a boost. I like her folk-rock and her conscience-raising lyrics,” insists the man who has worked in Burkina Faso for the Abbé-Pierre Foundation and the NGO, Action et Développements.

With this kind of perspective, a stylistic range that takes him to funk and reggae, and even some English lyrics, Cherif Mbaw sat down to write his new album Sing For Me. He worked in his home studio before recording with Bruce Springsteen’s bass-player, Francis Campello, as producer. “My singing is still Senegalese and the mbalax is still there. But I want to show that African music is not just about playing the kora under a baobab tree.”

The Senegalese demonstrates his faith with Mame Yalla before saluting two “spiritual guides”, Cheikh Amadou Bamba and Baye Laye. “In this album, I decided to put the accent on love and spirituality, even though there are a lot of reasons to grumble.”

And even though his single Cuckoo Baby “is about two lovers’ desire for intimacy”, the singer still takes a jab at the disarray eating away at Africa. He sings symbolically about deforestation in Pitch Me, “It’s the story of a fledgling living on a tree. On the fifth day, he flies away, and after a storm he can’t find his tree any more because it’s been cut down.”

He dedicates one song to Africa, the continent that he now contemplates from his home in the heart of Paris. “We have to count on ourselves. Our governments should value their children. And improve social conditions. Too much money doesn’t reach the right place. And there’s too much welfare, which in the end doesn’t help us move forward.”

Cherif Mbaw Sing For Me (World Village/Harmonia Mundi) 2010

Concert on 23 October at Cité de la Musique in Paris

Jacques  Denis

Translation : Anne-Marie  Harper