RFI Musique - - Africa - Senegal as seen by Star Band and Super Diamono

Album review

Senegal as seen by Star Band and Super Diamono

Two legendary bands, two musical attitudes

Paris

28/12/2010 -

A new compilation of Star Band’s seventies music, released at the same time as a collection of Super Diamono’s eighties hits, shows the contrasting visions of Senegalese music that came from groups featuring Omar Pene, Ismaël Lo and Youssou N’Dour.

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Both CD covers are designed with a series of increasingly large circles centred on a black and white photo background that makes them look like time space tunnels from a TV sci-fi show. To be sucked into them is to find yourself transported to a place like Miami, the Dakar restaurant cum successful nightclub, known among other things as Star Band’s regular venue.

From 1960, the group found support in the shape of the nightclub’s owner, Ibra Kassé, and went on to make a huge contribution to the emerging sound of young, independent Senegal. The team’s playing evolved as its members changed, without taking anything away from the quality of their playing. Cuba and Latin rhythms were one of the main sources of inspiration during the second half of the 1970s, when the fourteen tracks on the compilation were recorded. They were originally released on albums soberly titled Volume 6, Volume 7, etc.

The transatlantic influence at times gives way to a more original and authentic style. Strangely, the Gambian Laba Sosseh is still credited as one of the band’s singers, even though the one-time Star Band player and African salsa star had already changed tack by that time.

But another strong voice was starting to make itself heard on Kelendi, Bouna N’Diaye, Litie Litie and N’Deye N’Dongo: that of the young Youssou N’Dour, aged just 15 at the time. His experience with the well-known band was formative in many ways. “I became my own producer through rebellion… because I was fed up of being exploited. I recorded a lot of songs with Star Band, and I wasn’t protected by a contract, but hey – the group was legendary and it was an honour for me to play with them,” is what he says in his biography La Voix de la Medina, written by Michelle Lahana.

Kelendi

par Star Band

Super Diamono

The end of the Star Band’s period of glory coincided with the rise of another band that hit the Senegalese scene during the first part of the following decade. Super Diamono (or Super Jamono as they were called at the time), the subject of the second compilation disk, had a highly innovating sound. The group’s members spent time outside the capital getting back to the roots of their culture, thought hard about how to update what they found, and conveyed it with a protesting tone that made them hugely popular with young people and students in particular.

Omar Pene was succeeded as lead singer by Ismaël Lo (plus his harmonica), both of whom went on to make a name for themselves. The studio recordings have a live quality about them, with musicians on automatic pilot that we imagine playing with their eyes shut and a smile on their lips, ready to throw themselves into singing solos.

The electric guitars, synthesizers and soprano saxophone give their all – this afro-jazz, or afro-feeling as it has come to be called, is a like a perfectly oiled piece of machinery delivered in style on each of the eleven tracks selected for the CD from five original albums.

The only dark spot is that, in their laudable effort to track each song, the compilation’s producers have made a few glaring errors that risk creating a spot of confusion in the future and would have benefitted from clarity, for the sake of history at least.