This week’s theme has focused on musicians from all over the continent of Africa. The last musicians to be highlighted are Rokia Traore and Youssou N’Dour.
Rokia Traoré (born January 26, 1974) is a Victoires de la Musique award-winning Malian singer, songwriter and guitarist. Born in Mali as a member of the Bambara ethnic group, her father was a diplomat and she traveled widely in her youth. She visited such countries as Algeria, Saudi Arabia, France and Belgium and was exposed to a wide variety of influences. Her hometown of Kolokani is in the northwestern part of Mali’s Koulikoro region.
While the Bamana have a tradition of griot performing at weddings, members of the nobility such as Rokia are discouraged from performing as musicians. Rokia attended lycée in Mali while her father was stationed in Brussels and started performing publicly as a university student in Bamako. Unusual for a female musician in Africa, Rokia plays acoustic guitar, ngoni(lute), balafon, and sings. She uses vocal harmonies in her arrangements which are rare in Malian music. In 1997, she linked with Mali musician Ali Farka Touré which raised her profile. She won an Radio France Internationale prize as “African Discovery” of 1997, an honor previously won by Mali’s Habib Koité in 1993.
Her first album Mouneïssa (Label Bleu), released in late 1997 in Mali and September 1, 1998 in Europe, was acclaimed for its fresh treatment and unqualifiable combinations of several Malian music traditions such as her use of the ngoni and the balafon. It sold over 40,000 copies in Europe.
On July 11, 2000, her second album Wanita was released. Traoré wrote and arranged the entire album. The album was widely acclaimed with The New York Times nominating it as one of its critics’ albums of the year.
Her 2003 album Bowmboï has two tracks recorded with the Kronos Quartet but still sung in the Bamana language, and was awarded the prestigious BBC Radio 3 World Music Award. As of 2005, she has been nominated three times for this award. She played at WOMAD in 2004 and completed her first tour of North America in the same year.
In 2005 she performed at the “Africa Live” festival, held in Dakar (Senegal) on March 12th -13th, 2005, where several great names of African music were present, including: Malians Ali Farka Touré, Salif Keïta, Oumou Sangaré, Tinariwen, Tiken Jah Fakoly of Côte d’Ivoire, Cameronian Manu Dibango, Algerian Khaled, Senegalese Didier Awadi, Baaba Maal and Youssou N’Dour, and the French rapper Joey Starr. These concerts were dedicated to the fight against malaria in Africa.
In 2005 she also performed at the Youssou N’dour and Friends concert in Geneva, which was also a supporting gala against malaria, with Peter Gabriel, Amadou and Mariam, Gilberto Gil, Tiken Jah Fakoly and Neneh Cherry.
On May 6, 2008, her latest album, “Tchamantché”, was released.
She wrote the music for the 2011 Toni Morrison play, Desdemona.
Youssou N’Dour ( born 1 October 1959) is a Senegalese singer, percussionist, songwriter, composer, occasional actor and businessman. In 2004, Rolling Stone described him as, “perhaps the most famous singer alive” in Senegal and much of Africa. Since April 2012, he has been Senegal’s Minister of Tourism and Culture.
N’Dour helped to develop a style of popular Senegalese music known in the Serer language as mbalax, which traces from the conservative Serer music tradition of “Njuup” (the progenitor of Mbalax). He is the subject of the award-winning films Return to Goree directed by Pierre-Yves Borgeaud and Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, which were released around the world.
N’Dour was born in Dakar to a Serer father. At age 12, he began to perform and within a few years was performing regularly with the Star Band, Dakar’s most popular group during the early 1970s. Several members of the Star Band joined Orchestra Baobab about that time.
7 Seconds-w/Neneh Cherry
N’Dour is one of the most celebrated African musicians in history. His mix of traditional Senegalese mbalax with eclectic influences ranging from Cuban rumba to hip hop, jazz and soul won him an international fan base of millions. In the West, N’Dour collaborated with Peter Gabriel, Sting, Bran Van 3000,Neneh Cherry, Wyclef Jean, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, Branford Marsalis, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Dido and others.
The New York Times described his voice as an “arresting tenor, a supple weapon deployed with prophetic authority”. N’Dour’s work absorbed the entire Senegalese musical spectrum, often filtered through the lens of genre-defying rock or pop music from outside Senegalese culture.
Folk Roots magazine described him as the African Artist of the Century. He toured internationally for thirty years.
He is the proprietor of L’Observateur, one of the widest-circulation newspapers in Senegal, the radio station RFM (Radio Future Medias) and the TV channel TFM.
In 2006, N’Dour played the role of the African-British abolitionist Olaudah Equiano in the movie Amazing Grace, which chronicled the efforts of William Wilberforce to end slavery in the British Empire.
In 2011, N’Dour was awarded an honorary doctoral degree in Music from Yale University.
N’Dour was nominated Goodwill Ambassador of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in 2000.
In Senegal, N’Dour became a powerful cultural icon, actively involved in social issues. In 1985, he organized a concert for the release of Nelson Mandela. He was a featured performer in the 1988 worldwide Amnesty International Human Rights Now! Tour collaborating with Lou Reed on a version of the Peter Gabriel song Biko which was produced by Richard James Burgess and featured on the Amnesty International benefit album The Secret Policeman’s Third Ball. He worked with the United Nations and UNICEF, and he started Project Joko to open internet cafés in Africa and to connect Senegalese communities around the world. He performed in three of the Live 8 concerts (in Live 8 concert, London, Live 8 concert, Paris and at the Live 8 concert, Eden Project in Cornwall) with Dido. He covered John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” for the 2007 CD Instant Karma: The Amnesty International Campaign to Save Darfur.
In 2009, he released his song “Wake Up (It’s Africa Calling)” under a Creative Commons license to help IntraHealth International in their IntraHealth Open campaign to bring open source health applications to Africa. The song was remixed by a variety of artists including Nas, Peter Buck of R.E.M., and Duncan Sheik to help raise money for the campaign.