Issa Bagayogo is one of the great, if tongue-twisting, names in World Music. In fact, even in his homeland of Mali, they rarely use his last name; he's usually just called "Techno Issa." Issa topped the charts in 2002 with his ground-breaking Timbuktu, an album that spawned a host of imitators hoping to match his compelling blend of Malian roots music and Western dance technology. But no one's been able to pull it off as convincingly and as elegantly as Issa did. Now he's back to show how it's done.
Tassoumakan (meaning "Voice of Fire") is Issa's third full-length CD for Six Degrees, and represents the maturing of an artist who has found a way to honor his country's great musical traditions while creating a truly global, modern sound. Since the music of Mali is the source of much of the world's popular music (the blues, R&B, soul, rock, funk, hip hop), Issa Bagayogo's recordings are like an introduction to a great-grandparent you didn't know was still alive. Working with the French producer/keyboardist Yves Wernert, Bagayogo shows that the musical traditions of Mali are perhaps stronger now than ever before, building on the rhythms and the spirit of Manding emperors and Wassoulou hunters of a millennium ago, and evolving into something contemporary and relevant for listeners whether they're in Timbuktu or Toledo.
The world music field is crowded with singers trying to blend their native traditions with Western pop. But Issa Bagayogo stands apart from the crowd. For one thing, his recordings are made in Bamako, Mali's capital city, rather than one of the Afro-pop hit factories in Paris or London. Yves Wernert's studio was set up in Mali in the early 1990s with the goal of allowing the musicians there to create their own brand of new music, and Bagayogo has done just that.
His band includes some of Mali's top guitarists, like Karamokou Diabate and Mama Sissoko, and the result is an organic mix of West African and Western pop. For another, no one else sounds quite like him – though many have tried. His voice is not flashy, and at times it even seems to blend into the instrumental texture. But it is a subtly insistent voice, dusky and cool. And like his earlier records, Tassoumakan is brilliantly but transparently produced. It doesn't have the slick, glossy sheen that threatens to make so much of the world's pop music sound the same. This album has a gritty, organic feel, even when at its most electronic. There's no sense of something Western being imposed on a native tradition. |
