LINDA (prod. by NoeyDidios)

Riddle Song

Talibi

Musicien from Demb II / Gaye Massar from … dieulleul! / Aïda Soukeu from Le Pouvoir D'un Coeur Pur / Papa from Daaly

Thione (pronounced chōn) Seck is a gewel; one who must remember Wolof history and wisdom, and intone on demand. He is also one of Senegal’s greatest singers and there’s a clear connection between the two. His great-grandfather was a gewel in the court of a king, his grandfather a famous itinerant gewel, and his father was a singer of the psalms of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, the Muslim mystic and Senegalese national hero. 

In Dakar, the city of his birth in 1955, Thione heard the muezzin’s call to prayer, the Arabic pop picked up on shortwave radio, the Bollywood musicals everyone went to see in downtown cinemas, the Latin records he could buy on the funky side of the city, and the live sounds of hometown celebrities. Aged 16 he'd started an amateur group and within two years he was singing with Orchestra Baobab. 
 
Baobab blended styles into a Senegalese salsa, in which the voice of the gewel was as elemental as that of the santero in Afro-Cuban music, and young Thione Seck understudied Laye M’boup, the gewel in the group. A year later, 1974, M’boup died in a car crash and Seck was promoted. Here he write and sang some of Baobab’s biggest hits.

After recording tracks which were later incorporated into the Sterns album Bamba, Thione left Baobab in 1979 to revive his first group, Raam Daan. Their energetic style was called mbalax, and along with Youssou N’Dour, El Hadji Faye and Omar Pene, Thione Seck was one of its inventors and early stars.

Thione released a series of successful cassettes in Senegal including Dieuleul! This led to Le Pouvoir d’un Coeur Pur recorded in Paris and released internationally by Sterns in 1988. After more Senegalese cassettes, Seck and his band returned to Paris for two Syllart productions that Sterns issued on one CD, Daaly, in 1997. The two excellent Demb cassettes released by KSF in 1998 exemplify the spare but powerful Dakar sound, propelled by percussion and dominated by Thione’s thrilling voice. 

But Thione Seck’s art is always grounded in his heritage as a griot — one whose role in society is to teach, entertain and inspire – and we do not need to understand Wolof to hear that he is a griot par excellence.

http://sternsmusic.blogspot.co.uk/

Thione Seck - 4-track edit mix - free download

Jonathan Marmor - Short Stories

Feb-Sept 2017
Quatuor Bozzini:
Isabelle Bozzini, Stéphanie Bozzini, Alissa Cheung, Clemens Merkel
Live recording (premiere)
King's College Chapel, Aberdeen
Sound festival, October 2017

Thanks to Sound and Music, and Quatuor Bozzini for helping create this piece, as part of Composers' Kitchen 2017

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Jonathan Marmor

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