For last week’s episode I put together a mix of modernist ballads from West Africa, primarily works from the 1970s. About half the songs gathered here are from Senegal, an epicentre of post-colonial cultural forms, featuring a capacious cosmopolitan hybridity which drew from American jazz and psychedelic rock, French chanson, Cuban bolero, Congolese rhumba, Martinician beguine, Wolof griot music, and the complex polyrhythms of Mande musical traditions. Other songs in this mix come from Mali, Guinea-Bissau, Togo, and Benin, joined in pan-African solidarity as well as sharing a modernist sensibility, fraught with both melancholy for the failure of post-colonial nationalism and a utopic yearning for social change. These songs are exemplary of Tsitsi Ella Jaji calls “stereomodernism.” in her wonderful book, Africa in Stereo.

Séance Centre Radio Episode 85: Modernist Ballads from West Africa

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New tracks tagged #wolof griot music