Early N'dours
This music was originally issued on a Celluloid LP as Inedits 84-85. It is classic early N'dour, jazzy with marvelous percussion. Good quality sound but not overproduced as many of his later albums were. One of his best.
Write a Review 2 Member Reviews
WOMAD&mainstream: super rythms
great album with lots of rythm, for dancing and especially when the sky is grey and one dreams of a little sunshine and warmth... Youssou has succeeded in taking north african traditional music and westernising it through instruments, arrangements and tonality: the mix has turned to be perfect in his hands, one of the few artists who manage this.
Recommended Albums
eMusic Features
Icon: Youssou N’Dour
By Keith Harris, eMusic Contributor
Your first exposure to Youssou N'Dour's soaring tenor keen likely came on the coda to Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes." In the late '80s, with the assistance and encouragement of Gabriel and other respectable liberal rockers, N'Dour sought to cross over to Western audiences by adapting Senegalese mbalax to contemporary synth-rock settings. Unfortunately, that short period of N'Dour's career still defines Senegal's greatest musician to the ears of many Western listeners. But prior to his crossover… more »
The Youthful Youssou N’Dour
By Richard Gehr, eMusic Contributor
Scholars in the field of Youssology - i.e., the study of all things pertaining to the life and music of mbalax star Youssou N'dour, the most widely embraced and critically acclaimed African artist of the past two decades - have lately been focusing their collective attention on the singer's earliest performances, recorded while he was still a teenager. Despite his age, there's very little juvenilia in the music N'dour made during the late 1970s, prior to… more »
Francophilia
By Richard Gehr, eMusic Contributor
One figure stands off to the side and slightly obscured amid the pantheon of African bandleaders. The Congolese superstar Franco - christened François Luambo Makiadi in 1938, dead of AIDS in 1989 - is the least internationally-acclaimed among afropop giants such as Fela Kuti, King Sunny Ade, and Youssou N'Dour. With a biography at least as tragically complex as Fela's, Franco lived large, died sadly, and left hundreds of hours of some of the world's… more »