Orchestra Baobab
Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng
WORLD CIRCUIT
7/10
In the 1960s, Afro-Cuban dance band music came to dominate West African dancefloors. The craze led to indigenous versions that adapted the Caribbean sound to the local everyday by adding West Africans rhythms, singing styles, and instruments to the fray. The phenomenon eventually died out, with the different societies that make up West Africa each producing new dance music of their own. One of the era’s greatest bands, Dakar’s Orchestra Baobab, reunited in the early ’00s at the behest of World Circuit Records and released 2002’s Specialist in All Styles, which they followed with a couple of new albums over the past decade. Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng was recorded as a memoriam for the band’s late singer of the same name, who passed away in November 2016.
Orchestra Baobab was first financed as the in-house orchestra of Club Baobab by the President of Senegal himself, Leopold Senghor. He was a poet-president who allocated a significant portion of his nation’s budget to the arts, and the club was meant to entertain foreign dignitaries. This original commitment to symbolizing refinement can be heard in the rhythm sections of every song here, where instrumentation is rich and complex.
The lyrics are equally rich. Most of Tribute to Ndiouga Dieng’s songs are paeans: “Natalia” is a love song for the titular object of affection, and “Foulo” is about a woman’s unforgettable beauty, as are “Magnokouto” and “Mariama.” Others are proverbial poetry; “Sey” argues that it is not normal to divorce a woman that one has had children with, while “Fayinkounko” tells kids to respect their elders.
It’s that combination—the way rhythm and poetry are orchestrated and arranged—that’s most impressive here. These are the sort of arrangements that pride themselves on being so elegant that they practically demand an audience get dressed up to meet them.
