Now ready for download and streaming, six crucial albums from Thione Seck.
Thione
Seck is a gewel
— a griot of the Wolof people of Senegal; by family legacy one who
must remember Wolof history and wisdom and stand ready when called
upon to intone them for grandees, visitors and the general public. He
is also one of Senegal’s greatest singers and there’s a strong,
clear connection between the two.
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| Thione Seck: visting Sterns, London circa 1999 |
Thione
Seck was born to sing,
and in this case the phrase is not a cliché. His great-grandfather
was a gewel
in the court of King Lat Dior of Cayor, his grandfather was a famous
itinerant gewel,
and his father was anointed a singer of the psalms of Cheikh Amadou
Bamba, the Muslim mystic and Senegalese national hero. Singing is in
Thione’s genes. Naturally, his brother, Mapenda Seck, is also a
gewel
and a popular singer.
So
Thione (pronounced chōn)
was raised and tutored in the gewel
repertoire. But in Dakar, the city of his birth in 1955, he grew up
with lots more to absorb: the muezzin’s call to prayer, the Arabic
pop picked up on shortwave radio from across the Sahara, the
Bollywood musicals everyone went to see in downtown cinemas, the
Latin records he could buy in a shop on the funky side of the city,
and the live sounds of hometown celebrities, especially the Star Band
de Dakar. When he was 16 years old he started an amateur group with
Mapenda and friends who played the indigenous xalam lute and sabaar
and tama drums but did not restrict themselves to traditional Wolof
music. Within two years he was singing with a Star Band offshoot
called Orchestre Baobab.
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| Orchestre Baobab circa 1982, Seck in the middle |
Baobab
blended a variety of local and foreign
styles into something like Senegalese salsa, in which the voice of
the Muslim Wolof gewel
was as elemental as that of the Santería santero in Afro-Cuban
music, and so young Thione Seck was brought in to understudy Laye
M’boup, the gewel
among the group’s three original singers. A year later, 1974,
M’boup died in a car crash and Seck was promoted to the band’s
frontline. He immediately made a strong impression on audiences, not
only with his marvellously supple voice, which could be soft and
intimate one moment and plangent and soaring the next, but also with
his words, which were admired for their poetry, pith, and moral
integrity. These qualities did not impede his popularity; he wrote
and sang some of Baobab’s biggest hits in the years when it was the hottest band in Dakar.
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| Musician credits for the 'Bamba' album as released by Sterns in 1980 |
Even
so, after recording half the tracks
that would be released in the Sterns album 'Bamba', Thione
Seck left in 1979 to revive his first group, which
would henceforth be called Raam Daan and would home in on a
neo-traditional Wolof style, keeping the ancient drums and lutes but
adding electric guitars, bass and keyboards. This energetic dance
style was called mbalax, and along with Youssou N’Dour and El Hadji
Faye of Étoile de Dakar and Omar Pene of Super Diamono, Thione Seck
was one of its inventors and early stars.
Thione
Seck & Raam Daan released a series
of increasingly successful cassettes in Senegal, culminating in
'Dieuleul!', which led to the album 'Le Pouvoir d’un Coeur Pur'
being recorded in Paris and released internationally by Sterns in
1988. After more Senegalese cassettes, Seck and his band returned to
Paris for the two Ibrahima Sylla productions that Sterns issued on
one CD, 'Daaly', in 1997. Seck continued this pattern of recording
for local labels in Dakar and for Syllart and Sterns in Paris, where
Raam Daan was sometimes augmented by studio musicians. 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. 'Orientation', the album begun the
following year in Dakar and developed over the next three years in
Paris, Cairo and Madras, has a richer, more ornate sound that evinces
Seck’s love of Arabic and Indian music.
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| From the back cover of 'Le Pouvoir D'Un Coeur Pur' released by Sterns in 1988 |
THE ALBUMS:
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