This Monday, July 18, the city council of Cartagena, Spain, honored Youssou Ndour, the greatest modernist of Senegalese traditional music at the festival: “La Mar de Mùsicas 2022”. This kind of distinction is never too much for an artist of You’s stature.
Cartagena. – Torres Park Auditorium. It’s 11 p.m. It’s hot. Normal. It’s a special summer. Temperatures are exploding. In this large open-air space, similar to a Greek senate of ancient times, a charming audience jostle, hilarious, to the sound of Youssou Ndour’s well-tuned voice. He is alone on stage, on the front line. In the background, the polyphonic orchestra distills good Senegalese rhythm. Commemorative concert. He makes people appreciate his easy and well-stamped voice that takes the public of Cartagena to the shores of Senegal. The orchestra, the Dakar Super Star, is excellent and the maestro, Youssou Ndour, does not leave us indifferent with the delicate nuances of his voice calibrated to the note. For this sixth participation, the mayor of the city, Noelia Arroyo, wished to award this prize, in person, to the child of Dakar. A real honour for this patron of culture who contributed to the development of mbalax, the music that makes the identity of the Senegalese people.
Youssou Ndour is no longer to present. This interplanetary artist, a genius performer, was, in turn, a musician, composer, minister, counsellor, great ambassador of the African continent. He is one of the greatest voices of Senegalese music. It would be an offense to this talented performer to still want to decline his biography, sift through his discography as a new artist on the musical scene. In You is summed up on the one hand a part of the history of African music and on the other hand the whole history of Senegalese music. His albums, fruits of a set of social, cultural and climatic questions, the main ones of which, (we would lose breath to want to list them all here), are mixes of rhythms and sounds picked from the trees of modernity and tradition.
Youssou Ndour writes and sings delightfully well. I dare to allow myself this redundancy. His music, bouquet of musical flowers, abounds in melody, charm and rhythm. Youssou Ndour has been accompanied for more than thirty years by the Dakar Super Star. Despite the years, the band kept a good look. The orchestra is as pleasant to watch as to hear playing with a You who always sings with the same address. He is not the first African to receive this prize. Others before him have received this prize: Salif Keita, Oumou Sangaré, Cheick Lô…
