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Sample Track 1:
"Diama Don" from Tassoumakan
Sample Track 2:
"Ciew Mawele" from Tassoumakan
Sample Track 3:
"Dya" from Tassoumakan
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Tassoumakan
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Layer 2
CD Review

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Times (London), CD Review >>

ISSA BAGAYOGO

Tassoumakan (Wrasse)

So often when African artists have attempted to yoke the continent’s traditional rhythms to contemporary Western sounds, the results have sounded uncomfortable and compromised. On his third album, Issa Bagayogo gets the balance exactly right.  

            It wasn’t until he released Timbuktu in 2002 that Bagayogo began to make an impact outside his native Mali and was able to quit his job as a bus driver.  Singing in an attractive baritone, he builds on that success here, juxtaposing call-and-response vocals and ancient African strings with a digital sheen that is breathtaking.  Tassoumakan (it means “the voice of fire”) opens with the rasping sound of the traditional ngoni (lute) and ends more than an hour later with an atmospheric slice of African dub, quite unlike anything you have heard before.  In between, he takes us on a tour in which the traditional and the modern circle around each other in an intriguing courtship and then come together in ecstatic congress.  * * * *

NIGEL WILLIAMSON

 11/20/04
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