Thione Seck may not yet be as well known to the world at large as his countrymen, Youssou N'Dour, Baaba Maal or Ismael Lô, but in Senegal he is regarded as the most poetic songwriter and greatest singer of them all. His new album – his masterpiece – will undoubtedly raise his international profile and compel audiences far and wide to re-orient their notions of Senegalese music.
Thione Seck was born a gewel – a griot, one whose family heritage bestows on him both the responsibility to remember the history, genealogies and wisdom of the Wolof people and the skill to turn recitations into art that entertains and inspires. He was also raised a Mouride – a follower of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, the Muslim mystic and Senegalese nation hero (1853-1927). Thione's great-grandfather was a gewel in the court of the King of Cayor, his grandfather was a famous itinerant gewel, and his father is an anointed singer of Cheikh Amadou Bamba's verses. Inheriting the supple Seck voice and learning his elders' lessons, Thione (whose given name is pronounced chôn) was bound to be heard in the land.
But he has gone farther than his forebears. When he was 16 he joined a professional dance band that brandished horns and electric guitars, and soon he was recruited into the Star Band of Dakar, the pre-eminent Senegalese dance band of the 1960s. He sang with Orchestre Baobab from 1973 to 1977, the years when that band, with its Afro-Latin sound, was rising to the top of the Dakar music scene, and at the same time he led a family group that featured the Wolof xalam lute and sabar drums. Upon leaving Baobab he formed Raam Daan, a band that played traditional rhythms and melodies on modern instruments, much as Youssou N'Dour's Étoile de Dakar and Ismael Lô's and Omar Pene's Super Diamono were also doing in the late 70s and early 80s. Seck was one of the originators of mbalax, which has been Senegal's most popular sound since then. His cassettes were huge hits in the local market, and eventually his music reached Europe and North America. Stern's Africa released Le Pouvoir d'un Coeur Pur in 1988 and Daaly in 1997.
However, Thione Seck's musical compass has always pointed more to the East than to the West. In addition to the Wolof gewel repertoire that he began learning at an early age, Thione grew up listening to the muezzin's Arabic calls to prayer and the Sufi-inflected chants of the Mourides. The radio in his childhood home picked up Andalous music from Morocco, and his father collected records by the Egyptian superstars Abdel Halim Hafez and Oum Kalsoum, whom Thione greatly admired. He was also a fan of Indian singers such as Kishore Kumar and the sisters Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle, whom he heard in the Bollywood movies shown regularly in Dakar theatres. While other Senegalese singers of his generation imitated Latin soneros and American soul men, Thione practiced Indian vocal technique and trained his voice to reach the poignancy for which Hafez and Kalsoum were so beloved. These qualities have imbued his performances since he was a young man, whether he was singing Afro-salsa, Afro-rock, reggae, mbalax or pure Wolof canon. Moreover, he has composed songs that evoke Arabic and Indian styles, sometimes subtly, sometimes boldly. Admirers have long recognized his influences, often describing Thione Seck's sound as Oriental.
As early as the mid 90s Thione Seck, together with producer Ibrahima Sylla, began to plan an ambitious and unprecedented project that would involve Senegalese, Arabic and Indian musicians. Seck and Sylla recorded the preliminary tracks in Dakar in September 1999, then took them to François Breant, the French arranger and producer who had worked closely with Salif Keita on Soro. Inspired by Seck's grand idea, Breant joined the project and steered it to studios in Paris, Cairo and Madras, the centre of South Indian music. In each city he engaged the best local musicians, including the Egyptian singer Rehab and the Indian singer Bombay Jayashri, who were equally intrigued by the idea of collaborating with an African artist of Thione Seck's talents. It was a big undertaking, and Seck, Sylla and Breant each had many other commitments to honour as well, but by November 2002 the recordings were complete. However, it took another two and a half years to resolve transnational record industry matters. Half of the tracks were released on cassette in Senegal in 2004, and they set off a buzz that soon spread in all directions: Thione Seck is raising a landmark of Senegalese music – one that illuminates paths to and from the Orient.
Orientation can be considered a kind of musical travelogue as it describes in musical images the places Thione Seck has been and the people he has met there. But it's nothing like the audio scrapbooks of souvenirs and aural snapshots of tourists in native garb that some famous musicians have presented to the public; it's far more serious and heartfelt than that. The lyrics address subjects with which Seck has always been concerned – faith, love, family, social ethics – and are distinguished by the intelligence and poetry that have long earned him the acclaim of Wolof-speakers. "Ballago" and "Djirim" have been in Seck's songbook for more than 20 years. There is, however, an overarching theme that makes this album very special, and it is Thione Seck's celebration of the musical and spiritual values that connect his West African home to the Orient. These values determine, in more ways than one, Thione Seck's Orientation.
- Ken Braun
Thione Seck