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Published: May 25, 2011
Category: World
Do you like music that makes you happy?
I don't mean moderately happy, 7.5 on a scale of 10, isn't it a great day happy, kinda sorta happy.
I mean ecstatic, get up and dance happy, throw caution to the winds and kiss a stranger happy, pump up the volume and wake your neighbors happy, see yourself realizing all your dreams happy.
I wrote those lines, a few years ago, when I was besotted by Dimanche a Bamako and I wanted you to be as well.
Hype?
I didn’t think so then, and I don’t think so now --- on this release, the blind husband-and-wife singers from Mali, produced by genius/madman Manu Chao, deliver an imagined weekend concert in a park in Mali’s capitol. The music has brilliant harmonies, memorable melodies and dozens of Manu Chao’s favorite tricks: police whistles, xylophone, sirens, cheering crowds, a Tex-Mex organ and a beat that pounds disco right through the wall into reggae's yard. (Their recent CD, Welcome to Mali, is a studio project, but it’s just as good.)
And now comes their son, Sam, with a debut CD called “SMOD,” which is also the name of his group.
The creation myth has it that Sam and his friends formed a group to make “African Rap.” And that, late at night, they’d rehearse on the rooftop terrace of Amadou and Mariam’s house. Manu Chao happened to be staying there. He liked what he heard and volunteered to produce. The music evolved. Chao left the sound effects out. And the result is glorious, exultant, original. [To buy the CD from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
Yes, but is it as life-affirmative, addictive, desert-island-worthy as “Dimanche a Bamako?” Nothing is. But it’s damn good, and there’s not a clinker on it. Play it once, you'll play it again and again until you drive everyone crazy --- in the best possible way. Hype? Just listen:
BONUS
Here they are, after a concert at the Olympia in Paris. Fans were hanging around. The group appeared. And suddenly a street in Paris was like a street corner in the Bronx in the 1950s….