The singer conceived an album remotely during confinement with guitarist Pascal Danaë, leader of the blues-rock trio Delgres, and will present it on stage on May 15 at La Cigale, in Paris.
Oumou Sangaré, one of the most dazzling voices on the African continent, signs with Timbuktu a high-class album, carrying messages of commitment for women and full of electric guitars. Of Pascal Danaë, lead singer of the Creole blues-rock trio Delgres, who is also the artistic director (with Nicolas Quéré) of this album conceived at a distance, mainly between Baltimore and Paris. After the electro-psychedelic Mogoya, in 2017, followed by its acoustic version, Timbuktu marks the return of the Malian singer to the English label World Circuit, which launched her international career ( Ko Sira, 1993). She will present it on the stage of La Cigale, in Paris, on May 15, then at festivals this summer.
We meet the singer in one of her professional team’s offices in Paris, a few days before her concert. She springs up laughing, her mobile phone in her hand, adorned with her most beautiful jewelry, joyful and relaxed. This album, like the previous ones, carries the colors, the rhythms, the language, the musical identity (in particular the harp-lute, the kale n’goni), of Wassoulou, in the south, a cultural area on horseback in Mali, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire. The region of his mother, who taught him everything. And yet, she gave this album the name of the historic city located north of the Niger River… “Timbuktu, the city of 333 saints, city of science and knowledge, hit by war in my country, it’s like a wound that fails to heal and keeps reopening. »The voice suddenly darkened. Ten years after the destruction by the jihadists of sixteen mausoleums and the sacred door of the Sidi Yahia mosque in Timbuktu, the pain remains intact.
remains intact.
“Songs in a minimalist formula”
The idea for this album and the songs that compose it came during her forced retirement in the United States, in 2020, where she had gone to rest a few days after the Wassoulou International Festival, which she has been organizing since 2017 in Yanfolila in southern Mali. “I say thank you to the Covid, launches the singer in a burst of laughter. Thanks to him and the confinement, I was finally able to ask myself, reflect, seek inspiration deep inside me, while I was settled in Baltimore, after fleeing the hustle and bustle of New York. She contacted Mamadou Sidibé, a fellow kamele n’goni player, who had been living in Los Angeles for several years. “I told him: ‘Come, we’re going to work.’ »
Thus are born, little by little, the first seeds of Timbuktu. “It was songs in a minimalist formula, on which there was just his voice, percussion, a kale n’goni, explains Pascal Danaë on the phone. Some hyperbaric stuff they would send to us over the internet, and we would build around it. We ended up in the studio only at the end, for some adjustments. “Everything went very smoothly”, confirms, delighted, Oumou Sangaré, before taking her to leave.