The Brooklyn Rail

For some weeks this spring, the Catholic world had no Pope. It was during this spiritual vacuum, in late April, that the Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour asserted his stewardship over a different global religion, African pop, with a blistering Sunday night at the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn.

Decked in a robe of white satin with powder blue details down the front, a garment he sometimes wing-spanned out into a messianic rectangle, N’Dour led a backing band of thirteen—five drummers, plus keys, guitars, bass, woodwinds, singers, and an interpretive dancer wearing a variety of kaftans—through two hours of relentless and sparkling dance music.

N’Dour hails from griot stock, from the ancient oral bards of Senegal. But the Dakar into which he was born was already a globalized one, with American and Latin records in the shops and shaping the club bands. In the 1970s he took over lead vocals for the Afro-Cuban-leaning outfit Star Band, but soon injected into the group—which he later rebranded the Star of Dakar and then Super Star of Dakar—more drum-based flavors from the native Wolof culture. After Peter Gabriel noticed his spellbinding voice in London, N’Dour rocketed to Western fame with big-production crossover albums of the eighties and nineties. Fully embracing high-tech production, he became the best known export in African music. Listen to “The Truth,” from The Lion (Virgin, 1989), which Gabriel produced. It sounds both sophisti-pop and Indigenous.

N’Dour gave his brand of African pop the name “mbalax” (pronounced uhm-BAHL-ax). Mbalax is a quilt of rhythms, mainly in 4/4 time and kept on a rock drum kit, with layers of the sabar hand drum interwoven in triplets, distorting things. (Three sabar players took the Brooklyn stage); very easy to dance to but always changing, hard to count, and punctuated by rhythmic phrases of the complexity one expects from math rock. Watching his players go at top speed, one saw very little strategy in their eyes, only an easy sort of pleasure as they sprinted through those breathless changes, with two keyboardists articulating long, eighties-sounding pitch-bent synth phrases that spilled over the confines of the main beat.

“In mbalax music, you can’t see the one, you just imagine the one,” N’Dour explained in a 2019 interview on French television, referring to that body-beckoning bass thud, the one count stomping out each measure that is the engine of funk. N’Dour makes a different kind of groove. “It’s like the Wolof language,” he has said.

That language was plenty dense by his second number, a French tune with the refrain “Merci beaucoup.” Halfway through it, during the song’s breakdown, there seemed to be a problem with the microphone of his player on the talking drum, a double-inverted cone you hold in the crook of your armpit and whose pitch you must alter, as you rapidly strike the head, by squeezing your bicep to your rib cage, tightening the tuning strings that bridge the two cones. So while the kit drummer kept a triplet trance rhythm on the high-hat, N’Dour gave a nod, and the talking drummer stepped out into the middle of the stage toward us, assumed a squat not unlike a football center against his defense, then ripped a long, punishing solo out front, flapping his wing to bring forth great wailing, hiccuppy stutters, all the way high, then all the way low. Behind him, N’Dour crouched too, his quarterback, holding the vocal mic steady against the rear of the drum.

All of New York Senegal seemed to be here. Ladies in moussour head wraps of elaborate purple silk, hijabs of sequin and safety-orange; men in bright kaftans, shawl-collar dinner jackets, dyed leather loafers. The seats were abandoned, the aisles clogged, the phones out—with selfie flashlights burning in the theater like suns.

But the feel of the band—and here is the trick of mbalax—was also very Afro-Cuban, propelled by two tangy, extra-dry electric guitars of the kind that waft from open car windows in the Bronx. And it felt somehow Western. The saxophonist, on a muzaky tenor, gave just a touch of the schmaltzy earnestness of George Michael’s “Careless Whisper.” He also switched out for flute. Then the voice. N’Dour still has it—high-lonesome, slightly feminine, and clarion, whether he assigns it to French or Wolof or English. During a synth-heavy shuffle in a double tempo, he would wave his hand to the phalanx of drummers, easing them, and send up sundering peals of it.

In And The Roots of Rhythm Remain (Faber & Faber), his authoritative 2024 book on the boom of “world music” (the book is also the primer on mbalax), the British producer Joe Boyd recalls trying to convince N’Dour to scale back with traditional instruments and simple production. Offended, the new celebrity accused Boyd “of wanting to ‘keep me as an exhibit in a museum.’” N’Dour has since softened (see his kora-heavy Muslim homage Nonesuch album, Egypt, from 2004). But not entirely. In this raucous but knowing Sunday concert, there were just enough bedroom beats and Steely Dan-isms to reflect America back onto itself. World music excites because it implies all the territories unknown to the Western listener. And N’Dour’s Brooklyn show was put on by one of New York’s finest outfits in that spirt, the World Music Institute. What’s easier to miss is that those countries know far more about the so-called “first world” than vice versa. Once a Star of Dakar, N’Dour, now sixty-five, corrects the path of the illumination in the title of his latest, self-released album, which he launched this tour to support. He named the record Eclairer le Monde: “Light the world.”