Amadou&Mariam
Once a decade, it seems, a record emerges from the dense and vibrant undergrowth of the world music scene to achieve mass popular success in the mainstream. Back in the 1980s it was the Gypsy Kings. In the 1990s it was Buena Vista Social Club. And now it's the turn of the West African duo, Amadou and Mariam. Yet it's hard to avoid such vocabulary when talking about the success of Amadou and Mariam's album, ‘Dimanche à Bamako’Effortlessly funky yet full of insanely catchy tunes and with the African core of Amadou's stinging, snaking guitar lines and Mariam's hypnotically soulful voice tweaked with touches of reggae, jazz, blues and rock It's now 28 years since Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia met in Mali and started making music together. Manu Chao, whose own 1998 album ‘Clandestino’ was a landmark in global Latin fusion. He was particularly taken with a track called 'Je T'Aime Mon Amour, Ma Chérie', which persuaded him that Amadou and Mariam had the potential to reach a far wider public than the specialist world music audienceA meeting was arranged in a Paris studio and Chao offered to produce their next album. The result was ‘Dimanche à Bamako’. Recorded in both Paris and Bamako, Chao's presence and production cleverly enhance rather than blur Amadou & Mariam's own musical vision, in much the same symapthetic way Ry Cooder worked with the veteran Cuban musicians on Buena Vista.
