Ibro Diabate - Esclave de l'argent

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Looking for another Ibro Diabate album on Amazon last night, I came across this from 2003,

so, being a sucker for Syllart Records, as well as a long time Ibro fan, downloaded it immediately. What a surprise!

Ibro, despite being from a djeli family, doesn't sing like a djeli; he has a husky, nasal voice - so nasal he sounds as if he's singing through his forehead! And he enunciates just barely - djeli singers almost invariably enunciate very clearly but Ibro kind of drawls, as if he's from the part of Guinea Conakry that's the equivalent of Lake Charles, LA.

On this album, he still has the same voice, attack and drawl, so that's the mixture as before. But the arrangements!!! My good Gawd, I never heard anything like these arrangements - certainly not in West African recordings, but not really in western music, either. Though there are elements that are a little bit familiar - there's a (presumably French) horn section which, on some tracks, riffs as sharply as Kool & the Gang did in 1968, and on others a string section that reminds me of Xavier Cugat phrases from the forties. But those have got to be coincidences.

Because the thing is, all of these odd ideas and ways of putting rhythmic sounds together work together! So it's not someone dredging up a raft of disparate ideas from an old record collection; it's someone's idea of what makes a commercial West African album.

But I don't know whose idea it is - you get no sleevenotes with Amazon downloads.

Anyway, if you want to hear what someone who WASN'T one of the usual suspects had in his head in 2003, that no one's ever taken any notice of since or tried before, here's something.

MG

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Here's a sample of one of the tracks

https://www.sendspace.com/file/jr5ggg

MG

[Van Basten II]