Cheikh Lô looks like good fun from the off, attractive, unique, with Ray Bans glued onto a craggy face. An extremely slender frame enveloped by dreadlocks that mark out his membership of the Muslim sect Baye Fall; a wide-braided leather necklace, offering protection from the evil eye. Cheikh Lô has added a personal touch to this spiritual shield: embroidered tunics and a woven cotton frock coat complement the jeans, with their deliberate rips, finished off by sneakers with a pop art design. Sometimes, he'll be wearing a hat. He's swag. These adornments provide a stage for the voice. And the voice of Cheikh Lô is unique, cosmopolitan, graceful, slender and high-pitched, pulsating irregularly.
It can also switch suddenly to the bass line of Afro-beat, since the Nigerian Fela Kuti had left his mark on Senegal and Burkina Faso as well. And Cheikh also worked with the historical Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen in 2010. Cheikh Lô has forty years of music in his dreadlocks. He started out as a drummer. "From Bobo Dioulasso to Dakar", summarises the chilled-out guy. Born in 1955 in Burkina Faso's second city, where his father was a jeweller, this passionate Senegalese man took his first orchestral steps with Volta Jazz. The ensemble, one of the best in post-independence West Africa, revisited Cuban song, classics from the Congolese Tabu Ley Rochereau and created Creole-style dance pieces.
Read moreThere were twelve of them, behind the saxophonist and singer Mostapha Maiga, all ages, all ethnicities, all nationalities. Cheikh Lô is a child of this Africa - an enthusiastic, Sahelian creative. Having returned to Dakar in 1978 to work at the Cap-Vert Transport Company (SOTRAC), stopping off in Ivory Coast on the way, he experienced the unpredictable life of a session drummer when he lived in Paris at the end of the 1980s, working for a time with Papa Wemba. Spotted, as African music, by the producer Ibrahima Sylla, he recorded three albums on the Syllart Record label...