PRESS RELEASE
FOR: IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 15, 2002

ATLANTA'S FIRST GREAT AFRICAN BALL -  APRIL 14

(Visit http://www.africafest.com/ for more information and for the purchase
of tickets for this year's first Great African Ball.)


  Africafest, in association with Xibaar production, is proud to announce
this popular and unique Atlanta happening, featuring Senegal's Youssou
N'Dour and one of Africa's most beloved dance orchestras, N'Dour's famous
Super Etoile, will now be coming to The Tabernacle (152 Luckie St., Downtown
Atlanta) for an unprecedented night, Sunday, April 14, 2002 (7 p.m.
ONWARDS).

    Today's popular music in Senegal, known in the Wolof language as mbalax,
developed as a blend of the country's traditional griot percussion and
praise-singing with the Afro-Cuban arrangements and flavors which made the
return trip from the Caribbean to West Africa in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s
and have flourished in West Africa ever since. Beginning in the mid-1970s
the resulting mix was modernized with a gloss of more complex indigenous
Senegalese dance rhythms, roomy and melodic guitar and saxophone solos,
chattering talking-drum soliloquies and, on occasion, Sufi Muslim religious
chant. This created a new music which was at turns nostalgic, restrained and
stately, or  celebratory, explosively syncopated and indescribably funky.
Younger Senegalese musicians steeped in Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, James
Brown, and the whole range of American jazz, soul music and rock, which
Senegal's cosmopolitan capital, Dakar, had enthusiastically absorbed, were
rediscovering their heritage and seeking out traditional performers,
particularly singers and talking-drummers, to join their bands.  As it
emerged from this period of fruitful musical turbulence, mbalax would
eventually find in Youssou N'Dour  the singer and bandleader who has had
more to do with its shaping than any  other individual.

  Named "African Artist of the Century" by the English publication Folk
Roots at the threshold of the year 2000, N'Dour recently signed to the
respected and eclectic American label Nonesuch Records and is expected to
release a new album, NOTHING'S IN VAIN (THIONO DU REER) in June 2002, a
follow-up to the critically-acclaimed JOKO (THE LINK), his first Nonesuch
release.  N'Dour has made mbalax famous throughout the world during more
than twenty years of recording and concertizing outside of  Senegal with the
Super Etoile, Africa's most popular dance band, who, says The Los Angeles
Times, "play challenging Senegalese roots music with a joyous precision".

  The Village Voice's Robert Christgau has called N'Dour "the world's
greatest pop vocalist" and finds him "the one African moving inexorably
toward the world-pop fusion everyone else theorizes about", but
notwithstanding the recognition he and the band have earned internationally,
Youssou N'Dour's rootedness in Senegalese music and storytelling remains the
hallmark of his artistic personality.

  At once daring musical innovator and staunch protector of mbalax's uncanny
"Dakar overgroove", N'Dour manages to maintain a sound which is both
characteristically Senegalese and outward-looking, a synthesis of musical
languages unmistakably nourished by the musical soil of his homeland. On the
foundation of this highly personal sound, N'Dour remains an icon in his
country and in the ever-growing Senegalese and African diasporas.

N'Dour continues to make his home in Dakar.  But in Atlanta his Great
African Ball (Grand Bal), a massive dance party in the Senegalese style,
features the kind of unhinged five- and six-hour performances typical of
N'Dour's Thiossane nightclub in Dakar.

At the Great African Ball, a diverse array of thousands of Atlantan Africans
from across the Continent become, for one night, N'Dour's happy co-stars,
their verve finding expression is an extraordinary collective spectacle.
The food, fashions and emotions of "Africa in Atlanta" mingle with other
city energies to create a memorable celebration in recognition of an
unmistakable common humanity, with  N'Dour deftly coaxing the revelers
through a musical storyland both timeless and urgent.

  This is a special Atlanta night not to be missed, so save this date!

VISIT http://www.africafest.com  FOR DETAILS AND TICKETS.


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