Press Release. For Immediate Release - August 29, 2001

Youssou Ndour and The Super Etoile To Perform In Atlanta

ATLANTA - AFRICAFEST announced today that Finally! Senegal and Africa's top Superstar is here. The long awaited concert performance featuring the sensational artist, Grammy nominated Youssou Ndour and his Super Etoile Band will take place in Atlanta. The event is scheduled for Friday October 5, 2001 at the famous Variety Playhouse located at 1099 Euclid Ave., Little Five Points.

Modern Senegalese popular music, known in the Wolof language as mbalax ["UMM-BAH-LAAKH"], an enchanting blend of Senegal's traditional percussion and griot singing with Afro-Cuban and indigenous dance flavors, has found in YOUSSOU N'DOUR both its enduring symbol and its hardiest innovator.

N'DOUR (born in 1959 in Dakar), a vocal artist with incredible range and poise, simply dubbed "the West African Sinatra" by New York Newsday after one stirring concert in Manhattan's Hammerstein Ballroom, has made mbalax famous throughout the world in more than twenty years of touring outside of Senegal with his band, the SUPER ETOILE, having begun as a teenager. The SUPER ETOILE "plays with a joyous precision", The Los Angeles Times noted, and The (London) Guardian has called their music "the finest example yet of the meeting of African and Western music: wholesome, urgent and thoughtful".

Admired by the likes of Peter Gabriel, Sting and Wyclef Jean, each of whom has collaborated with N'DOUR on songs on N'DOUR's daring new album for Sony Music, "JOKO", and other contemporaries from the world of rock, N'DOUR, who The Village Voice's Robert Christgau says is "the one African moving inexorably toward the world-pop fusion everyone else theorizes about", has quietly but steadily captured the attention and the affection of a diverse, multi-ethnic, genuinely international audience, urging the delicious urban rhythms of mbalax beyond the territory of the world music aficionados who first were hip to him.

As Peter Gabriel himself so succinctly put it, "YOUSSOU N'DOUR is now one of the best loved voices in the world". Another commentator has said that N'DOUR's music "encourages you to think globally while dancing locally". Yet for all of its openness toward other musical cultures, for all of N'DOUR's wit and cosmopolitan grace, mbalax remains an edgy, idiosyncratic music now so much a part of the Senegalese national identity as to be almost indistinguishable from it. N'DOUR consequently finds himself nothing less than a cultural icon in his country and in the Senegalese and West African diaspora, including in the United States. Throughout an astonishing international career, N'DOUR's rootedness in Senegalese dance music and singing remains the hallmark of his musical personality. Again, Christgau: Crossover ambitions notwithstanding, "the protector of today's Dakar Overgroove" still turns out to be none other than the incomparable YOUSSOU N'DOUR.

Do not pass up the opportunity to discover the live music of one of the world's top talent!

Tickets available at all Ticketmaster locations or Variety Playhouse Box Office.
Tickets: $25 advance, $30 day of show.
For more information, please call 404-596-6321 or 301-213-9225

For Further Information

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