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Salif Keita

From Mali

A musical life less ordinary
You can compartmentalise Salif Keita's career into three neat boxes. The first covers the singer's time in two of West Africa's finest bands of the 1970s - the mighty Super Rail Band de Bamako and the equally impeccable Les Ambassadeurs. But collective glory wasn't enough and box number two finds Salif heading north to Paris to score unimaginable success just as the initial waves of the world music boom became audible - his 1987 album Soro, with all its attendant state-of-the-art technology, propelling him onto the coffee tables of Europe and North America. The third - but hopefully far from final - career stage began when Salif headed home to Bamako at the turn of the millennium, building his own studio and recording a string of delightful acoustic records like Moffou and M'Bemba. But the key thread stitching these three ages of man together is THAT voice - one of the most golden sounds to emerge from West Africa in the past half-century.

(Biography written by Nige Tassell 2010)
(Image by Richard Dumas)

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