My favourite albumMusicMy favourite album: Pirate's Choice by Orchestra Baobab
Our writers are picking their favourite albums. Here, Caspar Llewellyn Smith gets carried away by a magical collision of Cuban and African soundsIt could feel lame to start any paean to a favourite record with a claim for its significance; it makes it sound dry, academic, removed from the emotions it engages. And yet the story of Pirate's Choice bears re-telling, and what I've taken from it over the years is bound up in its multiple histories. This was an album recorded in 1982, but only released in the UK seven years later, when it helped kickstart a new-found fascination – among certain western listeners – with "world music". The band by that point had split up: their music deemed increasingly passé in Senegal itself, where once they'd be seen as harbingers of a new sound and style. But there's more than simply that: this seems to me to be a tale that reaches back much further in time, and crisscrosses the oceans more than twice over.
In Rumba on the River, an account of the popular music of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo,Gary Stewart describes the process by which Cuban son came to be the sound of this vast patch of Africa: colonialists brought to the country, as well as the most grotesque exploitation, the wooden phonograph, and of the records available from the early 30s onwards – mostly on the GV label, a subsidiary of HMV – the most popular by far were Cuban in origin, by acts such as Don Azpiazú and his Havana Casino Orchestra. Now, was the appeal of that music rooted in a deep appreciation of where it had first originated, centuries back? "African rhythms exported on slave ships echoed from the grooves of 78 rpm records and crackling radio loudspeakers," Stewart writes. "Africans in the two Congos embraced them like a kidnapped offspring suddenly released from captivity."
I can't get enough of that sort of thing: as someone who's no musicologist, to read it felt like a flash of lightning had illuminated the fog of history. And while I appreciate that this is meant to be a review of a record, not a book, here's another of the details that I find so fascinating in Stewart's study: while the confluence at Stanley Pool of different musical influences recalled the miscegenation of styles in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, jazz evolved on the pianos, brass and woodwinds of America's dominant European culture, whereas Congolese music embraced the guitar – partly because pianos weren't suited to the tropical humidity on the banks of the Congo, but mostly because the guitar sounded closest to the lutes and likembes of traditional African music.
It's the smokey guitar of Barthelemy Attiso that invites you into Pirate's Choice, as if to say there's a late-night story to tell here. That Cuban and Cuban-influenced Congolese music reached Dakar in the middle decades of the last century, and so it is that when I play this record to people to whom this is terra incognita, they sometimes struggle to locate its origins and think it sounds as much like the work of the Buena Vista Social Club as it does African. So it's partly this tale that the record relates, but there are other influences there, too; divining all these connections is at least part of what makes it so magical to me.
Wolfish whistles, timbales and the languid tenor sax of Issa Cissoko join the guitar on that opening track of the record, Utru Horas, and then we hear the voice of Rudy Gomis. He sings in Portuguese creole, and even Googling the song now, I'm no wiser as to what it is that he's singing about. The point is, it's never mattered: the reverie created by the music is so delicious in itself, the atmosphere that of an after-hours club, the bottle almost empty, a couple swaying on the dancefloor. Time slows.
I was a surprise when I learnt that Orchestra Baobab did in fact owe their existence to a club, only one less dissolute than that in my imaginings (the sort of place whose patrons might include Paolo Conte and Tom Waits on a busman's holiday). In fact, Dakar's celebrated Star Band were ploughing their trade at the Miami Club in 1970 when a rival establishment, the Baobab Club, opened – and the owners lured half the group to form their own house band. That much is archetypal.
The interior of the club was designed to resemble the hollow of a baobab tree – emblem of the savannah – and cabinet ministers and senior civil servants were its principal patrons. "The dress code was strict: a suit and tie or full traditional robes," Balla Sidibe once told the writer Mark Hudson. "Only the very top people could get in." It seems fantastical to me that any government apparatchik should have once danced to bands like Orchestra Baobab, but then Dakar clearly isn't Manchester come party conference season.
The pace on Pirate's Choice picks up after Utru Horas with the sensuous, lilting Coumba, which is set to a rumba rhythm. But the next two tracks, Ledi Ndieme M'bodj and the driving Werente Serigne, feel grittier, partly because both are Wolof songs. And it was, in fact, the earthier elements that Orchestra Baobab introduced to their sound that made the group stand out on the local scene, with a line-up that featured at different times Wolof, Malinke, Toucouleur, Nigerian and Moroccan musicians. Barthelemy Attisso originated from Togo. Issa Cissoko and the drummer Mountage Koite came from Mandinka griot families, from Mali and eastern Senegal respectively. Rudy Gomis and Balla Sidibe were from the southern, forested region of the Casamance. The final song on Pirate's Choice, the lovely Soldadi, is apparently based on a folk tune from there. So each member of this cast brought with them their own influences – and while I can't pretend to know much about any of these traditions, Pirate's Choice is the gateway.
I do know of one irony in this story, though: Baobab were Dakar's star attraction throughout the 70s, but the kids in the medina increasingly preferred a rawer, funkier sound and in the year that Pirate's Choice was recorded, 1982, a new group emerged from the remnants of the Star Band to take their crown. This was the Etoile de Dakar, led by a young Youssou N'Dour. Five years later, Orchestra Baobab split.
Even this isn't the end: the Pirate's Choice recordings were first released on cassette in Senegal, and then subsequently as a hard-to-find vinyl album in France. It was in a flea market in Paris that World Circuit Records' Nick Gold tracked down his copy, and in 1989 he put it out on CD. Support came from DJs including Charlie Gillett and Andy Kershaw, both hugely influential in the new market for world music. And in 2001, Orchestra Baobab reunited, making a record produced by Nick Gold and Youssou N'Dour, which also featured the Buena Vista Social Club's Ibrahim Ferrer. A world tour included an appearance on the David Letterman Show.
So it's a heartening conclusion, although for me there's a wistful note, too, because one tiny thread of this tale connects me to it. Charlie Gillett wrote the liner notes for that first CD release of Pirate's Choice (an expanded version with six further and equally beguiling songs has subsequently emerged; note the reggae influence on Balla Daffe!). Before his death at the early age of 68 last year, I had come to know Charlie slightly, and he had helped turn me on to a whole bunch of records that exist outside the pop mainstream. One thing I always got from him was that he cared, first and foremost, about the music, rather than its provenance. Was it a tune he'd want to play on the radio? Was it a record that would pay re-listening? Pirate's Choice does that, and in spades ... it is, as Charlie wrote, "by turns inspiring and soothing, spell-binding and exhilarating".
I love the stories that music can tell, and this album can be the start of several journeys. But first: just listen.
You can write your own review of this record on our brand new album pages: once you're signed into the Guardian website, visit the album's dedicated page.
Or you could simply star rate it, or add it to one of your album lists. There are more than 3m new pages for you to explore as well as 600,000-plus artists' pages – so simply find their albums and get to work.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKWlqLake8yuqqKbkqG8qHuRaWhqZ5%2BYwXB8lGinoqqRqbK0ecKhpqKblWK8s6%2FHnqqtqpFir6K7wZqZ