Contributed by Evangeline Kim, Afropop Worldwide Board Member
Photos by John Oko Nyaku


The magnificent and glamorous Oumou Sangare, Mali’s great diva struck an exceptionally fine balance between the traditional and contemporary during a completely “over-sold” free performance, Saturday night at Aaron Davis Hall’s Harlem Stage in the new Marian Anderson Theater, a Carnegie Hall Weill Music Institute presentation.  The theater’s capacity is 1100, yet audience demand was so heavy that this number could have easily tripled, as the limited, reserved seating disappeared almost simultaneously with the event announcement weeks earlier.

Her nickname, “Sangare Kono,” “Sangare the Songbird,” holds privileged significance in Malian society: a “songbird” through music, in her Wassoulou tradition, advises the whole community by commenting on the realities of life, contrasting good and bad.   She has risen to international stardom not only through her charismatic beauty, a commanding stage presence and her supple, compelling voice that swoops and soars effortlessly between soprano and contralto registers, but also by her daring will and commitment to challenge the traditions that throttle advancement of women in Africa and by her compassion for the underprivileged and poor throughout the world.  Through yet another major theme, she gives praise to and reminds her listeners of ’s immense cultural and historical wealth and renowned customs such as African hospitality, the importance of loyalty and keeping one’s word, thereby instilling pride and strength in all pan-African communities who uphold the same principles.  

Throngs of women and children – as well as liberated, progressive men – climbed on stage continuously to give homage, to shower her with money, to exchange tender embraces and dance with her throughout her almost 2 hour long performance.  Even if some did not understand her spontaneous outbursts in Bambara and French, the entranced, rapt audience was able to feel very deeply her messages, as she shared her passionate convictions in English from time to time.  “Everybody, move!” she exuberantly cued at one point, and the whole room was up on their feet, dancing along with her in the aisles and up onstage.

Such is her strength of artistry that her Harlem Stage performance, backed by her superb eight-member band and two women dancer-singers, overflowed with sparkling jazz riffs, blues-tinged musical inspirations and improvisations, as the group performed favorite songs from her now legendary recordings, “Moussoulou,” “Ko Sira,” “Worotan,” and “Oumou.”  Outstanding solo duets with Oumou by Brehima Diakite on the buzzing kamelen ngoni, the youth version of the six-string hunter’s harp, Cheick Oumar Diabate on djembe drum, Hamane Toure on guitar, Sekou Bah on bass guitar, and Zoumana Tereta on sokou, the one-string Wassoulou fiddle, heightened the joy and pleasure of the evening. 

While her signature style, based upon the popular Wassolou music with its hypnotic, upbeat dance rhythms and drawn from the sacred hunter’s musical traditions from Wasalu, the densely forested region spanning southern Mali and neighboring Guinea, served as rhythmic foundation for the performance, her musicians wove in several different rhythms from Mali’s vast musical landscape.  Zoumana Tereta on the one-string fiddle delivered an especially surprising and beautiful passage during the song, “Woula A Jana.”  His improvised melody wove sinuously over the elegant, lilting “Takamba” rhythm, as seen in Afropop’s brilliant documentary film, “Festival in the Desert - The Tent Sessions,” and danced by the Tuareg group Tartit, Ali Farka Toure and Oumou herself.  

During her second set, she spontaneously decided to sing a new song that she wrote recently in defiance of a movie produced in entitled “Fatou La Malienne.”  The film, she found, was a gross humiliation and insult to Mali and Malian women, as it stresses forced marriage and female circumcision.  The musical arrangement was explosively rock-intense, supercharged and laced with hip-hop rhythms, as she fiercely paced back and forth across the stage, denouncing the film’s content in Bambara.


Her love for Wassolou music was inherited through early musical training with her Wasalu-born mother, a traditional singer whose roots trace back to the ancient, sacred hunter’s music and other Wasulu regional styles such as the djembe-driven, hunters’ acrobatic masquerades. The age-old hunter’s tradition is central to the epic history of Sunjata, founder of Mali’s 13^th century empire that extended throughout all of West Africa long before colonialism.   Mali’s early hunters from the Wasalu region and others, even pre-Islam, were protectors of villages, food-providers, healers, philosophers and believed to have magical powers.  This psychic respect for the hunter endures today throughout Malian society and all of West Africa.  (You might have noticed Salif Keita sometimes in performance, wearing a hunter’s shirt and cap, sewn with small protective mirrors and magical gris-gris amulets, symbolic of his royal Manden hunter’s society ancestry with King Sunjata.)  Oumou’s Wassolou sound signifies, indeed, much, much more than a modern, popular dance style.

Oumou’s admiration for the pioneering Wassoulou singers, Coumba Sidibe and Sali Sidibe, further fueled her ambition to develop her own music and band, and her 1990 debut album at the age of 21, “Moussoulou” (Women) achieved unprecedented success throughout West Africa and brought international recognition and accolades with the support of two key labels, World Circuit and Nonesuch Records.   Many of her Malian elders including the late Ali Farka Toure and Salif Keita not only encouraged and supported her over the years, but inspired her with their own mastery of styles and power of performance. 

More than any other influence that propelled Oumou to greatness, it was her extraordinary determination to overcome the extreme poverty and hardship she suffered as a child with her mother and siblings.  At the age of two, her father suddenly abandoned Oumou’s pregnant mother and their small children for a second wife, and years of struggle to survive ensued.  And at the age of five, Oumou went out into the streets of Bamako to sell bottles of water to earn centimes (literally pennies) to help feed her destitute mother and her siblings.  She also began to accompany her mother during singing engagements at wedding and baptism parties, developed her love of singing, and thus launched her budding career as a tiny girl.

She once wrote about her concluding song on Harlem Stage, the profoundly moving lament, “Djorolen” (Anguish, Worry), “I am the songbird….  I am talking to the public, asking them to remember the poor, those who have no power, no voice, no hope.  Often it’s the orphans or those who lose their parents early who have the greatest problems in life.  I composed this because poverty is getting worse in Africa – through wars, there are so many orphans.”

Sangare Kono sings for her love of humanity.  Sangare the Songbird is eternal in her triumph over adversity.





Special Guests:

Left: Wife of New York's Malian Ambassador to U.N. (Washington) His Excellency Abdoulaye Diop, Oumou Sangare, and His Excellency Cheick Sidi Diarra, Malian Ambassador to the U.N. (New York).  John Oko Nyaku.

Cheikh Tairou M'Baye & Sing-Sing Rhythm, the sabar drum and dance company of Wolof griots from Medina, , opened for Oumou and brought a special festive tone to the evening. Cheikh M’Baye is the nephew of the griot and master drummer Doudou N'Diaye Rose, and the group is named after Sing Sing Faye, the first master drummer of Cape Verde.  The muscled percussionists were spectacular, and carry the crackling precision of Doudou N’Diaye Rose’s drumming legacy, and when joined by the leaping, tumbling, graceful, agile, acrobatic dancers, the audience was infused with the group’s supreme life force and West Africa ’s thrilling musical power.

First published: www.afropop.org