Baaba Maal

Firin' In Fouta

Mango, 1994. Once African pop's best kept secret at the time, Senegal's Baaba Maal first played Boston in 1989. The small crowd in attendance saw a singer and a band that equaled better known West African acts like Salif Keita and Youssou N'Dour. Unfortunately, though Maal produced great traditional records, notably Baayo (Mango 1991), his band releases never quite earned him the media spotlight. His 1992, Lam Toro, got help from a battery of "proven" producers, including Miami maestro Joe Galdo. But Galdo's thumpy dance grooves sold Maal's complex rhythms and sub-Saharan spirituality far short. All this changes, though, with Maal's new Firin' in Fouta (Mango), not only an overdue calling card for him, but a landmark in African pop fusion.

Fouta refers to the dry region of Northern Senegal where the Fulani people live herding cattle along the banks of the Senegal River. For Maal, coming of age meant moving beyond Fulani culture to mingle with the majority Wolof population in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. When Maal went there to study music in the `70s, the city moved to the mbalax sound, driven by brisk, Wolof sabar drumming. Maal's explorations continued as he traveled learning the court music of the Manding griots and the Arab-tinged sounds along the Mauritanian border, and eventually Western musical concepts at a Paris conservatory. Last year, though, Maal returned to his birthplace in Fouta to launch a new project.

"For this record," he told me over the phone from New York last fall, "We began in the in my town, Podor. We went there with sound engineers, cameras and the producer, Simon Emmerson. In Podor, people make music when they are working in the fields, preparing food, or at the mosque. They were interested in this record and they organized things for us to record and film, to show us different kinds cultural expression." Sound samples from Podor turn up woven into the mix of songs the band later recorded in Dakar, and also London, where Maal tastefully overlaid tracks by large string and horn sections.

On Firin' in Fouta, idiosyncratic takes on funk, reggae, salsa, and hip hop contain the sounds of fishermen singing by the water, a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, children chanting in a game, and on "Sidiki," the record's knockout opener, an odd rhythmic pounding that sounds like gunshots separated by an excited chorus of female voices. "Those are all the young girls in my family," says Maal. "We did that in the evening. There were something like forty girls pounding millet."

However novel, this stark juxtaposition of rural life and high technology might come off as a gimmick, but for Maal's exceptional musicality. The magic of this record lies in its combination of delicate acoustic sounds--principally plucked string instruments from the 21-string kora to a French folk harp--and ballsy electric pop. "The most important thing is that I wanted to see if I could get the modern music and the traditional music together without one of them overpowering the other." At this, Maal succeeds as noone has before. Songs like "Salimoun (Funky Kora)" and the driving techno romp "Gorel" present an ever-evolving thicket of sounds--snapping djembe drums, popping snare, shimmering harp riffs, airy Fulani flute, and full-throated male and female choruses.

Maal's sharp, gale-force voice easily cuts through all this, keening and caressing by turns, but never lost in the action. At a time when many high-tech Afropop efforts seem caught up in rehashing forumlas, Maal delivers a relentless of parade of ideas. Experiments tried in the past appear polished and fresh here, like "Swing Yela," a dramatic improvement over Lam Toro's attempt at Afro-hip-hop "Hamady Boiro." Cool as ice and bursting with party anarchy, "Swing Yela" contains great melodies but peaks with a delicious Wolof rap by two young Senagalese toasters. The scolding tone rings true, but the message, as Maal explains it, has a decidedly non-gangsta flavor: "Instead of trying to see our faults, we only see the faults of others.

" Maal's serious themes include the pain caused by the devaluation of the Central African Franc, the regenerative powers of community, motherhood, and on "African Woman," his horn-driven reworking of a Latin groove, a message to rural African women: don't just stay down on the farm and raise kids. Your continent needs you!