There are some artistic limits that Omar Pene is keen not to step over. His Senegalese roots are vital to him and he can’t bear the thought that anyone might say that he’s losing even one iota of his cultural identity. “I couldn’t accept that for anything in the world,” he claims. Not that he is shutting the door, more like setting out the conditions that any potential partner would have to accept.

He took up the acoustic path almost by chance, and found that he enjoyed it so much that he has hardly deviated in the last half decade. Where Myamba in 2005 was an experimental initiation, the 2009 recording of Ndam showed the true potential of the formula.

The tour that ensued brought its own lessons. “We realised that it was quite a cold album with a lot of ballads and not suitable for playing on stage. We wanted to get the audience moving more and yet keep the same style,” analyses Omar. As a result, the live aspect was part of his approach in creating Ndayaan, produced with the same team as the preceding disk.

Bridging two worlds

Ndayaan Omar Pene Ndayaan (Aztec musique) 2011 Listen

At the time, the French musicians he worked with were more used to accompanying figures from French light pop, and knew little about the type of music played by Super Diamono, the Senegalese artist’s band. So that they could exchange between their worlds, they built bridges that they gradually made more solid and broadened to facilitate their partnership.

Omar enjoyed the experience with his new accomplices, which he refers to as “symbiosis”. He also chose to travel his own part of the journey, and shrink the distance, by singing a song in French composed for the occasion, Plus on est de fous. His "attic", in which he stores over 800 tracks, supplied him with most of the album’s tracks: Tiki Tiki, Silmaxa, Circulation and Chômage have changed their colours and revealed new flavours. In fact, the author says he didn’t know them so well after all: “I went back to square one in many ways; it’s the kind of music we used to play when we started out,” he observes.

The album starts with the very first song he wrote and sang back in 1972, Biita Bann. The youngster of the time, drawing from his own experience of the street, felt the need to express his indignation at the frequent infanticides taking place in Dakar. He set down his lyrics to a well-known tune and the man who was dreaming of becoming a footballer was spotted by a member of the Kadd Orchestra.

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A few days later, he had an audition. His friends came along, pushing him to give it a go: “As soon as he saw us, the band leader wanted to throw us out. He thought we were neighbourhood kids come to watch rehearsals,” he recounts. Biita Bann earned Omar a ticket to join the Kadd Orchestra and he swiftly rose to stardom on the local scene, before starting up Super Domino in 1975.

Music university

His style, labelled “Afro feeling”, spanned the generations. Today, the group is seen as a kind of university, having trained around fifty instrumentalists who contribute to the simmering hotpot of Senegalese music, either supporting other artists like Youssou N’Dour, or going solo, like Ismaël Lo, “A real mate” – the two men still live in the same neighbourhood.

His international career, fuelled by the numerous Senegalese “colonies” in West Africa and round the world, took a new turn after Ndam. He had found himself the audience he’d been seeking to give his music a second life. Not that the boss of Super Diamono intends giving up on the local market which has supported him for so long, and he will still be playing at dance events and releasing his rhythmic albums.

He even dared reveal his acoustic repertoire to his compatriots, not without a touch of apprehension, during a concert he gave in Dakar last year at Obélisque Square. “You could hear the flies buzz, the audience was stunned. But they encouraged me to carry on in the same vein,” says Omar, clearly relieved at receiving local approval before getting started on Ndayaan.

Omar Pene Website

Omar Pene Ndayaan (Aztec Music) 2011

Translation : Anne-Marie Harper