On 'Made in Senegal,' Orchestra Baobab Prove the Old Tree Is Still Growing

A baobab doesn't grow fast. It grows slowly, sometimes over centuries, and it keeps growing long after everything around it has fallen. "We are like the tree that gives us our name," saxophonist and bandleader Thierno Koité says in the notes to this album. "Whatever happens, the baobab stays standing." On the evidence of Made in Senegal, he isn't exaggerating. Orchestra Baobab's first studio album in nine years is a warm, generous and quietly triumphant record. It's as good as Specialist in All Styles, the 2002 comeback that introduced the band to a whole new world, and in places it's even better.

That's no small claim, because the band has been through a lot to get here. Orchestra Baobab started in 1970 as the house band of a new club in the basement of a building on rue Jules Ferry in Dakar. Adrien Senghor, the nephew of President Léopold Sédar Senghor, was among its founders. The musicians blended the Cuban son they heard on Radio Senegal with Wolof griot song, Mandinka melody and the Creole poetry of the Casamance. By the Eighties, Youssou N'Dour's mbalax had taken over the dance floors, and in 1987 the band fell apart. For fifteen years Baobab was little more than a memory, kept alive by a World Circuit reissue called Pirates Choice. Then Nick Gold brought the band back together in 2001, and Specialist in All Styles, produced with Youssou N'Dour and recorded in ten days in London, won it a BBC World Music Award.

Since then, the founding fathers have fallen one by one. Singer Ndiouga Dieng died in 2016, saxophonist Issa Cissokho in 2019 and bandleader Balla Sidibé in 2020. Thione Seck and the great Togolese guitarist Barthélemy Attisso followed in 2021, and singer Rudy Gomis in 2022. Plenty of bands would have called it a day. Baobab did what a baobab does. Sons, nephews and long-time collaborators have joined the elders, the line-up now stretches from Senegal to Benin and Mauritania, and for the first time in its history the band has a woman out front.

History lessons in a beautiful new coat.

That woman is Korka Dieng, and she's the heart of this record. Senegal has known her for years: she sang in the Sargal band of rapper Didier Awadi and backed kora virtuoso Seckou Keita. Her father played drums and keyboards in an army band and was friends with the original Baobab members. When I interviewed her earlier this year, she described the new album as a fusion of two generations: new sounds, but true to the essence. That's exactly what you hear. Her voice is powerful, warm and completely unforced. It cuts through the horns without ever fighting them, and next to Zacharia "Papino" Koité she gives the old songs a new and very human centre.

Because make no mistake: this is an album of history lessons in a beautiful new coat. Half of these songs already belong to Senegal's musical memory. "Sibo Odia" was the title track of a Baobab album from the early Eighties, and "Ndiaga Niaw" was on the Pirates Choice sessions of 1982. "Tioro Bye Samba" revisits a Thione Seck classic. "Togne Bakhoul," the lead single, is Rudy Gomis's tender address to his wife. And "Ana Maria," also written by Gomis, is a song to the grandmother who was the only one in his family to support his life in music, sung in Casamance Creole imagery, with the wind as a messenger between generations. It was already a Baobab classic, it's my favourite song at their concerts, and here it becomes the highlight of the album. If you want to know your future, you have to know your history. Baobab know theirs by heart.

Many of these songs have been road-tested. On the European tour last autumn, half the album was already in the set: "Ana Maria," "Togne Bakhoul," "Sibo Odia," "Souvenir," "Senegal" and "Baobab 50 Ans." When I saw the band in Heerlen in November, I wrote that it wasn't a nostalgia act but a living orchestra, and that the tree simply keeps growing. The studio versions confirm it. These songs have grown on stage, and you can hear that the band knows exactly where every groove breathes.

The new songs hold their own. "Casamance" is a loving tribute to the green south of the country, where several band members were born, and it carries the lilt of that region in every bar. "Wuti Xaliss," whose Wolof title translates roughly as "looking for money," turns the daily struggle in Dakar into one of the most irresistible grooves on the record. Together with "Ana Maria," they're the three songs I keep coming back to. And "Baobab 50 Ans" does what the title promises: it celebrates the road travelled without sinking into sentimentality.

The baobab keeps growing. Made in Senegal is the proof.

The title is meant literally. Specialist in All Styles was made in London, and every Baobab studio album since the reunion came out on the British label World Circuit. Made in Senegal was recorded entirely at La Boutique in Dakar and produced by the Senegalese label Madoky, with Strut licensing it for the rest of the world. It's also the second part of a trilogy that began with Made in Dakar in 2007. The sound is warm but remarkably open. You hear the space between René "Bolero" Sowatché's jazzy lead guitar and Yahya Fall's rhythm guitar, between Thierno Koité's alto and Wilfried Zinsou's trombone, and the drums of Mamadou Mountaga Koité, who joined in 1974, sit right in the room. The production never takes over. It's at the service of the music, which is the highest compliment you can pay a record like this.

So why not five stars? Because nothing here is new, and I reserve five stars for records that also break new ground. Baobab haven't reinvented themselves, and they don't pretend to. As Korka Dieng told me, modernism for this band was never about electronics or trends. It's about the search for perfection. On that count, Made in Senegal comes remarkably close.

Fifty-six years after the first night at the Baobab Club, the founding fathers are gone, but their songs are in good hands. The old tree has new branches, and it's still growing.