NEW ALBUM "NIMISSA"!
After 10 years of performing live on stage, BA CISSOKO travelled around " New world music " stages all over the world. The complicity between the 5 musicians is infallible and the reputation of their ebullient groove has never been denied... For this new European tour starting in February 2012, they surround themselves with two additional brass instruments and we bet that the record realized by Philippe Eidel (Khaled, Rachid Taha, ...) marks a turning point in the band’s career…
Musician and singer settled in Marseille, Ba Cissoko was born in Koundara – 600 kilometers from Conakry (Guinea). With the great gap in his life, one step here and another there, shared between France and Africa, Ba Cissoko releases his fourth album recorded and mixed by Philippe Eidel (the famous producer of Khaled and the Gyspy Kings…). This meeting turned as a revelation between the marabout of recording studios (Philippe Eidel) and the master of kora (Ba Cissoko) giving a new look at the world.
Ba Cissoko plays with his long time sidemen, his young cousins (Sekou Kouyate playing the kora and Kourou Kouyate on the bass guitar) and with his latest recruits (the guitar player Abdoulaye Kouyaté and “d’Artagnan” on drums. Laurent Rigaud known as “Samba” (percussions) and The Ava Saty Marching band, a brass band, came to perform for the first time on this new album. Together, they create a new style made to propel Combo on the international scene.
On “ Nimissa” (meaning “regrets”), the song which gave the title of the album, the band, like a giant boa, curls up a funky groove with the long tunes of the brass band. A quarry well-known by the singer. In 2006, this son of a griot, raised in the Mandingo tradition, had already experienced a mixture of West African music, jazz, funk and reggae perfor-ming in a duet with the trumpeter Gilles Poizat. The band called “Tamalou” was created with a subversive spirit, where experimenting and innovating were the main goals.
Here, with the complicity of Philippe Eidel, modernity forwards its face, its torso and its members. Successful delivery! On these 11 tracks blows a wind of freedom so necessary to Ba Cissoko’s desire of emancipation. Here, the Mandingo tunes mix with salsa, rumba, funk, jazz, rhythm n’ blues and even scat, without diming the rich tunes and flaming harmonies of this thousand-year old culture. The gap eventually turned into a bridge between different worlds which have Humanity in common, torments and joys – whatever the degree of the colour.
Baba SQUAALY