Baaba Maal at London’s Royal Festival Hall — ‘It’s a Senegalese party!’

The evening began with a coup de théâtre — five drummers filing into the venue halfway down the stalls, unleashing a hail of percussion as heads swivelled to watch them, then processing on to the stage to join the band. Women in robes and bright traditional headdresses laid out a carpet and strewed it with flowers. When Baaba Maal arrived, also richly robed, he too was anointed with flowers. It was an imperial entrance. The music accelerated into “Mbolo”, hammered triplets driving the beat home. “It’s a Senegalese party”, cried the host. “An African party!”

This party was much delayed. Maal had originally been announced as part of the line-up for Grace Jones’s Meltdown for 2020. His last London performance, at the Union Chapel in 2018, highlighted his solo acoustic guitar work; for Meltdown he was true to his ambition, expressed to me two decades ago, to “put an African village on stage”. Not counting Maal, a hyperactive road manager, and an enthusiastic dancer at one point plucked from the crowd, at least 24 people appeared on stage. There were, at times, eight drummers drumming, three horns a-blazing, two dancers leaping, and six ladies (“beautiful ladies”, as he insisted in a rare cheesy moment) doing not very much beside nodding appreciatively. Maal danced unlike a man due to turn 70 next year.

The evening suffered from the lack of his usual foil, the blind griot Mansour Seck, whose seraphic calm sets off Maal’s compulsion to command (though it was promised that Seck will return), as well as the kora’s place in the soundscape being replaced by keyboards.

Highlights included a version of “Chérie” that started with Maal seated with an acoustic guitar, as if holding a conversation on a porch, and built to a warm celebration from the whole band, with a coda from the Kick Horns, London’s invaluable brass-section-for-hire, that sounded like a return of The Skatalites. He started the old Mauritanian song “Mbaye Mbaye” seated again, playing slow blues lines bolstered subtly from semi-darkness by guitarist Barry Reynolds, while the women seated at his feet swayed in time to his rich, warm voice. Cheikh Ndoye reeled off a bass-heavy ngoni solo.

On “African Woman”, the Kick Horns brought a touch of Havana. Maal directed the words to his bassist, Maah Koudia Keita, the only actual African woman on stage at that point, who grinned back and prowled proudly. The cowboy gallop of “Gorel” and a frenetic “Sidiki” brought the concert home. “I have missed you so much”, he told the audience. It was mutual.

★★★★☆

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