Being is Baaba Maal’s most compelling album in years — review

It is never good for a singer to become the musical mouthpiece for a small country whose resource curse has given it a military-backed regime fronted by an authoritarian cult of personality. Happily, Baaba Maal has recovered from his time as national praise singer for the Kingdom of Wakanda on Marvel’s Black Panther soundtrack to record Being, his most coherent and compelling album in years.

The rule of Maal’s albums is that their quality is always in inverse proportion to the number of instruments deployed. The best, from Djam Leelii to Mi Yeewnii, have been built essentially around his voice and guitar, as unadorned as possible. For Being Maal reunites with producer Johan Karlberg, but the style is more simplified than their work on 2016’s The Traveller. The singing is foregrounded and the instrumentation is composed largely of Maal’s guitar, bass ngoni from Barou Sall and percussion, both synthesised from Karlberg and real from Mamadou Sarr.

The album kicks off with “Yerimayo Celebration”, Maal singing to a flourish of ngoni before a brief electronic howl like a far-off plane cues a jumping rhythm. The song celebrates Maal’s upbringing as a fisherman (in a culture where hereditary credentials as a griot are important for musicians) and expresses admiration for their stewardship of the environment.

Elsewhere many of his key themes are reiterated. The most processed of the tracks, “Freak Out”, on which he is joined by Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya, sounds caution about overuse of the internet. “Boboyillo”, by contrast, praises its power for connection and progress. The quiet, contemplative “Ndungu Ruumi” uses the changing seasons as a metaphor for the pull between migration and the hearth. At the end of the album, “Casamance Nights”, recorded in the open air by the titular river, brings the story full circle with a homage to the natural world and whose simplicity recalls Maal’s earliest recordings.

★★★★★

‘Being’ is released by Marathon Artists