Cheikh Lo is sitting in the driver’s seat of an old Mercedes, the chair flung far back, the smoke curling from a spliff up and out of the cracks at the top of the darkened windows. A string of Islamic prayer beads dangles from a rearview mirror mounted on the dashboard. Another mirror and a bunch of leather-bound religious talismans hang from the steering- wheel shaft. The whole car interior, including its occupants, is covered in a layer of spliff ash and sand, which blows in sudden gusts off this suburban Dakar street.
His dreadlocks, topped by an old blue beret, hang to his waist. His skinny legs are almost lost in an old pair of tracksuit bottoms pocked with smoking burns. His eyes are concealed behind cheap gold-rimmed aviator glasses.
The Senegalese guitar maverick’s new album, Jamm, meaning “peace” in the Senegalese language Wolof, is pulsing out of the car stereo, a seductive mix of Cuban swing rhythms, chopping guitar riffs, funk-laden saxophone wheezes, complex Wolof drum beats and the slinky voice of the man sitting beside me.
“I wanted to look in the rearview mirror with this album,” says Lo, “and when I looked, I saw a beautiful past. I first sang in public in 1975, so there’s a lot of nostalgia in this record. I wanted to go back and see what I had done in my life.”
‘It might not work here, but it might work elsewhere’
Lo first came to international attention in 1996 with his album Ne La Thiass. Senegal was already prominent as an exporter of music — Youssou N’Dour had long been bringing mbalax, the country’s vibrant dance music, to the world. But this new singer, with his acoustic sound and his Sufi lyrics, had something different to offer.
It had already taken a long time, however, to convince the Senegalese that this style of music was going to work. “Every time I made a new album,” Lo says, “Senegalese people came to my studio to listen and said ‘yes, but Cheikh, that music won’t work here’. They all said I should play mbalax. I would say: ‘It might not work here, but it might work elsewhere.'”
It was Youssou N’Dour, though, who eventually recognised the beauty of this soulful, pan-African acoustic music. He saw Lo play in a bar in Dakar one night and after the gig asked him to come to his house to play a demo tape.
“I had no idea that he lived in the house behind mine,” Lo says. “I took him the demo that weekend. We talked about it for about a week we went to the studio and Ne La Thiass was born.”
Lo’s early years were not spent in Senegal, but in Burkina Faso. His father was a jeweller and had a large house where anyone could go to stay, as if in keeping with Burkina Faso’s status as the crossroads of West Africa. “I could say that’s been my musical schooling,” he says, remembering how travellers of all nationalities would arrive at the house one day and leave the next, often leaving behind their musical imprint. By the time Lo was singing with the local band, Volta Jazz, he was playing the guitar and singing everything from the traditional Guinean Manding songs to spicy Congolese rumba riffs.
“That’s what makes the difference between my music and others’. There are excellent guitarists who play 10 000 times better than me in Senegal, but they don’t have the same way of playing it.” Lo’s guitar style is based on chopping heavy-handed chords, which can feel at odds with the delicate flamenco-like riffs that sometimes emerge. When he performs his weekly sets in Dakar he plays the drums — his guitarist Baye Diop is one of the best young guitarists on the scene — but has been known to take Diop’s guitar for one or two songs, at times emptying the room. Not all Lo fans — and in Senegal he has a lot nowadays — find his guitar-playing an enjoyable experience.
Jamm had a difficult gestation — a full-band version of the album was scrapped, after both Lo and his producer Nick Gold felt it lacked the spirit and immediacy of Lo’s demos. “Nick kept the demo,” Lo says. “We took some of the voices and guitar that we liked and pieced them together, kept the originals and chucked the rest in the bin. Omar Sow [one of Senegal’s finest guitarists] was taken out, the tama drum was taken out, even my drum kit was taken out! And then I saw that the acoustic version was better,” he says, “more like Ne La Thiass.”
Rich with nostalgia
While this album is rich with nostalgia — there are odes to some of the great singers who have made an impact on Lo’s work, such as the Gambian Laba Sosseh and the Cuban son singer Abelardo Barroso — the songs are also infused with the spirituality that made Ne La Thiass a hit and made Lo a legend at home. His exuberant patchwork outfits, his heavy leather and wood necklaces and his long dreadlocks are all part of his life as a Baye Fall, a popular Islamic religious sect whose members believe in hard work and song as a form of prayer.
Dieuf Dieul, a praise song to one of his spiritual guides, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba — who died in 1927 — returns to Lo’s spiritual roots, with a soaring voice that takes phrases from the Koran overlaid with rough and funky Wolof rhythms. They are the same beats and rhythms that regularly fill the Dakar night air as Baye Fall groups gather and sing their love of their leader, often falling into a trance. Lo sings as though he was in one of those prayer vigils — deliciously mellow.
“When I sing about my spiritual guide, I feel good,” he says smiling hazily, taking the image of his spiritual leader hanging around his neck and holding it tenderly. “I feel much more internal peace, which is really important. Yes,” he nods to himself, “it’s more important than all the gold in the world.” — Guardian News & Media 2010
Ramm will be released on Sheer Sound on August 30