Mariage

The Wau Wau Collectif was formed by Karl-Jonas Winqvist from Sweden with an eclectic group of 20 Senegalese contributors after he spent several weeks in West Africa in 2018. The ensemble's debut album Yaral Sa Doom (Educate the Young) earned a four-star review in Songlines and the follow-up, based upon the same 2018 sessions, is even more varied than its predecessor.

Reworking and overdubbing the foundational rhythms from those original recordings in much the same way Damon Albarn did with his groundbreaking Mali Music (2002), rippling koras combine with soaring saxophones and Senegalese children's songs with thumping hip-hop beats while the tones of flute master Ousmane Ba, who has died since the original recordings, dance gloriously over the balafón-and-horns jam of ‘Nécessaire’ and ‘Mariage Forcé’. Winqvist has assembled an impressive array of vocalists, too, ranging from the rapper Babacar ‘Babadi’ Diol, who growls distinctively on the synth-heavy ‘Baye Kate’, to the similarly deep but more conventional singing of Arouna Kane, heard on ‘Le Repaire Spirituel’, an extraordinary mix of doo-wop and griot grooves, and on the lovely acoustic closer ‘Liguey Len’.