Hearing her recent album and the first couple of songs at the Dome, you wouldn’t have been prepared for the sustained and infectious energy that quickly followed Fatoumata Diawara’s performance on Tuesday night.
If you like Amadou & Mariam or Youssou N’Dour, you would have felt at home. Here the band were a little more sparse but absolutely firm and, with her pure and scarily fierce voice soaring and chanting, Fatoumata, from Mali, was totally in charge as they delivered the familiar west-African guitar-driven sound.
The most successful songs were Clandestin, from her album Fatou, which was haunting yet light, and Sowa and Bakonoba, which entranced with melodious joyfulness and rhythmic vitality in abundance. That vitality was maintained with a consistent, exciting pace and precision for the rest of the set, and with Fatoumata’s dancing, confidence and warmth, the audience was clearly won over.
Baloji, originally from the Congo but raised in Belgium, gave us a more eclectic and constantly shifting but strangely satisfactory blend of Afro-beat, Cuban, jazz funk and a theatrical kind of rap, mostly in French.
From the cool funk of the electric piano with slinky backing vocals through the gospel Hammond to some sophisticated and solid riffing in the later numbers, the band easily matched Baloji’s energy levels.
The final songs – involving a loud-hailer, rapping while lying on the floor with much exaggerated pelvic thrusting and the guitarist playing with his instrument behind his head – were a fun climax to an exhaustingly exuberant set.
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