Gig: Baaba Maal

Baaba Maal

Koerner Hall. Tuesday, April 6, 2010.

Out to the lovely new-ish Koerner Hall at the Royal Conservatory of Music for a big-ticket show with an international star. Baaba Maal, "The Nightingale of Senegal" has been a major star since the late '80's, known for his pure voice and musical adventurism that documents the encounters of his own traditional music with new sounds from around the world. I was, admittedly, not a huge follower, but I was aware that a show like this is a bit of a special event. A good crowd on hand, quite mixed in every way you could imagine, though skewing older and slightly more affluent.

No opener for this one, and the show started with Maal alone, sitting in the centre of the stage, just his guitar and that sweet voice rising to the room's undulating rafters. Midway through he was joined by his mentor, griot Mansour Seck, who would add his voice throughout the evening. At song's end he laid it out: "The concert today is going to be very simple at the beginning... God knows what's going to happen at the end."

After a second song that slowly unfolded with a couple more musicians taking the stage it was twenty minutes in, and the full band emerged. And now the contemplative early mood was supplanted by the rhythm, with bouncy bass and percussion lending a groove. The full band would run to eight behind the leader, including keyb, percussion and ngoni. I don't have a strong enough grounding in the discography to know all the songs, but they were uniformly good stuff. I did pick out the title track from his recent release Television, which was recorded in collaboration with Brazilian Girls, creating a subtly club-friendly sound on the album. Here, though, the song fit organically into the set.

The members of the band were all musically beyond reproach and mostly tended to their instruments with unshowy professionalism. The exception was Massamba Diop, playing the talking drum. He was a gleeful ham, and the most overtly theatrical of the players, adding a lively spark that picked up as the show went on.

The sound in the refined concert hall was surprisingly loud — I was glad to have had my earplugs with me. One would guess that the house techs have a bit less experience with rock-style amplification, and the sound was fine enough — possibly a bit muddled in the low-end when the music was at its loudest, but generally clear throughout, and without any hitches from dealing with a large ensemble.

I did find that as the show went on, the disjunction between the recital-worthy surroundings and the music's groove imperative became more pronounced. On the upper balcony where I was sitting, some people with seats in the long rows perpendicular to the stage stood up pretty early on to dance, but it took folks on the floor a bit longer to overcome the propriety of the venue. During one extended instrumental passage more than an hour in, a guy clambered up onto the stage to praise the singer by sticking a banknote to his forehead, and as he hopped off afterward security seemed unsure if they should bounce the guy or not. Whether or not they were briefed to expect this kind of looseness at an African music show would soon be moot, however.

In the groovy heart of the show the band played three songs in a row that each stretched to the ten-twelve minute mark, one of which was an extended samba jam. And then the finale after that was a fifteen-minute monster — and by this time, bowing to the inevitable, Maal called the crowd up to their feet. Soon enough there was a sizable crowd pressed up against the stage, as a couple children were brought up to dance. And then, the crowd was on the stage, a couple dozen people jumping up to dance along. Quite a spectacle.

And then back out for one more, "International" (also from the new album, and revealing some of its western dancefloor underpinnings, though here tripled in length and with extra percussion) to close out the night. The "venue effect" left me with some ambiguous feelings — if I'd been on my feet for the whole two-hours-plus, I'd have surely felt exhausted, but the bulk of the show was the sort of music that makes more sense when you are up and moving, even if only a little bit. But it was certainly a worthy experience and the crowd went home looking pretty happy with what they saw.