Among the glittering array of contemporary Senegalese musicians, Amadou Binta Konté is a relatively undiscovered gem. His low profile has a lot to do with his character and his location on the island of Morfil on the Senegalese river in the extreme north of the country.
The region is known colloquially as Fouta Toro, the Pulaar-speaking area straddling the Senegal/Mauritania border. Konté leads a simple life. The idyll of his surroundings infiltrates his music. There would appear to be peace in this valley. Remoteness causes him no worry. He has never travelled in a car or carriages.
The music he makes evokes a kind of calm that is in stark contrast to the accelerated urban energy of Dakar. Unusually for a musician of his stature in this part of Africa, he is not a griot (bard) but a fisherman.
Charmingly, he first heard his instrument, the hoddu, a kind of banjo with braided fishing line for strings, from a passing canoe. Goat or sheepskin is stretched over the resonator. I imagine it travels sweetly over water. It did in this case.
The sound stirred something within him. He heard it again when the canoe was making its return journey.
Next day he went into the forest, found some wood and assembled his first hoddu. The one he plays so gracefully on the album Waande Kadde was made by his own hand.
Most of his days are spent on the water. His life is centred around the small family compound on the riverbank, and it was here that this album was recorded in his small mud house. The simplicity of the setting is palpable in the music. Konté’s children are audible, clapping, snapping and stomping along.
The gorgeous echoing resonance of Konté's playing on Waande Kadde is tempered by the sound of Tidiane Thiam's guitar, which toes a steady line in its stead. The music feels like something of an ode to the sleepy landscape. It evokes a dreamy calm that isn't eerie but comforting; music sent directly from the earthen floor of a mud house to the sky and stars of a shimmering African sky above. I'm in. Beam me up.
