Born in Mali at Bamako, and raised by her maternal grandmother in the purest Bambara tradition, Mamani Keita was barely twenty when she landed in France at the turn of the Nineties, but she already had quite a reputation as someone actively involved with the Malian artistic scene, thanks to her work with the theatre troupe called 'Oulofobougou' and with the Malian National Orchestra, 'Badema'). Immediately adopted by the Parisian African community, she quickly drew people's attention when she joined Salif Keita's vocalists, and took part in numerous innovative, atypical projects (those of Jeffrey Smith, Hank Jones and Cheikh Tidiane Seck) that were laying down bridges between African music and jazz. In London, invited to join the Tama group by English guitarist Sam Mills and Tom Diakité from Mali, she participated in the recording of « Espace », released on Peter Gabriel's Realworld label. In 2005 she recorded four brand-new songs for the Manu Dibango-produced original soundtrack album for the film « Kirikou et les bêtes sauvages ».
Undeniably, however, it was the World-Electro experiment Electro Bamako, a concept-album (2002) in collaboration with French musician Marc Minelli, which earned her international recognition from both critics and public alike. Today it seems obvious that Mamani Keita, in integrating her inimitable voice within hybrid contexts that mingled jazz rhythms with electronic sound, opened up new perspectives, new horizons for contemporary African music without ever watering down the tradition.
This new record entitled Yelema (the Bambara word for "change") drives this fusion adventure further forward, but this time with a total change in perspective. Clearly a development of Electro Bamako, it stands apart in that it no longer seeks to project Africa into the modern world, but looks to reveal the debt which this modernity, both crossbreed and cosmopolitan, owes to Africa.
We owe this new vision, iconoclastic and at the same time showing deep respect for African music, essentially to Nicolas Repac, who conceived and produced Yelema. This composer, multi-instrumentalist (he's an excellent guitarist), and refined arranger who was for many years an associate of Arthur H (they made no fewer than 4 albums together), is a tireless sound-seeker, someone who's become a master in manipulating machines of all kinds; he drew attention to himself in 2004 when No Format! released a record of his that was as difficult to categorize as it was brimming with joy: Swing Swing, an album of astonishingly poetic sensual ramblings that brought the essential virtues of swing right up to date by introducing them at first-hand to the all-electro era. A conceiver of made-to-measure climates (for Michel Portal, notably), but also an unclassifiable singer-songwriter cultivating a secret garden all his own filled with lyricism and tender melancholy, yet readily surrealist, Nicolas Repac was the ideal partner Mamani Keita had been waiting for so that she could give vent to the most intimate aspects of her universe.
Yelema is the fruit of their telepathic collaboration, and it has the audacity to telescope all kinds of styles, all kinds of cultural hybridization, without ever ceasing, not even for the slightest instant, to humbly belong to the thousand-year-old gestures of the most authentic African music.
