With Salif Keïta and Amadou & Mariam, le Cabaret sauvage, in Paris, at the Malian hour

2023-07-10 16:00:08
Salif Keïta, at the Cabaret Sauvage, in Paris, July 7, 2023. BRUNO ARESSI

Friday, July 7, 8:15 p.m., imperial, dressed in a saffron-colored coat enhanced with a sparkling breastplate, Salif Keïta takes the stage at the Cabaret Sauvage, an elegant Parisian performance venue (floor, benches, red velvet and colored stained glass windows). A standing ovation greets him. A thousand chests shout to salute the magnificent singer. After a disappointing concert given in Paris in 2018 (Jazz at La Villette), he proves today that at almost 74 years old (August 25), his voice, his aura still radiate as much. The audience is divided between the singer’s feverish compatriots, who came in large numbers – for each title, they seize the words before him from the first bars – and connoisseurs or amateurs of African sounds.

Read the portrait (in 2017): Article reserved for our subscribers Le Cabaret sauvage, twenty years of musical eclecticism

This concert will be the only date in France of the European tour he is currently doing. He has no new album to defend. The last published, another white (Naïve), whose title echoes the cause of albinos, for which the singer, who himself has albinism, has created a foundation, dates back to 2018. He then announced that it would be the last, wanting to raise a little foot. “At my age, it’s legitimate, the weight of the years is there”, explains the singer in his dressing room. While revealing the forthcoming release of an acoustic album, some of which were taken recently in Japan during the Kyotophonie festival, a musical extension of the Japanese photography festival.

Not to mention the other dreams that agitate him: recording with flamenco artists, or bolero with the Cuban Omara Portuondo. In short, the man has not said his last word. On stage, little talkative, he connects the pieces, muscular by a group in which cross traditional instruments (kora, kamelé n’goni, calabash), guitar and bass, plus two singers. All remarkably efficient. The repertoire recounts the memories of a long career. Of Mama (present on the album Papain 1999) to Lerou Lerou or Watch it (another white, 2018), via Yamore (which he sang in duet with Cesaria Evora on Moffou in 2002). The end, Madan, another title of this album with bare arrangements, becomes a powerful call to let off steam. The stage is overrun. Salif Keïta disappears.

sentimental songs

The next day, Saturday July 8, it’s the same effervescence in the room and the same pleasure to play and sing on stage, with the most famous couple of Mali: Amadou and Mariam. Both blind, they also have a long career behind them. Amadou Bagayoko was a guitarist in the 1970s in the group Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako (in which Salif Keïta sang), before forming a duet in the early 1980s with Mariam Doumbia, whom he met at the Institute for young blind people of the Malian capital.

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