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| Pitchfork. |
 Amadou & Mariam spent much of the last month opening for Coldplay. They're friends with Damon Albarn (Blur, Gorillaz) and Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. They live a jetset life traveling between Africa, Europe, and North America to play shows and record. They've made a record with global megastar Manu Chao, and back home in Mali, their son is a successful rapper. By any standard, they've had one heck of a run since 2005's excellent Dimanche à Bamako established them as major world music stars. And they deserved all of it, not only because their music was great, but because they spent nearly three decades earning it. Mariam Doumbia and Amadou Bagayoko met at the Institute for the Young Blind in Bamako in the 1970s and have made music together ever since, first traveling abroad to record in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in the early 90s.I've heard those early recordings, and they're quite spare, just the two voices and Amadou's mellifluous guitar playing. Even so, the sound they established then is still very much apparent in the maximalist, pan-global pop records they've made recently. They began adding a band in the mid-90s, finally traveling to Europe late in the decade to record. It's this transitional phase, where the duo began to try on a dizzying array of styles and incorporate a broad range of instrumentation, that's covered on The Magic Couple, a sharp retrospective that shows clearly that they didn't arrive at Dimanche à Bamako and Welcome to Mali by accident. The set draws from three albums, Sou Ni Tile, Tje Ni Mousso, and Wati, recorded from 1997-2001 and released in 1999, 2000, and 2003, respectively. (It has a very different tracklisting from Je Pense à Toi, another A&M best-of released several years ago that covers roughly the same period.) The tracks of the three LPs are jumbled together in favor of flow, and the period of recording covered here is so distinct and unified that the lack of chronological tracking isn't really a big deal. Wati is only represented by two tracks, but they're clear arrows pointing to their watershed. "Sarama (La Charmante)" is generously splattered with tumbling jazz piano, an extremely unusual texture for Malian music, while "Poulo (Les Peuls)", a song about an ethnic group from the Sahel region more widely known as the Fulani, has a hyperspace beat that mixes kit drumming, slashing guitar, and traditional flute and stirs. Flute also drives the hard funk of Tje Ni Mousso's "Beki Miri", a song that finds Amadou leaning on his wah pedal as he and Mariam sing in unison....full text |
| Independent |
| It was their collaboration with Manu Chao on 2005's Dimanche à Bamako that propelled Amadou & Mariam to star status outside the Francophone African diaspora. But by that time they had already released three albums recorded outside Africa, the highlights of which are collected on this splendid compilation. They show the duo to have developed their alliance well beyond their native Malian roots since first fusing musical destinies at Bamako's Institute for the Young Blind, where Amadou served as musical director and first encountered Mariam's enchanting voice. Even on 1997's Sou Ni Tile, their itchy African pop was being augmented and blended with the rhapsodic Indian violin of Sameh Catalan for "Je Pense à Toi", flowing like silk over the hand-drum pulse and Amadou's guitar fills; and by 1999's Tje Ni Mousso, they were incorporating Colombian trombonist Andres Viafara on "Djagneba", and Valentin Clastrier's hurdy-gurdy on "C'est Comme Ça". But it's in the gentle collusion of their voices that the duo's appeal resides, both in the call-and-response chant of a song like Amadou's "Combattants" or the lyrical grace of Mariam's "Sarama", where Amadou layers tendrils of cyclical guitar lines around her voice like rose briars around her heart. A magical couple indeed....full text |
| Allaboutjazz |
| For most people outside Mali, and maybe France, Amadou & Mariam came out of nowhere in 2005 with Dimanche a Bamako (Nonesuch). But the duo had released three other, Paris-recorded CDs before their Manu Chao-produced breakthrough, which were themselves preceded by a series of cassette-only albums recorded in Cote d'Ivoire. The excellent anthology The Magic Couple cherry picks 76 minutes of beaten gold from the three earlier discs—Sou Ni Tile (Tinder, 1999), recorded in 1997, Tje Ni Mousso (Circular Moves, 2000), recorded in 1999, and Wati (Circular Moves, 2003), recorded 2001. Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia aren't the first husband and wife team to break out of Mali—in the 1980s singer and guitarist Ousmane Sacko and singer Yakare Diabate toured Europe and released an enchanting live album, La Nuit Des Griots (Ocora, 1987)—but they are the first Malian artists so successfully to fuse local roots music with a European pop sensibility. They were already looking beyond their birth culture in 1997, as four tracks from Sou Ni Tile reveal. "Je Pense A Toi" (check the YouTube clip below) foregrounds the Middle Eastern-styled violin of Sameh Catalan, "Combattants" and "A Chacun Son Probleme" feature harmonica player Loic Landois, and "C'est La Vie" includes the exuberant, Latin American-flavored trumpet of Barbaro Teunter. Weave into the mix Amadou's spangly electric guitar and the supple rhythm team of bassist Shihab M'Ghezzi Bekhouche and drummer Stephane San Juan, and the template for Dimanche a Bamako is already being drawn....full text |
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