Baaba’s new single Yerimayo Celebration is available to stream everywhere now. Yerimayo Celebration is an introduction to a collection of songs that sees Baaba calling for people to both honour tradition and deal with new technology as they face up to a rapidly changing, challenging world. Featuring regular collaborators including Cheikh Ndoye on bass ngoni and Momadou Sarr on percussion, it is a glorious, positive percussion-heavy celebration of music and how in troubled times it can open the mind and hearts and fight cynicism and chaos. The song celebrates the culture of the fisherman and their communities. The fishermen are the care takers of the waters and also the connection between the people and the spirit of the water.
Listen
Listen to the new single, ‘Yerimayo Celebration’
Baaba Maal’s daring and dazzling new album, ‘Being’, will be released on March 31st, 2023.
The record is a powerful continuation of his pioneering, transcendent work over the last forty years, blending the ancient and the modern, the acoustic and the electronic. Extending his productive partnership with producer and multi-instrumentalist Johan Karlberg (Self Esteem, The Very Best, Santigold), his first album since 2016’s The Traveller, Being was recorded in Brooklyn, London and Senegal. On ‘Being’, there are seven songs shimmering in exquisitely clashing equilibrium between dirty thorny desert blues and intangible electro-spirituals, between uplifting chants and trance-like freak outs. They are about generational debts and conflicts, rivers, watching people, seeing new generations of Africans make themselves felt, the impact of technology, remembering dreams, the magic of place, the strangeness of time, the feeling of home, the stars above, and the rhythms inside and out.
Tracklist:
- Yerimayo Celebration
- Freak Out Ft. The Very Best
- Ndungu Ruumi
- Agreement
- Boboyillo Ft. Rougi
- Mbeda Wella Ft. Paco Lenol
- Casamance Nights
“Each song of this album has its own personality. A song is like a person. It has a life, name, a character, and it has a position in life. I think that’s what makes this album so powerful – it is totally about now and where I am now, the dreams I have of the past and the future.”
Baaba Maal
On May 30th, 2023, Baaba and his band will also be performing at The Barbican in London, his first appearance at the venue in 20 years.
General ticket sale is live now: TICKETS