BAABA MAAL APPEARED ON BIG Brother last year. If you missed this, it's probably because it was Big Brother South Africa, not shown here but broadcast in 30 countries, with housemates from all over Africa.
The Senegalese singer was invited to join the house's final six contestants to talk about education, health, women's rights, HIV and Aids, as spokesperson for Africa's Millennium Horizon Objectives for 2015.
Needless to say, Big Brother South Afri
ca has a rather different production agenda to Big Brother UK. Maal says he enjoyed himself; he knew earnestness wouldn't inspire change, so instead he spoke positively and persuasively about love and respect, of making "Africa one of the best places in the world".
In Africa Baaba Maal is more than just a musician. He is a communicator, statesman and, for many, even a prophet. He is currently a youth emissary for the UN, fluent in both French and English. He has performed at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies in Norway. Ultimately, though, he maintains that he is here to make music. "We see things like artists," he says of his profession. "We are close to people but we are not politicians. We see the world something like a painting: hard, strong, sometimes very beautiful and that is what we sing."
A story from 2001 sums this up well. That year, a celebration concert was held in Nelson Mandela's honour in London's Trafalgar Square, and Mandela met musicians taking part, including REM and The Corrs. He spoke to them about how musicians, able to lift people's spirits and morale, could reach many more people than politicians. He then asked the artists surrounding him for a song. It was Baaba Maal who broke the embarrassed silence that followed. With his arms around the shoulders of two children, this small, slender figure, with short, spiky dreads framing his high-cheek-boned, sculpted face, sang an extraordinary praise song. Anyone who has experienced his gloriously flinty voice knows how it brings you out in goosebumps, hitting home like a flying spear, piercing your psyche with its integrity.
Maal laughs when he remembers that moment. "I'm used to singing just like that," he says. "My father was a muezzin, calling worshippers to prayer at the local mosque, and I am used to the idea of hearing a strong voice alone bringing people together." He will be bringing that voice to Scotland for a key concert at this year's Celtic Connections festival, along with Daandé Leñol (The Voice of the Race), the band he founded back in 1985. It is not his first time in Scotland, he reminds me. There was a notable gig at Edinburgh's Queen's Hall after which the friends on whose floor he had slept when he was a student took him out dancing until dawn at the old Bongo Club. Most significantly, in July 2005 he came to sing at the Make Poverty History concert, while the G8 meeting was taking place in Gleneagles.
At the Edinburgh press conference then he told a packed and sweaty tent crammed full of reporters that the week's events in Scotland and the concerts around the world were just the beginning. Later he publicly spoke out against the validity of Live8 presuming to speak for Africa without involving African musicians. Like other high-profile African musicians he refuses to see Europe and North America as the centre of the world and his continent as a charity case.
How does he feel now? "We have just been recording a song about Africans facing things like HIV; that is me with Angelique Kidjo, Youssou N'Dour, Salif Keita, Cheb Mami and others," he says. "We don't get the amount of media support Bono and Geldof do, but we are singing direct to the African people. But Geldof and Bono did real good getting the politicians to make those promises. Now we have to make that happen."
To see Maal on stage is to experience a celebration of song and dance that makes fireworks redundant. His music is irresistible, whether rooted in joyful yela dance – imbued with pre-reggae rhythms to which he and his dancers cavort high in the air as if powered by springs – or in pared-down sonorous praise songs, accompanied only by acoustic guitar. Usually he sings in the Fulani language of his Pulaar people, a repertoire of gorgeous love songs as well as pieces about important issues affecting them. In effect, though, there are two sides to his music, which he has worked hard over the years to integrate. There's the African side, with which he blew everyone away in front of Mandela: acoustic, heroic, splendid, traditional, often rooted in dance powered by polyrhythmic talking drums. And there's the western one – remixed, hip, postmodern and full of soul, jazz, blues, R&B and Cuban influences. Both are distinguished by his sonorous, high, tenor voice. At 55 he is considered one of African music's biggest stars, renowned for a back catalogue of albums that balance respect for tradition with hunger for innovation. He is known for concerts of riotous colour, energy and sound; Damon Albarn, Michael Stipe and Brian Eno are all fans, as was the late John Peel, who likened hearing his disc Djam Leeli to hearing Muddy Waters for the first time. In short, Maal has the respect of leftfield music-lovers and a laid-back, almost mischievous charisma that makes him both popular and cool.
A constant presence at Maal's side is blind guitarist Mansour Seck. "Mansour and I are the same age and we've known each other since we were five," he says. "Our friendship began with our two families even before we were born. Mansour's father was my father's griot (a hereditary praise singer, custodian of personal and local history) and they were great friends. We grew up together and we've always played music together. His mother died early so my mother became in a way his mother. It is because of this that Mansour's family accepted me and let me into their world, introducing me to the stories and secrets of griot songs even though I wasn't a griot myself. The griots are our libraries. In Senegal our traditions are oral, they are kept in people's memories; they are not written down. Mansour gave me everything – he is the spirituality in my music. He never lets me go too far from the path of African music."
Maal and Seck both grew up in Podor, Senegal's northern cultural crossroads, where nomadic groups from the Sahara and Southern Africa mingle. In their teens their musical curiosity saw them travel their country's backroads, from village to village. Over time they visited Mali, Mauritania, Guinea, Gambia, travelling as far as Ivory Coast. "Sometimes we took a bus, sometimes we walked, carrying our baggage," he recalls. "We'd stay in places a couple of days, we'd play in the evening and then next day meet the village elders and they would tell us the history of the village. Those years were very important in my life."
Although his parents wanted him to study law, Maal persuaded them to let him take a degree at Dakar's Music Conservatoire. When he graduated he went to the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. "Through the conservatoire I realised that the same norms that are used in European music are used in Senegalese music also," he says. "I realised that the griot families are music schools, they are conservatories also. They take a theme, they sing it, there's a beginning, an end, there are variations, reprises, changes in harmony and rhythm at precise moments. It's a music created to convey a very well-defined message with a specific style for whatever instrument is being played, a specific scale and rhythms that convey the evolution of the events being described, all precisely calculated. It is full of its own wisdom. That is the essence, charm and power of traditional music.
"I am coming to Glasgow with both sides of my band, with lots of tradition, because that is what links to Celtic music. Mansour and I have worked with Irish musicians Davy Spillane and D"nal Lunny and we find much in common between musical elements like melody, as well as attitudes and ways of life in Senegal, Ireland and Scotland. At home we all sit round and exchange music every night – that is the spirit of sharing we will bring with us."
• Baaba Maal plays Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on 21 January, as part of Celtic Connections.
