Youssou Ndour is a cornerstone of the music of Senegal and the art of (Griot) storytelling, which has become one of his trademarks. He will perform at VeszprémFest on 19 July.
Born in Dakar in 1959, N'Dour is a singer endowed with remarkable range and poise, and, as a composer, bandleader, and producer, with a prodigious musical intelligence. The New York Times has described his voice as “an arresting tenor, deployed with prophetic authority,” one that “soars heavenward with passion and then wafts tenderly toward earth.”
As a craftsman of an inimitable brand of ensemble music, N'Dour absorbs the entire diversity of the Senegalese musical spectrum in his work, often filtering his country’s musical heritage through a modernist lens of genre-defying rock or pop music from outside Senegalese culture.
Named “African Artist of the Century” by the English publication fRoots at the threshold of the year 2000, and to the “TIME 100” in 2007, TIME magazine’s annual list of “the hundred men and women whose power, talent, or moral example is transforming the world," N'Dour has made mbalax famous throughout the world during nearly 30 years of recording and touring outside of Senegal with his band, the Super Étoile.
