Guide Wommat Music Cd

Youssou N`dour - Guide Wommat

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Guide (Wommat)      Artist : Youssou N'Dour      List Price : $9.98 USD        ProductGroup: Music      Release Date : 1994-06-21      Studio : Sony      Label : Sony      Avg. Customer Rating : (8 reviews)

Reviews Customer Reviews for Guide Wommat      Good music, but not his or Senegal's best album.      Rating:      I enjoy this cd, but I don't love it. It's a pleasant listening experience, but there is no song on it that I would classify as among my all-time favorites. N'Dour has a wonderful voice, well worth getting to know, and the quality of the playing is excellent. However, I believe that most people from Western countries who would buy this album are intrigued by music from Africa and want to try something different. Therefore it is the very fact that this album sounds quite a bit like Western pop that bothers me. I wish that the, to me, exotic African elements were more to the fore, and the everyday pop elements were less evident. If you also are interested in this singer because you want to listen to something out of the ordinary, I would suggest you buy instead a cd by Cheikh Lo, who is also from Senegal. Lo's music is more obviously unusual, and yet very beautiful. One of N'Dour's less Westernized albums would also be more appropriate.     Customer Reviews for Guide Wommat Cd      Africa for Beginners      Rating:      I like African music, but I won't recommend every album to my friends. A musician like Franco is maybe too difficult to enjoy. This album by Youssou N'Dour is great music and has enough connections with our European ears (is that English?). Seven seconds is a all time high Editorial Reviews for Guide Wommat Audio Cd      Amazon.com      Youssou N'Dour, a superstar at home in Senegal and in most of Africa, possesses an astonishingly strong and supple high-tenor voice, and he writes tuneful, insightful songs about his fellow West Africans' transition from isolated rural villages to cosmopolitan big cities. The Guide (Wommat) includes several calculated enticements to lure an Anglo-American audience: a bilingual duet with hip-hop star Neneh Cherry on "Seven Seconds," a guest appearance by saxophonist Branford Marsalis on "Without a Smile," and a bilingual version of Bob Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom." The Marsalis and Dylan experiments work, while the Cherry one doesn't, but they're superfluous to the main focus of the album, which is N'Dour's shift from a bandleader to a singer-songwriter with a backing band. The infectious mbalax rhythms of Senegal are still there, but they're pushed down in the mix so the focus is on N'Dour's vocals. There are some missteps, like the simple-minded cheerleading of "Tourista" and "Love One Another," but for the most part N'Dour comes across as the Stevie Wonder of West Africa. --Geoffrey Himes