Biography
Since joining Youssou N'Dour’s Super Etoile Band in 1979, Mamadou Mbaye, known professionally as Jimi Mbaye, has established himself among Senegal’s foremost guitarists. His style fuses indigenous Senegalese traditions with American pop and R&B, a synthesis frequently likened to the approaches of Jimi Hendrix and Robert Johnson. In 1997 he released the solo album Dakar Heart, enlisting fellow Super Etoile Band members and spotlighting his distinctive guitar technique—derived from the kora—alongside vocals delivered in Wolof, English, and French. Billboard hailed him as “a prodigious world talent,” while Rhythm labeled him “one of Senegal’s most exciting musicians.” Music has remained central to his life from childhood, when he played a homemade instrument constructed from discarded garbage cans and nylon fishing line on the streets of Dakar. By age twenty he had advanced to a Fender Stratocaster. Mbaye remains the rhythmic foundation of N’Dour’s ensemble; he co-wrote the 1994 single “Mame Bamba” and contributed to six additional N’Dour recordings. Increasingly the pair has appeared as a duo, opening for Brazilian guitarist Gilberto Gil at Paris’s Olympic Theater in 1998.
Albums
