MC Solaar, France’s leading and most widely embraced rapper, gained traction in the United States among listeners drawn to acid jazz and jazz-rap, if less so inside the wider hip-hop audience, after contributing to Guru’s widely praised Jazzmatazz project. His supple phrasing offsets his limited English, while the beats supplied for his own records by DJ Jimmy Jay and Boom Bass of La Funk Mob exceed those of most contemporaries in the field.
Born Claude M'Barali in Senegal, he later settled in Paris and issued his first single, “Bouge de La,” in 1990. Two subsequent tracks became domestic successes, which led to the release of his debut album, Qui Seme le Vent Recolte le Tempo, in 1991. American awareness grew through a pair of compilations—Tommy Boy’s Planet Rap and Island’s The Rebirth of Cool—after which he supplied “Le Bien, Le Mal” for the 1993 Jazzmatazz LP. His second album, Prose Combat, reached the U.S. market via Cohiba in 1994. Paradisiaque followed in 1997, a self-titled set appeared the next year, and La Tour de la Question arrived in 1999.
He continued shaping his sound through the new decade, issuing the sixth album Cinquiéme As to strong critical notice in 2001. Mach 6 surfaced for European audiences in 2003 and reached America three years later. Solaar moved operations to New York in 2007, where he captured some of his most exploratory material for Chapitre 7, an eclectic set that incorporated distorted guitar riffs and a samba-influenced dance beat alongside his characteristically relaxed delivery. The compilation Magnum 567 appeared in 2010, gathering tracks from his fifth, sixth, and seventh albums. In 2017 he returned with the full-length Géopoétique, which included the single “Sonotone.”
