Wasis Diop

Paris-based guitarist Wasis Diop fuses the traditional sounds of Senegal with contemporary world music influences to shape his smooth-edged global fusion. His track “African Dream” reached the Top 40 in England, and the soundtrack he created for his brother Djibril Diop Mambety’s film Hyenes enjoyed international success. USA Today highlighted Diop’s “sensual rhythms, gorgeous harmonies, and mystical melodies,” while the Paris-based magazine Le Matin noted that Diop “strikes a balance between the songs of a hallucinating Muslim priest calling his flock and the ageless gentle storyteller of the Savannah.” Exclaim magazine observed, “Diop’s voice is key in the framework of the songs; deep, dark and delicious.” After emigrating to Paris in the late ’80s, Diop turned away from university engineering studies to tour and record with the jazz band West African Cosmos. At the encouragement of the band’s singer he traveled to Jamaica in 1989, where influential record producer Lee “Scratch” Perry befriended him and featured him on guitar for several of Perry’s dub singles. Back in Paris in 1990, Diop began collaborating with Moroccan-rooted vocalist Amina Annabi. The next year the song he wrote for her, “C’est le Dernier Qui A Raison (It Is the Last One Who Speaks Who Is Right),” took first place in the Eurovision Song Contest. Shortly thereafter he met Japanese saxophonist Tasuaki Shimizu and spent the following two years recording and touring Japan as a member of Shimizu’s band. Diop initiated his solo career with the Hyenes soundtrack and rapidly earned international acclaim, a trajectory sustained by his highly eclectic solo albums No Sant, issued in 1995, and Toxu, issued in 1998.