Mbalax

What it is

Youssou N'Dour was sixteen when he joined the Star Band at the Miami club in Dakar, and the argument going on in that room in the mid seventies was whether a Senegalese band had to keep playing Cuban repertoire. The answer worked out over the next decade was to bring the sabar in. Sabar is a family of drums played with one thin stick and one bare hand at ceremonies across Wolof Senegal, with a repertoire of composed phrases called bakks, and putting a sabar ensemble on stage beside a guitar band produced something that resembles nothing else in this file. The name is the Wolof word for the accompaniment part, the figure the supporting drums hold while a lead drummer plays over the top, and it ended up naming the whole music.

What it sounds like

Very busy in the upper mids and almost empty underneath. The sabar drums are struck with a thin stick and cut hard, so a record is full of short loud high transients with no sustain at all. A tama, the small talking drum held under the arm and squeezed, bends its pitch on every stroke and answers the kit. The trap kit sounds small next to them and is mixed that way. Guitars pick clean lines rather than strumming, the bass moves constantly, and horns arrive in short blocks. Vocals are in Wolof, sung near the top of the range with a great deal of ornament. Dakar cassette studio recordings are bright and compressed; the international records are cleaner and lose some of the stick attack.

Key elements

• The sabar accompanimentEight strokes in bar one and not one of them on a beat, alternating a stick crack above 90 with a hand tone under 80. The whole rhythm hangs off this lane.
• The tamaA talking drum with a pitch bend on every stroke, four notes in bar one and six in bar two. It is a melodic instrument that happens to be made of skin and wood.
• A kick that stays out of the wayBeat 1, the e of 2, beat 3 and the and of 4, mixed low. The sabar needs the transient room more than the floor needs the weight.
• Backbeat with ghostsSnare on 2 and 4 with a ghost on the a of 2 and a soft hit on the and of 4. It is holding a place rather than driving anything.
• BakksComposed sabar phrases a band drops in as breaks, everything stopping to play a written rhythm in unison. There is no lane for that here and no honest way to fake it with a loop.

How to get them

• Program the sabar firstWrite the accompaniment figure before the kit and keep every stroke off the beats. The kit is arranged around the sabar in this music, and doing it the other way round gives you a pop record with drums on it.
• Stick and handPlayers use a thin stick in one hand and the bare other, so the lane needs two samples with a forty velocity gap between them. One sample at one level sounds like a machine within a bar.
• TamaA talking drum with a real pitch bend on each stroke. If all you have is a conga sample, automate the pitch up by a whole tone into every hit, because the placement alone will not carry it.
• Keep the kick quietFour hits in bar one, mixed about six decibels below where a club record would put them. The low end is not what anybody is dancing to here.
• Leave room for a bakkWrite a two bar sabar phrase, then arrange a point where everything stops and plays it in unison. That break is how these records move between sections.
• Bright and dryHigh-pass the percussion at 200Hz and keep reverb off it. Sabar recorded wet loses the stick attack, and the attack is what carries the rhythm.

Reference points

Youssou N'Dour and the Super Etoile de Dakar, Etoile de Dakar, Thione Seck, Omar Pene and Super Diamono, Baaba Maal, Viviane Chidid, and the sabar drumming families the rhythms belong to. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.