Senegal’s Superstar Youssou N’Dour Brings Mbalax Music to Wisconsin Union Theater

Youssou N’Dour, the Senegalese master of mbalax music, will perform in the Wisconsin Union Theater on Thursday, December 6, at 8:00 pm as part of the Wisconsin Union Theater’s World Stage Series. Tickets are $18, $28 and $34 for the general public, $18, $26 and $32 for UW Faculty and Staff, Union Members, and WAA members, and $10 for UW-Madison students.

Call the box office at 608-262-2201 or buy online.

Mbalax is a blend of the Senegal's traditional griot percussion and praise-singing with Afro-Cuban arrangements, complex indigenous Senegalese dance rhythms, guitar and saxophone solos, talking-drum soliloquies and Sufi-inspired Muslim religious chant. It is at times nostalgic, restrained and stately, and at times celebratory, explosively syncopated and funky. Youssou N'Dour, it is said, is the performer who had more to do with shaping the genre than any other individual.
A singer, composer, bandleader and producer, N’Dour’s voice is an “arresting tenor, a supple weapon deployed with prophetic authority,” according to The New York Times.
Named "African Artist of the Century" by the English publication Folk Roots in 2000, N'Dour has made mbalax famous throughout the world during more than twenty years of recording and touring with his band, The Super Etoile. The Village Voice's Robert Christgau, dean of American rock critics, finds him “the one African moving inexorably toward the world-pop fusion everyone else theorizes about.“ Peter Gabriel, who recorded with N'Dour, has called him “one of the best alive”.
As a teenager, N'Dour sang in the parking lots of Dakar’s dance clubs, his distinctive voice eventually earning him a reputation as a prodigy and an occasional live amateur-hour slot on Senegalese National Radio. As early as age 12, N'Dour was also performing at neighborhood religious-ceremonial occasions in the poor Medina section of the city where he grew up. His mother was of griot origin and an occasional performer in those ceremonies.

The performance is sponsored by the Wisconsin Union Theater Committee and supported in part by a grant from the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin. Other sponsors include WORT-89.9 FM Community Radio, WSUM 92.1 and the Onion.