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Music

Stream Adama Yalomba 'Waati Sera,' a Beautiful Record Calling for Peace and Unity

The Bamako-based renaissance man has always jumped from Afro-pop to dub to dance music like each genre was his birthright.

Adama Yalomba has been an on the verge of greater fame Malian musician since his performance in the immortal Desert In The Festival in Timbuktu in 2003 and hopefully this will be his year. The Bamako-based renaissance man, coming from a long musical tradition (his father was master of the traditional harp, the n’dan) but with both feet firmly planted in the contemporary Mali music scene, has always jumped from Afro-pop to dub to dance music like each genre was his birthright. His new album, Waati Sera, is no different. Yalomba has a voracious appetite for whatever vibe suits his fancy, be it the most traditional Malian or American R&B and rock, but he never once descends into dilettantisms.

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Yalomba got a bit of shine last year, singing on the phenomenal Bassekou Kouyate album, Ba Power, which was nominated for a Grammy and got high praise from our guy, Robert Christgau. Now he’s going from strength to strength with his solo outing. Produced by Paul Chandler, Waati Sera services as a potent showcase of just what Adama Yalomba is capable of. Over 11 tracks, Yalomba sings songs of redemption and peace that, through pure body music and more meditative slow burners, range from an artist’s love for those who shaped him to the traumatized state of 2016 Mali. Mali has, for the last few years, gone through multiple levels of hell. The uprising in the North and the continued violence that has spread into Bamako (the terrorist attack on the hotel Raddison Blu was overshadowed, for the usual reasons, by the Paris attacks days earlier) has made Mali itself the topic of many of the country’s musicians. Waati Sera is no outlier in that regard, song after song calling for peace and unity and some semblance of tolerance from all sides. It’s not a dogmatic political album by any means but its politics; just the politics of “enough please” are unavoidable. The record works as both spiritual head music and an extended unifying party jam in hard times.

Noisey is delighted to stream the record in advance of its US release on February 16 through Studio Mali Recordings.