Etoile 2000 [extended]

• Volume 1: Absa Gueye [Sterns, 1993] A
• Volume 2: Thiapathioly [Sterns, 1994] ***
• Etoile 2000 [Dakar Sound, 1996] A-
• Volume 3: Lay Suma Lay [Sterns, 1996] A-
• The Rough Guide to Youssou N'Dour & Étoile de Dakar [World Music Network, 2002] A+
• Once Upon a Time in Senegal: The Birth of Mbalax [Sterns Africa, 2010] A

See Also:

• Etoile de Dakar
• Youssou N'Dour & Étoile de Dakar

Consumer Guide Reviews:

Etoile de Dakar: Volume 1: Absa Gueye [Sterns, 1993]
Supposedly, Youssou N'Dour has gone onto better things than these first recordings, cut in 1979 with the seminal band he formed two years earlier at age 18. And without doubt his music has grown more ambitious and more accomplished. But there's nothing youthfully naive or folkishly charming about mbalax at this stage of evolution. Counterbalancing clavé-inflected sway with hectic tama-drum interjections, making ample room for guitar and horns, it never shrinks from its own complexities or sinks under their weight. With five band members writing, many of the 10 tracks grab you at every turn. And unlike N'Dour's always admirable and usually enjoyable internationalist fusions, they never overreach. A

Etoile de Dakar: Volume 2: Thiapathioly [Sterns, 1994]
meaning of title: public property ("Dounya," "Thiapathioly") ***

Etoile 2000 [Dakar Sound, 1996]
Imagine a bunch of garage musicians whose main technical limitation is that they grew up too poor to own instruments. Two genius guitarists clashing, three drummers beating the hell out of each other, crazy sax man coming and going, and then, because this is a garage band only in theory, two singers who can outwail the average gospel strongman, never mind the average Iggyphile. That's this short-lived, hot-headed Senegalese crew, who undertook the literally garage-recorded "Boubou N'Gary," all unkempt echoplexed fuzzbox and excitable tama, to give their old boss Youssou N'Dour what for, and began hearing it on the radio--constantly--about two hours after they'd finished. None of the other five tracks is quite as intense or chaotic. But this will shut up anybody who believes Afropop is too slick and anybody who believes it's too primitive simultaneously. El Hadji Faye, we salute you. A-

Etoile de Dakar: Volume 3: Lay Suma Lay [Sterns, 1996]
On the final installment of their collected works, Youssou N'Dour's first band embellish their self-taught Afrocentric charanga with horn lines whose intricately percussive Islamic tune families recall no Latin record I've ever noticed. Cut into still gaudier ribbons by the hectoring tenor of the soon-departed El Hadji Faye, it's wilder and weirder than any mbalax or fusion the nonpareil vocalist has put his name on since. A-

Youssou N'Dour & Étoile de Dakar: The Rough Guide to Youssou N'Dour & Étoile de Dakar [World Music Network, 2002]
With Étoile's Stern's Africa CDs gone the way of all licensing deals, how can I say no? Maybe somewhere there was more exciting music circa 1980--punk L.A.? soukous Montreuil? hip-hop South Bronx? But don't bet on it. Exploding out of this one band and the mad rivalries it engendered, early mbalax is the grail, the very essence of musical conflict resolution not least because the groove can't quite resolve the conflict. Great singers jostle for space among spiky tamas. Horns and guitars augment and one-up each other. You never know what'll happen next. But everything they do gonna be funky. A+

Etoile de Dakar: Once Upon a Time in Senegal: The Birth of Mbalax [Sterns Africa, 2010]
"If I say this, you will think I'm crazy, but Étoile was like the Beatles," Finland-based guitarist Badou N'Diaye tells annotator-compiler Mark Hudson about Youssou N'Dour's first band, which Hudson believes belonged almost as much to El Hadji Faye's John Lennon as to N'Dour's McCartney. Those crude analogies are mine, not Hudson's, and they're vocal only, plus maybe McCartney/N'Dour's head for business. But Beatles is right: As Hudson puts it, these 23 1979-1981 recordings document an "uncouth, uneducated racket" of "nobodies from the other side of the tracks" who jump-started the Senegalese music industry and launched the career of a mechanic's son who decades later would be name-dropped as a presidential possibility. Duplicating only four tracks from Rough Guide's coruscating best-of and unearthing seven worthy songs left off Sterns' four long-unobtainable '90s reissues, this collection generates a rough excitement elided by N'Dour on mature albums that compensate with focus and scope. But he still hits it live sometime, because he knows how sweet it is. A