Mor Thiam - Dini Safarrar (Drums Of Fire)

9.0 - Senegal / USA - 1973

- Masterpiece -

The legendary spiritual jazz album, copies of which were selling well north of a grand, has been reissued by the good people at Jazzman Records. Recorded in 1973 when the Senegalese percussionist (a genius of the djembe) and future father of Akon visited the United States and joined up with a bunch of American jazz luminaries (including the Art Ensemble of Chicago's Lester Bowie), Dini Safarrar was only initially released in limited quantities. The lead track, "Ayo Ayo Nene (Blessing For The Newborn Baby)", was included on Jazzman's first Spiritual Jazz comp back in 2008, which presumably created an increased demand for this lost classic, culminating, after years of licensing negotiations, in this most welcomed reissue.

It's not a terribly long album, its five tracks clocking just over half an hour, but what it lacks in length, it more than makes up for in intensity. Given that it features three African percussionists alongside a traditional Western trap set, the subtitular "drums of fire" naturally form the basis of the record, but much of the appeal for this listener lies in the deep groove created by percussion along with the bass guitar, rhythm guitar, and piano overtop of which the soloists wreak all sorts aleatory havoc as they jump from bluesy riffs to atonal squalls. Seriously, not to take anything away from Thiam's djembe, but Bowie's trumpet is the highlight here, especially on "Sindiely (Song For The Black Beauty)" where he produces some wonderful, moving lyricism in his runs before veering off into terrific blasts of noise.

Soundwise, things could be better, I suppose. This reissue appears to be taken from a vinyl rip, and though it does sound a bit better than the rips floating around on the Internet, the restoration is minimal. Much of the problem appears to be with the original recording, described as "very hot" in the liner notes, which sounds overloaded and quite distorted in places (most notably the very noisy "Kanfera (Return Of Fisher)"), but this is indeed part of the record's charm, as if the intensity of the grooves could not be captured by mere technology. (A friend of mine once pejoratively described this as sounding like "muppets singing underwater", but I think that was more a critique of the music itself rather than its sound quality; he is a metalhead). Either way, the sound on this reissue is much better than the overly compressed sound of "Ayo Ayo Nene" as it appeared on the Spiritual Jazz compilation. And more importantly, it's just great to have this music back in circulation.