"Here" Remixed by Doctor L.

The idea of taking Salif Keita's recent "back to roots" album, Moffou, and turning the tracks over to popular "remixers" is bold and interesting. Just as Keita returns from his various foreign rock and pop adventures to make new, mostly acoustic music with mostly Malian musicians, a bunch of DJs and studio maestros in Europe take those same tracks out to musical zones Keita probably never thought of visiting, even in his wildest flights. Bold and interesting--and on a few of these eleven tracks, the promise is realized.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I confess to being remix-skeptic, finding this genre mostly shallow and self-congratulatory with the mixer substituting cleverness for the artistry of the original. That said, if there's a bottom line to success or failure in remixing, it might be that the remix should bear some relationship to the original, ideally abstracting or essentializing it so that the listener comes away with a deeper understanding or feeling of the song. When it feels like the remixer is just using the source material as paint on his own playroom wall, trouble often follows.

This set starts out strongly with the first--and best--of three takes on Moffou's most naturally jamming track, "Madan." Gekko strips the music down to a pulsating, electronic drone that sets Keita's fabulous voice in bold relief. Later on, the acoustic instruments emerge and we get close to the rich texture of the original. By peeling away and reapplying the layers of the song's dense arrangement, Gekko actually shows us what's there. Tim Paris's "Days of Holy Salif Remix" of "Madan" replaces a spectacular groove with a stiff, mechanical one decorated with bleeps and bomps. The Boldz's "No Traitorz Remix" unearths the funk in the song, with James Brown scratch guitar, clavichord and techno backbeat drumming. Neither of these matches the richness of Gekko's mix.

The lyrical "Moussoulou" gets two treatments. Ark gives us a snatch of the original vocal and then dices the song into beat-driven electronica. Charles Webster sets the same vocal to a vaguely Brazilian percussion bed with distant harmonic washes. Both of these work well enough, though neither one really goes anywhere. B Alone's dark pump-up of the moody ballad "Souvent"--what he calls the "Hyper Preacher Mix"--has some power to it. Salif's plaintive singing contrasts with the muscular beats, without seeming totally disconnected from them.

In the least successful category, Luciano does a hatchet job on Keita's sensuous collaboration with Cesaria Evora, "Yamore." We get a few abstracted lines of Salif's romantic verse against a totally unrelated backing, part blip-hop and part rhythmic industrial noise. Then--Salif gone but noises and blips still present--we settle into a mindless disco beat. The song's melancholy chord changes poke through in echo chamber snatches. Then the opening chorus comes in briefly only to be sat upon almost instantly. The same effect could easily have been achieved without involving Salif in the first place. Nothing meaningful about the original--a great song--survives.

Equally bad is Frederic Galliano evisceration of "Here," wherein we get a tad of backing singing and then it's into mindless techno beat interspersed with chirping fragments of the original. If Galliano mixes out the music here and replaces it with studio games, he may be forgiven. The original is excessively sweet. But just to show that remixes can work magic--even impressing a techno-curmudgeon like myself--Doctor L takes the same song and comes up with the one remix here that is actually better than the original. The sappiest songs on "Moffou" becomes a beautiful, reflective journey as hovering flutes, wah-wah guitar, and dramatic, deep cello riffs punctuate a shuffling, portentous sound scape. In the place of saccharine major key fluff, we get a more ambiguous harmonic setting that gives the vocal a whole new character. The song ends satisfyingly at eleven minutes, and then there's an eight-minute tag ending that feels a bit excessive. But as a whole, this track is an encouraging ending to a project that goes at least someway toward realizing its potential.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre for www.afropop.org