Mali’s Amadou & Mariam will visit the Twin Cities in August
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August in Minnesota is already pretty hot and humid, but things are only going to get more sweltering when famed Malian husband-and-wife musical duo Amadou & Mariam hit the stage at the Cedar Cultural Center Aug. 7.
Amadou & Mariam have one of those beautiful, serendipitous backstories that you’d expect to only exist in the minds of Hollywood executives if it weren’t happening in front of your eyes. Struggling as musicians for years, the pair met at Bamako’s Institute For Young Blind People in the 1970s and began both a marriage and a musical partnership that endured various ups and downs before the couple’s unlikely late-in-life career boom. They managed success thanks, in part, to risky partnerships with people like the Gorillaz’s Damon Albarn and Parisian world artist Manu Chao.
After Amadou & Mariam received kudos from diverse musical publications like Pitchfork and The Guardian, artists like U2 and Coldplay took notice of the duo’s innovative and pan-ethnic approach to the traditional music of Mali. This sound put Amadou & Mariam nicely alongside M.I.A. during the boom of multi-genre music that hinted at the new avenues and possibilities of an emerging global culture in the last decade.
Judging from the guest list on the duo’s new album, Folila (which includes visits from TV On The Radio, Santigold, and Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), that same sense of ambitious genre blurring isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
The Captain and Tennille were never this cool.
