Issa Bagayogo
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Biography
Issa Bagayogo is one of the great, if tongue twisting, names in World music and has been conveniently nicknamed Techno-Issa. Techno music is in stark contrast to Issa's rural background 30 miles from the nearest town in southern Mali. Born in 1961, Issa Bagayogo should never have become a musician his fate seemed to be to work the farm his father worked with his four wives and 14 other children. But Issa was drawn to music and started singing and playing traditional instruments.
After becoming well known locally, Issa, at the age of 30, decided to go to the capital, Bamako in 1991. There he got the chance to use his skills at playing kamele n'goni in a studio belonging to two Frenchmen and the result was a cassette. He did not return to Bamako for another two years and recorded another cassette and became an apprentice bus driver. The cassettes brought in no money and Issa became depressed, turned to drink and his wife left him and it seemed as if his life had bottomed out. After a while Issa returned to his music and at a studio he met Yves Wernert, a French engineer, and guitarist Foamed Koné, who'd been a guitarist in Ali Farka Touré's band. They began mixing traditional music with techno drum programming, something Issa was unsure of, if only because it was so unlike anything he'd done The result became known as Afro-techno and it certainly did the trick because their first CD, Sya, released in 1998, was a huge success in Mali also enabling him to finally quit his job as an apprentice bus driver. As a consequence to the success of this album Issa won an award as Brightest New Hope and the trio and their accompanying band with backing vocalists went on to record their second CD, the international hit Timbuktu.
This new album Tassoumakan includes topics such as unity, going abroad, drugs and death,
It is a convincing blend of modern technology and deeply rooted music.
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