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Angélique Kidjo's high-powered soprano and stage charisma have carried the diminutive singer far from her native country of Bénin. She recorded her first solo album in Paris, her second in Miami, and her new one,
Ayé in London with Soul II Soul's Will Mowat as one producer and in Minneapolis with Prince sidekick David Z. as the other. Kidjo sings in Fon and Yoruba (West African languages), but both producers as well as her cowriter Jean Hébrail reinforce her African rhythms with programmed drums and synths. The result is neither African music nor Anglo-American pop but a strange hybrid that contains some of the most exciting dance music anywhere today.
African purists will be annoyed that Mowat and Z. have pushed Kidjo even further from her roots than before. American dance club denizens will be bothered that they can't understand what she's singing (the translations in the CD booklet for Ayé suggest they aren't missing much--mere platitudes about optimism, tolerance, the homeless, love and God). Americans may also be thrown by the skipping polyrhythms of Kidjo's music, so different from the fat, on-the-one funk they're used to. Yet it's Kidjo's ability to sing strong and hard (with a little sizzle in her timbre as the notes trail off) even as she skips effortlessly through the polyrhythms that makes her sound so fresh. Her triumph is not the breakthrough of real Sub-Saharan music but of a new international pop that marries West African beats to the technology of the Western dance record. --Geoffrey Himes
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