THERE IS SOMETHING potently evocative about the music we hear in our youth, the songs that reawaken, with crystalline precision, isolated moments and sentiments long buried or forgotten. Then there is the music that helps us imagine another past, one that did not belong to us, yet arouses just as much nostalgia.
Such is the power wielded by the veteran musicians of Senegal's Orchestra Baobab, a motley combo of vocalists and instrumentalists, who are bringing their Afro-Cuban rhythms and melodies to the Hong Kong Arts Festival this weekend. Like the legendary Buena Vista Social Club, with whom they share a genre and a record label, Orchestra Baobab's music and history is a chronicle of loss and discovery, obscurity and celebrity.
The band exploded onto the stage in Dakar in 1970, when the Senegalese capital was pulsing with Afro-Cuban dance tunes. They formed as the house band for the Baobab Club, Dakar's newest and hottest nightclub, whose elite clientele included high-ranking politicians and businessmen. Audiences were captivated by the orchestra's languid Cuban rhythms, woven with Wolof melodies from the north and throbbing with the drumbeat of the southern province of Casamance, from where many of their members hail.
That unique sound dominated the airwaves over the next decade, making superstars of the band's musicians, who became one of West Africa's most cosmopolitan musical acts.
Despite its success, Orchestra Baobab, like the vignettes of our own adolescence, faded from consciousness, its 70s-era big band sound deafened by the frenetic rhythms of rising star Youssou N'dour, whose mbalax music - blending Cuban and African rhythms with griot and Wolof vocals - swept the country 10 years later. By 1982, Orchestra Baobab had started to split, its laid-back harmonies cleaved by the mood swing of the era. 'When mbalax became popular, we lost our public little by little,' says Barthelemy Attiso, the band's lead guitarist, composer and arranger. 'But we do not consider mbalax our adversary. We chose to stay classic.'
Attiso, who had abandoned a career in law to join Baobab, returned home to Togo to reclaim his profession. The rest of the band went their separate ways. It should have marked the end of the group. Yet, while time can be ruthless, memory is often kinder. A selection of songs recorded by Orchestra Baobab on four-track between 1970 and 1985 continued to appear in bootleg LPs and cassettes, treasured by a legion of fans who refused to forget.
One of those albums found its way to Nick Gold, director of Britain's World Circuit Records, who took the tracks from the bootleg vinyl and released, in 1989, the aptly titled Pirate's Choice, an album that launched Orchestra Baobab on the world.