Photo: courtesy of artist
LISTENING MIX provides a musical preview of artists visiting the Walker. Combining their work with sounds from a variety of contextual sources, LISTENING MIX can be experienced before or after a performance.
Get acquainted with the music of Mauritanian singer Noura Mint Seymali, who is bringing her unique brand of desert blues to the Cedar Cultural Center on Friday, February 19. The show, copresented by the Walker, begins at 8pm.
Noura has been releasing music back home for a decade and performing since her teenage years, but even then, music extends beyond her birth for generations. Descended from traveling griot poets and storytellers, a father who devised the Moorish system of musical notation, a local pop star for a step-mother, and a grandmother who taught her the nine string ardine (which has become her signature instrument), Noura seems destined to carry on this sonic legacy. In collaboration with her husband, guitarist Jeiche Ould Chighaly, her international debut record Tzenni is the culmination of the sounds, classical and contemporary, that have shaped her path. This listening mix highlights some of her West African predecessors and fellow ardine and ngoni virtuosos, as well as Jeiche’s desert guitar contemporaries (Tinariwen, Bombino) and the unexpected westerners who inspired their sounds.
Noura Mint Seymali performs at the Cedar Cultural Center on Friday, February 19, at 8pm, with opening act Gospel Machine.