noura mint seymali: tzenni

"'Tzenni' in Hassaniya means to circulate, to spin, to turn. It's the name for a whirling dance performed to the music of Moorish griots, often under khaima tents thrown up for street gatherings in the sandy quarters of Nouakchott and out across the wide deserts of Mauritania. Tzenni is an orbit, the movement of the earth around the sun, the daily progression of light and dark, lunar cycles, tides and winds. Tzenni, the dance, comes forth as the cyclical trajectory of a Moorish musical gathering builds to a feverish pitch. Produced and recorded across an appropriately dizzying array of locations and social contexts (New York City, Dakar, Nouakchott), the album Tzenni is a contemporary articulation of Moorish griot music from Mauritania -- an artform that has been evolving and gaining momentum for centuries -- as voiced by Noura Mint Seymali, an artist profoundly steeped in its history and rigorously devoted to its global resonance. Noura Mint Seymali comes from a long line of visionary musicians. Seymali Ould Ahmed Vall, her father, was a scholar-artist instrumental in opening Mauritanian music to the world; devising the first system for Moorish melodic notation, adapting music for the national anthem, and composing works popularized by his wife (Noura's step-mother), the great Dimi Mint Abba. From her precocious beginnings as a teenaged backing vocalist with Dimi Mint Abba, Noura Mint Seymali now drives the legacy forward, re-calibrating Moorish music for our contemporary moment. Her band's arrangements, rigor, and experimental spirit may be understood as a continuation of the tradition of Seymali, Dimi, her grandmother Mounina, and countless others. Together with her husband, heroic guitarist Jeiche Ould Chighaly, who brings the force of yet another powerful branch of Moorish musical lineage, the band on this recording was conceived as a distillation of essential elements, the 'azawan' and the backbeat. The ardine & tidinit (or guitar) together are the 'azawan,' the leading ensemble of Moorish traditional music, while bass & drums, played here by Ousmane Touré and Matthew Tinari, fortify it with genre-transcendent funk and a basic pop urgency. Tzenni re-visits several classics of the Moorish repertoire, but does so within a novel formation, conversant in the pop idiom, and with Noura Mint's practice of aligning music to a given socio-historical and personal moment, it is an essential charge of the iggawen, or griot, and, we believe, of artists everywhere. As we seek to convey another turn in the Mauritanian musical dialectic, Tzenni is ultimately an album about shapeshifting, faith, and stability found through instability." --Matthew Tinari, producer/drummer for Noura Mint Seymali