Malouma - 'Nour'

Listen To 'Nour'

Malouma is from Mauritania, one of Africa's most desolate countries. Malouma is the first Mauritanian women to introduce Modern Mauritanian Music. Her music is a mix of traditional and modern sounds where she is melding western styles to the Moorish music of the Sahara and adding electric guitars to traditional instruments such as the four-stringed, lute-like tidinit.

Anchored in the tradition yet resolutely modern, inspired by the songs of the desert and immersed in the rhythms of the Senegal River, somewhere at the crossroads of West Africa, the Arab and the Berber worlds, between the Sahel and the Savannah, Malouma's music is unique.

Malouma is also known as a militant singer, spokesman for women rights in a Muslim Country. She was born into a family of griots, the daughter of Moktar Ould Meidah, a prominent traditional musician as well as a highly skilled poet, and the granddaughter of Mohamed Yahya Ould Boubane, another virtuoso of words and the tidinit (a small traditional guitar used by griots).

Although she started performing at age 12, she started to make a national impact a bit later, through her commitment to encourage justice and equality in Mauritania, she involved herself in activist songs to stir people into action, singing for the AIDS campaigns, for the vaccination of children, for the elimination of illiteracy and for the promotion of women, among other things. While her music soon became popular among the youth (girls and boys), it was rejected at first by the dictatorship of Mauritania.

However, with the first elections in Mauritania, Malouma is now in a special place to effect change, being both an elected official in the government and continuing to make powerful music. [More...]

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[Jaap van der Sman]

o ja?