Miscegenation. Blackness and impurity. Borders - mental and geographical - that blur. All this is what unites the Malian Salif Keita and the Zaragozan Santiago Auserón, two giants of the popular music of the last decades. Of the authentic music of the world.
Is it the same as always, or is it different? With Santiago Auserón it can never be the same. Maybe the essence is maintained, but the form hardly lasts. His new project, La Academia Nocturna, revisits some of the best songs of his career as frontman of Radio Futura or as Juan Perro, but does it from a new perspective, giving them new atmospheres, in which jazz, rock, rhythm and blues or soul merge with Caribbean sounds and the Spanish lyrical tradition. Havana, Madrid, New Orleans and Chicago united in an eternally malleable repertoire: the latest pirouette of an artist who does not understand this without challenging himself.
The veteran Malian singer, instrumentalist and composer Salif Keita is a legend of African and world music. He never had it easy: being born an albino, considered a sign of bad luck in the Mandinka culture, was already a first obstacle. So was his family's reluctance to let him dedicate himself to music. But the so-called "African golden voice" earned his status as an unbeatable ambassador of the music of his continent, to which he supplies with European and American influences in a discography of almost twenty albums since 1987, in which balophones, yembes, koras, organs, saxophones and synthesizers take center stage and ally with his unmistakable voice.
