Baaba Maal on the power of music and the future of Africa
Ways to Change the World with Krishnan Guru-Murthy
Channel 4 News
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2023
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“I’m a nomadic person, I don’t want to stay in one place”. When Baaba writes his music, he takes inspiration from the places he visits. “When I started travelling, I came to London, I bought cassettes, I appreciated different people. And when I got a chance to meet them, we sat down and wrote songs”. But no matter how much Baaba has travelled, and to where, he always brings his music “back home to Podor, Senegal”.
Baaba has released his first solo album in seven years, ‘Being’, which is inspired by working on the soundtrack to Black Panther and the issues facing the world today, including climate change and desertification in African countries. In today’s Ways to Change the World, Baaba sits down with Krishnan Guru-Murthy to discuss the power of music and why we are all politicians in our own way when it comes to helping the world.
Produced by: Imahn Robertson and Alice Wagstaffe
Music credits:
Wakanda by Ludwig Göransson ft. Baaba Maal - Hollywood Records
Yela by Baaba Maal - Island Records Ltd.
There Will Be Time (Live in South Africa) by Mumford & Sons and Baaba Maal - Gentlemen of the Road, Island, Glassnote
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Ways to Change the World. I'm Krishna Gururumurthy and this is the |
| 0:09.2 | podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and |
| 0:14.2 | the events that have helped shape them. We're on location in a cinema at the Barbican |
| 0:19.6 | theatre in London because my guest is performing here later on this year. He is the extraordinary |
| 0:28.4 | Senegalese singer and guitarist Baba Mal and you may know him simply as the soaring voice |
| 0:37.6 | from Black Panther. Or you may know his music more deeply but he is revered in Senegal not |
| 0:53.7 | just as a musician but as an ambassador, a leader. He is an activist, a philanthropist. He's |
| 1:00.0 | involved in climate change and desertification and education and there are many things to talk to |
| 1:08.4 | you about. Thank you very much indeed for joining us. Thank you for inviting me because you also |
| 1:13.0 | have a new album after many years. Being. Being yes. Which is beautiful. Oh thank you. And very |
| 1:20.4 | moving and the thing that is extraordinary for Western ears is that we don't know what it means. |
| 1:28.9 | But there is great meaning in your music as well, isn't it? It's just a being. Just to play music, |
| 1:35.0 | write music from your experiences of life, you know. And you have to just to live, to breathe |
| 1:43.4 | and to be and to look around you and to take notice of everything, chat with your friends, |
| 1:50.0 | musicians and write songs about all these issues, you know, that matters every one. But it's all |
| 1:57.1 | leading just to be happy and to be living happiness together. Can you tell me about the language |
| 2:11.6 | that you sing it? I am singing mostly in Fulani, the language of the Fulani people from |
| 2:19.0 | 14 or maybe 17 countries in Africa, these languages, people speak these languages. And also a |
| 2:26.5 | little bit of a mandink, a little bit of fall off. And I invited also some people who come from |
| 2:35.0 | different countries, someone like Sahu, who come from Malawi, just because of the topics that we |
| 2:41.6 | talking about, one of them is the social media. I think from the first song, did the last song, |
| 2:49.2 | did the thing that connects all the songs together is the impact of social media. How we |
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