Mbalax

Mbalax is the national popular dance music of Senegal and the Gambia, built on the rhythms of the sabar drum ensemble of the Wolof people. Developed in Dakar in the 1970s, it fuses those traditional percussion patterns — directed by the tama talking drum — with Afro-Cuban music, jazz, funk and Western pop instrumentation. *Youssou N'Dour* and his group *Super Étoile de Dakar* carried mbalax from Dakar's clubs to a global audience in the 1980s, but in Senegal it remained above all a social music, performed at weddings, naming ceremonies and wrestling matches by griot praise singers.