This Saturday, May 27th, we're bringing a very special, one-night-only experience to Baltimore!
Le Mondo welcomes Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band (Burkina Faso) on their first US tour alongside Peni Candra Rini (Java, Indonesia) and Mowder Oyal (Baltimore, USA), for a don't-even-think-about-missing night of music.
Learn more about the performers below!
ABOUT BABA COMMANDANT & THE MANDINGO BAND
Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band are a contemporary group from Burkina Faso, steeped in the capital's DIY underground musical culture. Coming from Bobo-Dioulasso, the group is steeped in the Mandingue musical traditions of their ancestral legacy. The enigmatic lead singer Baba Commandant (Mamadou Sanou) is an original and eccentric character who is well respected in the Burkinabé musical community. A sort of punk Faso Dan Fani activist for traditional Mandingo music, Baba continues to redefine the boundaries between traditional and modern.
Stylistic influences include: Afrobeat style, drawing inspiration from the golden era of Nigerian music; Fela Kuti/Africa 70; King Sunny Adé; and Malian growler Moussa Doumbia (the "James Brown of Mali"). You can LISTEN HERE.
“Burkina Faso’s black punk”, as his friends call him in reference to the eccentric character he has built for himself and his noctambulism, shakes the dolo cabarets on Sundays and the underground bars of Ouagadougou in the evening. Issouf Diabaté accompanies him on feverish electric guitar solos. Their fusion style amazes.
After building a reputation for hypnotic, trance-inducing live shows across West Africa, the group had its first studio recording Juguya released on the Sublime Frequencies label in 2015.
The label founded by Sun City Girls member Alan Bishop and North African documentary filmmaker Hisham Mayet, Sublime Frequencies has always specialized in compiling and issuing unusual, hard-to-find global music ranging from African guitar music to Thai and Cambodian pop to Turkish psychedelia. While the label frequently focuses on preserving lost and nearly forgotten music, Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band stands as one of the imprint's best contemporary finds.
ABOUT PENI CANDRA RINI
Peni Candra Rini is a renowned Javanese singer, composer, and faculty member at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts. Raised in an artistic family in a small fishing village in East Java, Peni first began studying voice at the age of 5 under her father, a village shadow master. She is a master of several traditional forms and is regarded as one of Indonesia’s most daring young composers, one of only a handful of female composers in the majority Muslim nation.
The Kronos String Quartet is currently performing her latest chamber work, which they premiered this year at Carnegie Hall. During the spring 2023 semester she will be teaching as a Visiting Fulbright Artist-Scholar at the University of Richmond and Virginia Commonwealth University. Her latest experimental album is being produced in collaboration with Deerhoof’s John Dieterich.
ABOUT MOWDER OYAL
Mowder Oyal is a Baltimore-based quartet of musicians and multidisciplinary artists that make hardcore punk and free jazz at the same time. With rapper/actor/arts advocate Eze Jackson on vocals, musician and arts lawyer Adam Holofcener on guitar, Konjur Collective’s Bashi Rose on percussion, and Mind On Fire's James Young on bassoon, Mowder Oyal (phonetic Baldamore-ese for “motor oil”) is a sonic supergroup providing the soundtrack for the there-is-never-not-a-pandemic-goin'-on era we are all indefinitely in.
Past members include founding vocalist SHAN Wallace (AKA Lor Ugly Yo).
Our favorite new band in Baltimore might be one of the most Baltimore bands to ever Baltimore.
An unexpected supergroup of local artists... [with] a singular sound that fuses free jazz, funk, and hip-hop with a hefty foundation of hardcore punk, plus a throughline nod to our hometown genre of Baltimore Club.