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Ismael Isaac

Reviews :  Live Show Pictures

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Reggae is popular throughout Africa, and has been since the late 1960's, when Desmond Dekker and Jimmy Cliff vied with James Brown and Wilson Pickket as African's favorite foreign stars. Among the million of Africans who listened to these singers was a boy named Issiaka Diakité, a crippled victim of polio growing up in treichville, a densely populated lower-working-class district of Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Issiaka was 15 years old when Bob Marley died in 1981. It was a definiing moment to him. That, he recalls, was when "reggae became, de facto, a genre of Africa Music", propelled mainly by another son of Treichville, an elder fellow named Seydou Koné, who called himself Alpha Blondy. Hearing Alpha Blondy sing original reggae songs in the Dioula language (one of the five that Issiaka speaks), he made up his mind to be a reggae singer himself. With little more than his faith in his talent, Issiaka, under the stage name Ismael Isaac, managed to get himself onto Ivorian radio and television. His recording career got well underway in 1986, when he joined "Les Fréres Keita" in a vocal trio for the first time of three sucessful Ivorian cassettes. He made his first solo recording album, "Rahman", for the renowned Senegalese producer Ibrahima Sylla in 1990. A hit throughout West Africa, "Rahman" brought Isaac to the attention of Polygram France, which put him in the studio with producer Godwin Logie to record 1993's "Taxi Jump". Isaac's popularity grew further still with the international release of "Treich Feeling" in 1997. After a three year hiatus, Ismael Isaac is back with with his strongest album yet. "Black System" reunites the artist with some important collaborators, bandleader Georges Kouakou, who supported Isaac in his early days with Radio Télévision Ivorienne; arranger Wurie Moctar, who was the instrumental in teh success of "Rahman", and producer Ibrahima Sylla. Singing in Mandinka, Malenké, Bambara, Dioula, and French, Isaac has written songs that address the citizens of today's teeming African cities, reminding the that traditional values such as community, hospitality and human dignity need not be sacrificed to modernity. His new music reflects his convictions, it is both contemporary and rooted. Listening to Ismael Isaac, one might easily be persuaded that Reggae has been African music forever.