CityLife

African stars Amadou and Mariam soar with Beating Wings

Amadou and Mariam and the Beating Wings Orchestra

SINCE the release of their Manu Chao-produced album Dimanche A Bamako in 2004, the blind Malian husband and wife duo Amadou and Mariam have become genuine global music superstars.

Now they spend their time incessantly touring the world.

So it’s a bit of a surprise to find them sitting in a rehearsal room at Manchester Metropolitan University, sipping a soft drink as they wait for the car that’s taking them back out to the airport to resume that tour.

It’s less of a surprise to learn that they’ve been brought here as part of the Manchester International Festival and have been rehearsing with our very own Beating Wings Orchestra, one of the exciting collaborations in which the festival specialises. 

Beating Wings Orchestra formed right here from musicians of refugee and other migrant backgrounds. They’re from countries as diverse as Kurdistan, Cameroon, China, and Brazil and debuted at the 2007 MIF.

Brilliant opener

Amadou and Mariam were first approached by the Festival to do something more than a year ago, while they were working on their Welcome To Mali album, partly produced by Blur’s Damon Albarn, whose Chinese opera Monkey – Journey To The West was the brilliant opener to the last festival.

“There were a lot of ideas floating around about what we might do but the one thing everybody knew straight away was that it wasn’t going to be a normal Amadou And Mariam show,” Amadou tells me. 

“At one point, there was an idea that we were going to perform for an audience in a totally blacked-out environment, so that the audience, like us, couldn’t see and had to feel the music. 

“Of course, there would be more to it than that and we thought that was an interesting idea but we didn’t really have time to work on it. 

Diverse musical background

“So that’s something that we might be doing with the Festival in the future. Then the idea came up of us working with Beating Wings Orchestra and we thought, with their diverse musical background and influences, that we could really do something exciting together.

“As you know, the success of Dimanche A Bamako meant that we now get to play all over the world.

“Of course, that’s exciting for us but, with our work schedule being so full there wasn’t time to compose an original set so we thought it would be interesting to present, with this community group, some of our older songs which fewer of our Western audiences are familiar with.”

Quite obviously, the pair are more than pleased with the results.

“A lot of music is fusion but we had never imagined some of the types of musicians and cultures represented in the Beating Wings Orchestra fitting into our music,” says Mariam. 

“It makes the songs sound very different. It gives them a new life.”

Amadou And Mariam and the Beating Wings Orchestra play on Tuesday and Wednesday July 7 and 8 at the Festival Pavilion Theatre, Albert Square.