By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: October 28, 2005
The New York Times

Everyone likes to be in on a secret. And like lots of the best singers, Youssou N’Dour knows how to make listeners feel as if they’re not just hearing his music but overhearing it. On Wednesday night, during the last of a series of Carnegie Hall concerts, Mr. N’Dour took this notion one step further, explaining to concertgoers that they were hearing something not really meant for them.

“At first, it was only for me and my family, my friends, the people around me during the Ramadan,” he said, explaining the evening’s music. This was the American live premiere of “Egypt,” an ambitious and graceful song cycle released in America last year by Nonesuch Records. The album is a collaboration with the Egyptian composer and producer Fathy Salama.

The album pays subtle tribute to the shape and scope of West African Islam. The musicians use overlapping styles to create rich and dazzling patterns, with latticed rhythms built from the intersection of Senegalese and Egyptian percussion. And the lyrics evoke the transcendent power of Muslim faith by illuminating its local history: drawing from pre-Muslim traditions of West African griots, Mr. N’Dour sings the praises of legendary Senegalese religious scholars and leaders and mystics.

The album does all this with a remarkable lightness of sound and spirit. One song, “Cheikh Ibra Fall,” recounts the story of an important leader of the Mouride Sufi community. The song rides gently on an off-center groove, returning time and again to the clip-clop of those four syllables in the title.

During Wednesday’s concert, in the Isaac Stern Auditorium, Mr. N’Dour and Mr. Salama sometimes struggled to keep the music afloat; songs like “Cheikh Ibra Fall” require a nearly impossible combination of lightness and rigor. There were some problems with amplification (including stray buzzes and pops), and the pulse sometimes got lost in the room’s reverberation. More than once, Mr. Salama’s orchestra seemed to be having trouble locking in with the rhythm section, which was on the other side of the stage. A useful lesson, perhaps: these cultural exchanges can be messy.

Often, Mr. N’Dour’s voice was enough. He sang a riveting version of “Bamba the Poet,” a meditative tribute that revolves around a playful question. While praising the poems of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, Mr. N’Dour keeps asking, “Did he ever sleep?” On Wednesday night, Mr. N’Dour mainly avoided translating his lyrics, which is probably a wise decision: interested listeners could read the explanations in the program and the translated lyrics in the CD booklet.

To a crowd full of non-Wolof speakers, Mr. N’Dour’s devotional music might sound an awful lot like dance music; sometimes ecstasy translates more clearly than piety. (As it happened, Mr. N’Dour had played an exhilarating set of dance music – the mbalax songs that first brought him fame – the night before, in Zankel Hall, with his band, Super Étoile.) And by night’s end, the audience was standing and clapping along with a reprise of “Touba – Daru Salaam.” The rhythms had come together to create a different expression of transcendence: a beat.