Mor Thiam - 1973 - Dini Safarrar (Drums Of Fire)

Mor Thiam 

1973

Dini Safarrar (Drums Of Fire)

01. Ayo Ayo Nene (Blessing For The New Born Baby) 5:46

02. Sindiely (Song For The Black Beauty) 5:55

03. Kele Mubana (Overpain And Struggle To Black) 3:47

04. Kanfera (Return Of Fisher) 7:47

05. Africa (Dedication To All The People) 7:21

Alto Saxophone, Flute – Oliver Lake

Bass Guitar – Rayman Eldrige

Congas – Billy Ingram

Drums – Bobo - Charles Wesley Shaw Jr.

Guitar – Philip Wesdmoread

Piano – James Mathis

Trombone – John Evens

Trumpet – Lester Bowie

Vocals, Bass Drum – Zak Diouf

Vocals, Drum [Solo], Djembe, Written-By – Mor Thiam

Vocals, Maracas – Abdoulaye N'Gom

Recorded in St. Louis, Missouri.

Mor Thiam’s 1973 album Dini Safarrar (Drums of Fire) is a half-hour lightning bolt that still feels like it could power a small city. Recorded in St. Louis by a Senegalese master djembe player who paid for the session himself, pressed in laughably small numbers on the Rite Record Production label, and originally sold to raise money for famine relief back home, it’s the kind of record that makes collectors weep and DJs grin like lunatics. Jazzman Records finally rescued it from four-figure obscurity in 2016 with a lavish Holy Grail reissue, but even on a phone speaker it sounds like the earth cracking open and deciding to dance.

The album opens with “Ayo Ayo Nene” – a blessing for a newborn baby. That baby? Aliaune Damala Badara Akon Thiam, better known as Akon. Yes, the guy who sang “Lonely” and “Smack That” was literally welcomed into the world by Lester Bowie’s trumpet and a wall of djembes. Parental flex of the century.

From there it never lets up. “Sindiely” is a slow, swaying love song to Black beauty that feels like dusk on the Senegal River with Oliver Lake’s flute floating overhead like smoke. “Kele Mubana” (“Overpain and Struggle to Black”) is the heavy one – drums arguing with each other while voices cry out ancestral warnings; it’s the sound of colonial scars still stinging. “Kanfera” (“Return of Fisher”) is pure sprinting Afrofunk that makes your hips file a complaint with HR. The closer, “Africa,” is a wide-armed dedication to the entire continent, piano and horns swelling like a sunrise you can feel in your chest.

Musically, it’s Wolof griot tradition hijacking a Midwestern jazz loft. Thiam brought the talking-drum vocabulary of Dakar, then threw it into a room with AACM monsters (Bowie, Lake, Josef Burch on extra percussion) and St. Louis funkateers (bassist Rayman Eldridge, pianist James Mathis). The result is hypnotic, raw, and oddly welcoming – like being invited to a village ceremony where the elders suddenly break into a James Brown riff.

Context matters here, and 1973 was a brutal year. The Sahel drought was starving millions across West Africa; Thiam watched the news from Missouri and emptied his own pockets to press this record and send the money home. Meanwhile, America was choking on Watergate, the tail end of Vietnam, and the slow hangover from the Civil Rights years. Black Power slogans were turning into quiet exhaustion in a lot of cities. Against all that, Dini Safarrar is defiant joy – a reminder that you can face famine, racism, and Richard Nixon and still choose to make something that makes people move their feet and lift their heads

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) didn’t just influence Mor Thiam’s Dini Safarrar – it basically adopted him the moment he rolled into St. Louis with a car full of djembes and a head full of Dakar rhythms. And the album is the smoking evidence.

By 1973 the AACM was already the most radical, self-determined Black music collective in America. Born on the South Side of Chicago in 1965 as a survival mechanism against racist club policies and indifferent record labels, it had become a mobile university of freedom: learn, create, teach, repeat – no compromises, no commercial pandering. Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Anthony Braxton, and the Art Ensemble of Lester Bowie were busy rewriting what jazz could be: polyrhythms from everywhere, little instruments, theater, silence, noise, ancestral memory, all fair game. And crucially, they were doing it collectively.

When Mor Thiam arrived in the Midwest around 1968–69 (first Chicago, then St. Louis), he walked straight into that force field. He wasn’t an official “card-carrying” AACM member – he was Senegalese, older than most of the firebrands, and already a griot – but the AACM ethos swallowed him whole and spat him back out glowing. The proof is in the personnel and the attitude of Dini Safarrar.

Lester Bowie shows up on trumpet, fresh from the Art Ensemble’s Paris adventures, and instead of playing avant-garde fire music he lays down these warm, almost conversational lines that wrap around the djembes like an old friend. That’s pure AACM flexibility: the same guy who squealed and snorted on Les Stances à Sophie one year earlier is now voicing Wolof blessings like he grew up in Kaolack. Oliver Lake, another AACM lifer, brings his alto and flute and does the same trick – no ego solos, just perfect placement in service of the groove and the story. Even the percussionists (Josef Burch and others) treat the session like an AACM “little instruments” workshop, except the little instruments happen to be talking drums and shakers that trace back centuries in Senegal.

Listen closely and you can hear AACM philosophy baked into every bar:

Collective improvisation over star solos – Nobody hogs the spotlight. The drums are the lead instrument, and the horns are there to testify, not to preach. That’s straight out of the Art Ensemble playbook.

Pan-African memory as creative source – Muhal and the AACM had been preaching “Great Black Music: Ancient to the Future” for years. Thiam took it literally: he brought the actual ancient (Wolof griot codes) and fused it with the future (St. Louis funk bass and electric piano). The result is the most successful on-wax marriage of traditional West African rhythm and AACM-style freedom up to that point.

Music as community ritual – AACM concerts were ceremonies. Dini Safarrar is literally a ceremony: blessings, dedications, struggle songs, celebration songs. Same spirit, different continent.

Self-determination – The AACM taught young musicians to press their own records, book their own gigs, own their own publishing. Thiam paid for the session himself and pressed the LP to feed starving people back home. That’s AACM economics translated into Wolof.

Without the AACM’s example, Dini Safarrar might have been just another “African percussion meets jazz” novelty record. Instead it became something deeper: a working model of how to honor an ancient tradition while sounding completely, defiantly new. The Chicago cats didn’t “jazz up” Thiam’s music; they recognized it as already free and simply got out of the way – or, when needed, added the exact colors that made the fire burn brighter.

In return, Thiam gave the AACM something priceless: living proof that their “ancient to the future” slogan wasn’t just theory. Here was a griot who could trace his drum language back generations, standing in a St. Louis studio making it speak fluently to 1973. The influence went both ways, but on this particular day in 1973, the AACM’s radical openness was the spark that turned Mor Thiam’s drums into fire that still hasn’t gone out.

Fifty-two years later, the legacy is ridiculous in the best way. Crate-diggers treat originals like religious relics. Young London jazz kids cite it as scripture. Akon probably still has the master tapes in a vault next to his diamond grill. Mor Thiam himself – now in his eighties, splitting time between Florida and Dakar – used the reissue money to keep building schools in Senegal. The man turned a 30-minute drum record into lifelong tuition for kids who’ll never know how hard those beats once hit in a smoky St. Louis studio.

Put it on today and it still sounds urgent, still sounds like fire that refuses to go out. And every time the opening chant of “Ayo Ayo Nene” kicks in, somewhere Akon owes his dad another thank-you text. Legend has it the reply is always the same: “Son, I already gave you the drums. Now go make the world dance.” Mission accomplished, Pops. Mission very much accomplished.