FATAU KEITA

Fatau Keita is what we call an "African Pop Musician" or even "African World Musician": an inheritor, creator, and young exponent of a kind of West African popular music that transcends the conventional boundaries of popular music hitherto drawn, at least as far as the West of Africa is concerned. Fatau's music points us to alternative routes of musical inspiration and appropriation in Ghana to those of the exclusively Highlife, Afrobeat, Funk, Soul, Reggae, Hip Hop, and Dancehall elements in popular music most musicians embrace. With very few exceptions, music-makers in Ghana have not been much attracted by the popular music of their Malian, Guinean, and Senegalese "neighbors," but it is different with Fatau Keita.

Fatau and the band's vibrant live performances provide an even stronger experience of another superb example of "young pan-African pop music" that promisingly binds tradition with modernity.