Rebirth (10")

"Rebirth", is a new EP from Les Ambassadeurs, who were the flagship band of new African music from the early sixties until the mid-seventies. Their style, mixing ancestral art, salsa, jazz and funk, lit up "world sono". Originally known as Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako, a talented group put together by a powerful lieutenant in Mali's military government, the musicians became a true creative force in the early 1970s when they were joined by Manfila Kanté and Idrissa Soumaoro, along with their current spokesman and world music star Salif Keita.

The return of this super-group, which officially split up in the late '70s but continued to record occasionally until 1987, symbolizes values of freedom and authenticity encapsulated in a sound: the unchanging, haunting groove of Mandinka pop music. Also, the artists will donate all profits from "Rebirth" to the Salif Nantenin Keita Foundation in Paris and its center in Kouloubléni, Mali where young Albinos - who are feared, despised, rejected and worse in Africa - can find safety, medical care, education and training.

"Above all, Les Ambassadeurs taught Malians to love their own music…" Salif Keita once told me that, and it's so true. In the cultural whirl of the 1970s, when Mali had been free of colonialism for barely a decade, Les Ambassadeurs proved to their fellow countrymen that the griot's praise song, the clavé of Orquesta Aragon and the funky drumming of the JBs weren't mutually exclusive: Malians could have it all. With that liberating idea, Les Ambassadeurs dreamed up a musical template that conquered Mali, then West Africa and then the rest of the world world.

But why revisit those delectable days of groove and innovation? Nostalgia? Money? Glory? Friendship? A pinch of them all perhaps, but there's comes a point in anyone's life when money, nostalgia and friendship aren't enough, when you know you have leave something positive behind to mark the place where you once lived and breathed.

Salif Keita had no need to go looking for a cause. It was given to him when he was born. In Africa, albinos are feared, despised, rejected and worse. Their skin is turned cancerous by the sun, their eyes often fail them, their education becomes impossible, they can be touted as a mascot or murdered to make potions that supposedly grant strength and success. Music is an anti-dote to all that ignorance and hatred. It saved Salif's life.

Above all, this album, this 'rebirth' of a sound and a spirit that first moved West Africa and the world over three decades ago, is proof of what an albino child can become: a voice that conquered the world in the case of Salif, or a medal-winning paralympian and human rights advocate like his daughter Nantenin Keita.

All profit will go to help the work of the Salif Nantenin Keita Foundation in Paris and the special centre it runs in Kouloubléni, Mali, where young Albinos can find safety, medical care, education and training, and where the rest of world may learn the pain, as the poet Frederico Garcia Lorca once said, of living in "a world shameless and cruel enough to divide its people by color, when color is in fact the sign of God's artistic genius." - Andy Morgan