Pirates Choice
For people who know their Senegalese music,Orchestra Baobab'sPirates Choiceis the Holy Grail. By the time this music was recorded to  four-track in 1982, the immensely popular band had been playing nightly for  years at a Dakar club called Baobab. But legendary status in Senegal didn't help  the musicians get wider attention--the album wasn't released in Europe until  1987, and it only now comes to the U.S. for the first time. Latin music was  popular in Dakar, a port city, and the band mixed various strains of Latin music  with different African music styles to create uniformly stunning results not all  that different from Afro-Cuban music. The French vocals are lovely, and the  powerful mix of African and Latin percussion is undeniable--but keep a  particular ear out for guitarist Barthelemy Attisso, whose tasteful leads float  over the top. The original six-track album is hard to pass up, but this reissue  contains a second disk with six unreleased songs from the same session, making  this a must-have.--Tad Hendrickson