| Afro Jazz |
A Silence Between Continents
Since settling in the United States, I’ve come to realize how easily French jazz disappears across the Atlantic. In a country that once prided itself on cultural openness, the infrastructure that used to promote international artists has largely vanished. Album releases from Europe rarely make it past the trade press, and only those backed by substantial funding can afford meaningful promotion. The result is a kind of quiet isolation, a narrowing of the jazz landscape that leaves American audiences unaware of the creative ferment happening elsewhere.
Every so often, though, a project breaks through the noise. French drummer Raphaël Pannier, whom I’ve written about before, returns with a stunning new release that does just that. His album *Live in Saint Louis, Senegal* is more than a live recording, it’s a daring act of musical diplomacy, an effort to connect modern jazz with its deepest rhythmic ancestry.
Where Jazz Meets Sabar
The album, released on Miguel Zenón’s label, captures a performance that feels both raw and incandescent. It opens with a volcanic reimagining of “Take Five,” Dave Brubeck’s classic, reframed through the complex polyrhythms of sabar, the West African drumming tradition. Pannier’s quartet, Cuban saxophonist, Yosvany Terry, pianist Thomas Enhco, and bassist François Moutin, builds a shimmering architecture around the percussive core provided by Senegalese master Khadim Niang and his ensemble of eight drummers, including Niang’s sons, Papa Madiodio and Yoro.
The result is breathtaking: jazz not as fusion, but as dialogue. The rhythmic interplay is dense yet fluid, the kind of conversation that can only happen when musicians listen as deeply as they play.
A Historic First
Beyond its musical achievement, “Live in Saint Louis, Senegal” holds historical weight. It is the first live album ever recorded*in the 33-year history of the Saint Louis Jazz Festival, the most prestigious jazz gathering on the African continent. The performance, captured under open skies, brims with the energy of a homecoming. It’s as if jazz itself, an art form born from African diasporic memor, has found a way to speak directly to its origins.
There’s an echo of “Sun Ra” here, not in the sound but in the spirit: that sense of collective transcendence, of music as a portal between worlds. Yet Pannier’s approach feels unmistakably European, shaped by a different kind of longing. Where Sun Ra’s cosmic vision grew from the African American experience of displacement, Pannier’s journey is one of rediscovery, a European musician confronting the history of a continent that once took without listening, now returning to hear what was always there.
A Dream in Motion
Pannier’s path to Senegal began years earlier. After studying at “Berklee” and the **Manhattan School of Music**, he spent a decade in New York performing with artists like Zenón, Aaron Goldberg, Bob James, Steve Wilson, Chad Lefkowitz-Brown, and Manuel Valera. These collaborations gave him not only technical mastery but a sense of jazz as a living dialogue, shaped by geography and history alike.
When he returned to Paris in 2020, Pannier played with French greats Biréli Lagrène, Baptiste Trotignon, and Thomas Enhco, yet he continued to speak of one unfulfilled dream: to travel to Senegal and learn directly from the custodians of sabar. “When you have a dream,” he says, “you want to share it as widely as possible.”
That dream took form when he met the director of the Saint Louis Jazz Festival, who invited him to perform in 2023. Traveling alone, Pannier sought out Khadim Niang, the most respected sabar master of his generation and a disciple of the legendary Doudou N’Diaye Rose. What began as a musical experiment became something deeper: a shared exploration of rhythm as history, rhythm as language.
The Sound of Reconciliation
To listen to “Live in Saint Louis, Senegal” is to hear more than drums and horns. It’s to hear continents in conversation, histories intertwining. The music doesn’t attempt to “blend” cultures so much as to reveal how they’ve always been entangled.
In Europe, this kind of artistic reconciliation remains rare. The continent’s colonial past still casts a long shadow, and its artistic institutions have struggled to integrate African traditions without exoticizing them.
Pannier’s project, by contrast, feels honest, an acknowledgment that European jazz, for all its sophistication, owes a profound debt to the rhythms of Africa.
That honesty gives the album its power. The percussion is not an embellishment but the heartbeat; the jazz harmonies not a frame but a response. The dialogue is free, equal, and unforced.
Toward a New Horizon
Ultimately, *Live in Saint Louis, Senegal* stands as both a musical triumph and a cultural document. It reminds us that jazz is not a museum piece but a living, evolving art form, one that still carries the potential for surprise, communion, and repair.
At a time when music is often consumed in fragments, this record demands deep listening. It rewards patience, curiosity, and openness, the very qualities that define jazz itself. And it leaves us with a hopeful image: a French drummer, standing on Senegalese soil, hearing in the polyrhythms of sabar not just the sound of Africa, but the echo of jazz returning home.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, October 22nd 2025
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Musicians :
Raphaël Pannier, drums
Khadim Niang & Sabar Group, drums and percussions
Thomas Enhco, piano
Yosvany Terry, saxophone
François Moutin, double bass
Tracking List :
Lonely Woman [Live SLJ 2024]
Take Five [Live SLJ 2024]
Xalat Bou Set
Naima [Live SLJ 2024]
Hommage A Doudou N’Diaye Rose [Live SLJ 2024]
Sine Saloum [Live SLJ 2024]
DJolokaneté! [Live SLJ 2024]