2004 Grammy Award Winner

While Youssou N’Dour’s international releases have always combined Senegalese musical traditions with outside sources of inspiration, Egypt takes a fresh approach; on this album, the rhythms and melodies of Senegal drive arrangements featuring Egyptian and Arabian orchestral sounds. Featuring traditional musicians in Dakar and in Cairo, Egypt’s lyrics demonstrate a distinctly Senegalese way of Islam, and of Sufi thought and practice, with references to venerated caliphs, saints, and sages. The making of the album, and the public's reaction to it, has now been documented in the award-winning film Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love, by director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi; you can watch the trailer for the film at nonesuch.com/media.

Muslim life in Senegal is centered in the country’s Sufi communities, which have adapted to the modern rhythms of post-independence Africa. N’Dour, who sought to explore the links between his homeland’s religious beliefs and that of Muslims in Egypt and the Middle East, has explained that Egypt is an album that “praises the tolerance of my religion”—a religion that in recent times has come to be both misunderstood and misinterpreted by commentators and adherents alike.

The New York Times has called N’Dour “one of the world’s greatest singers” and has described his voice as an “arresting tenor, a supple weapon deployed with prophetic authority.” Renowned for his remarkable range and poise and for his prodigious musical intelligence as a writer, bandleader, and producer, N’Dour absorbs the entire Senegalese musical spectrum in his work, often filtering this through the lens of genre-defying rock or pop music from outside his culture. N’Dour has made mbalax—a blend of Senegal’s traditional griot percussion and praise-singing with Afro-Cuban music—famous throughout the world during more than twenty years of recording and touring outside of Senegal with his band, The Super Étoile.