ART / Going the extra Maal: Baaba Maal has cracked the big entrance on the live stage; now he's set on making a big impression on world record sales. Chris Salewicz talked to the Senegalise singer and musician between shows

BAABA MALL, the Senegalese singer and musician, arrived on stage at Paris's Elysee Montmartre last week in an unorthodox manner: he was carried on a kind of sedan chair through the audience by half a dozen men, all white. There was an almost camp drama to this majestically effective entrance: wasn't Uganda's Idi Amin once fond of being dragged about on a throne by expatriate Britons?

So started a private performance and party for which invitations had gone out to only the hippest section of the French media; even the hundred or so members of Paris's Senegalese population, leaping on stage for a moment or two of frenetically elegant dancing, were essentially props at a well-staged event. Poulet yassa and the traditional West African beverage of premier cru champagne rounded off the evening, which was almost a total success. The troupe of professional Senegalese dancers, used to their continent's rather later starting times, didn't turn up until 10 minutes before the end.

Most importantly, the performance of Baaba Maal and his group Daande i enol was tremendous: in scope like an African James Brown roadshow, but dominated by the rhythm of talking drums and breathtaking dancing. To set up such a buzz in the French capital, the start of the promotion of Maal's I am Toro album (released to acclaim in a different form in the United Kingdom) had cost pounds 15,000. Not a penny was begrudged, however, by Philippe Constantine, who runs the Paris office of Mango Records, Maal's label. Live performances is the only sure route forward in world music.

And the star of the evening was unconcerned by the level of marketing, aware of its larger function. 'I try and make my concerts as though they are in a village in Senegal, just brought to a bigger stage,' Baaba Maal said. 'The message comes from the musicians and dancers as though they are still in Senegal. When I was a child I saw that music belonged to the whole world, and I'm simply trying to get across that belief.'

Getting the world beyond world music to listen is a tricky business. World music has become the refugee camp of the record business: only a handful have succeeded in escaping its confines and getting permanent residence in the West - the Gipsy Kings, Yousou N'Dour, Mory Kante, Martinque's hugely successful Kassav. To succeed, as Philippe Constantine is only too aware, it's important to push a specifically modern angle. 'We don't want to be stuck into a kind of ethnic ghetto. With Baaba we want to promote the dance element. In Dakar on Saturday afternoon you see five or six drummers start playing on a street corner and within 10 minutes you've got 200 people there getting in on the act. That's the kind of event that Baab's shows should emulate.'

Quality of performance and atmosphere from Baaba Maal is almost guaranteed. But for most world music artists in the Nineties there has been a more worrying question: how big will the audience be? Like the Third World itself, music from the developing countries has suffered badly from the recession. In the late Eighties, world music was in vogue, a kind of aural adventure travel. Acts like Salif Keita, the Malian, got them riding high on his Soro album, and had little difficulty selling out the Brixton Academy in 1989.

But this burst of success compounded the problem; a surfeit of releases from all quarters of the globe left its potential new audience baffled; few of the record sleeves would identify the nature of the music within, and the artists' exotic names would be no more help. World music became a problem child of the conventional music business: it wasn't sung in English, there were few world music sex symbols. And sales soon reflected a time when there was only money for essentials; last year even the revered Womad touring festival nearly went to the wall.

But Baaba Maal, it is hoped, can transcend such difficulties and break free of marginalisation. He looks young, athletic and glamorous. He has both the purity of the African village in his music and the thinking of the intellectual who studied music in Dakar and at the Conservatoire in Paris. He is open and friendly, and speaks English well enough to joke in it. He's also an extraordinary performer.

In fact, as a marketing concept, Baaba Maal is a good idea. To give him a push, I am Toro, which was critically lauded (it made Q magazine's Top Fifty albums of the year when it came out in the United Kingdom last autumn), has been remixed for its American and European releases. This remix emphasises the extent to which Yela, the style of music Maal plays, is claimed to be the root of reggae; much of the more African sounding instrumentation has been removed, an effort to capture some of the new fondness for Jamaican music in the United States.

Experienced hands have been pulled in; Peter Jenner, Billy Bragg's rock manager, is overseeing Baaba Maal's career. Strategic shows have been lined up: Paris, the Forum last weekend, an acoustic set at the opening of an African exhibition at the Saatchi gallery last October, the main rock stage (and not the world music one) at the next Glastonbury Festival. For the United States a more ambitious series of concerts is planned: Africa Fete, a kind of mini-Womad focusing on one strand of world music, will feature Baaba Mall and several other African acts. It will play a number of small venues, culminating in a heavily publicised free concert in New York's Central Park.

Africa Fete will be a distillation of a much larger event held annually in Paris since 1978. 'African music has to be sold like reggae was,' Christophe Meyer, one of the organisers of this French near-institution, explains. 'People had to first realise that reggae was coming out of a fantastic country, with a really interesting culture. So what we've got to get across is that Africa isn't some poor continent where everyone is hungry, but that it's a really interesting place, a really funny place sometimes.'

After Baaba Maal's Paris show, a triumvirate of African music stars assembled in the dressing room. Angelique Kidjo, the diminutive, bouncy singer from Benin whose Logozo has sold over 100,000 copies in France, hammed for the camera of a Californian documentary about the link between rap and African music. Salif Keita haggled solemnly with a representative of his record company about the cost of his next album. And Baaba Maal? Baaba Maal simply beamed beatifically, tired from his performance but delighted by its success.

Had he no objections about the re-mixing of I am Toro, of this conscious effort to remove him from the rigorous asceticism of pure world music? 'At the beginning I was very afraid,' he admitted. 'But they've done a good job. The radio stations in Senegal have started playing this version of the record now.

'When I compose music, I do it as universal music, not as something just coming from Africa. What African music must do is to keep its flavour, and at the same time open itself to other people. Even if you're African, let alone European or American, if you hadn't been culturally initiated in my precise sort of music, you wouldn't necessarily understand it at all.'

(Photograph omitted)