MUSIC: Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band x Peni Candra Rini x Mowder Oyal

Le Mondo is psyched to welcome Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band (Burkina Faso) and Peni Candra Rini (Java, Indonesia) to Baltimore, alongside our house favorites Mowder Oyal (Baltimore, USA), for a don't-even-think-about-missing night of music and performance.

ABOUT BABA COMMANDANT 

Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band are a contemporary group from Burkina Faso. Coming from Bobo-Dioulasso, the group is steeped in the Mandingue musical traditions of their ancestral legacy. The enigmatic lead singer Baba Commandant (Mamadou Sanou) is an original and eccentric character who is well respected in the Burkinabé musical community. A sort of punk Faso Dan Fani activist for traditional Mandingo music, Baba continues to redefine the boundaries between traditional and modern. In 1981, he joined the Koule Dafourou troupe as a dancer. Later, he embarked on his current musical direction as a singer first in Dounia and then in the Afromandingo Band.

His current band — when he’s not playing with the now-famous Burkinabé musician Victor Démé — is the Mandingo Band. At present, he is a practitioner of the Afrobeat style, drawing inspiration from the golden era of Nigerian music. Fela Kuti/Africa 70 and King Sunny Adé are big influences, as is the legendary Malian growler Moussa Doumbia.

Baba Commandant plays the ngoni, the instrument of the Donso (the traditional hunters in this region of Burkina Faso and Mali). His audience comprises multiple generations and strata of Burkinabé society; he accordingly adapts his repertoire to his surroundings, which range from cabaret Sundays in Bobo-Dioulasso to the sound systems of Ouagadougou.

Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band are a formidable force steeped in Ouagadougou’s DIY underground musical culture. Juguya is their sound.

ABOUT PENI CANDRA RINI

Peni is a renowned Javanese singer, composer, and faculty member at  the Indonesian Institute of the Arts. Raised in an artistic family in a  small fishing village in East Java, Peni first began studying voice at  the age of 5 under her father, a village shadow master. She later moved  to the Central Javanese town of Solo to study at the Indonesian National  Conservatory of the Arts, where she completed her doctorate and was  hired as faculty in 2020. She is a master of several traditional forms  and is regarded as one of Indonesia’s most daring young composers, one  of only a handful of female composers in the majority Muslim nation. The  Kronos String Quartet is currently performing her latest chamber work, which they premiered this year at Carnegie Hall. She is a former recipient of grants from the Asian Cultural Council, is a two-time grantee of the US State Department’s One Beat Program and in 2022 was named an Aga Khan Foundation laureate  of the arts. During the spring 2023 semester she will be teaching as a  Visiting Fulbright Artist-Scholar at the University of Richmond and  Virginia Commonwealth University. Her latest experimental album is being  produced in collaboration with Deerhoof’s John Dieterich.

ABOUT MOWDER OYAL

Mowder Oyal is a quartet of musicians and multidisciplinary artists that make hardcore punk and free jazz at the same time. With rapper/actor/arts advocate Eze Jackson on vocals, musician and arts lawyer Adam Holofcener on guitar, Konjur Collective’s Bashi Rose on percussion, and Mind On Fire's James Young on bassoon, Mowder Oyal (phonetic Baldamore-ese for “motor oil”) is a sonic supergroup providing the soundtrack for the there-is-never-not-a-pandemic-goin'-on era we are all indefinitely in. Past members include founding vocalist SHAN Wallace (AKA Lor Ugly Yo).

https://www.mowderoyal.com/