Singer and lyricist Thione Seck, one of the lords of Senegalese music for forty years, died Sunday at the age of 66 in Dakar, we learned from his lawyer, Ousmane Seye.
From a family of griots, Thione Ballago Seck - by his full name - was one of the most famous musicians in the country with Youssou Ndour, Omar Pène, Ismaël Lô or even his own son, Wally Seck.
To read also: The "united" France of Youssou Ndour
"He died this morning of an illness at the Fann hospital"
in Dakar, Me Seye told AFP, confirming information from the Senegalese press.
Former singer, in the 1970s, of the Baobab Orchestra, a formation adept at Afro-Cuban salsa with Senegalese sauce, Thione Seck founded in the 1980s Raam Daam, a group of pure mbalax, a genre born from the meeting between several local rhythms, singing, funk, and sometimes reggae.
His discography notably includes
Allô Petit
,
Orientissime
and
Diaga
.
Fell ill in prison
Tributes followed one another in Senegal as soon as the disappearance was announced.
On Twitter, the former mayor of Dakar, Khalifa Sall, hailed the departure of a
“real monument to Senegalese music”
.
“Thione Seck is one of the hero artists of an era.
Free, energetic, melodic
[…]
, he persisted in creation, moving from traditional to modern, braving the pitfalls and the incomprehension of a society which had little faith in art as a mode and a means of living ”
, a tweeted former journalist El Hadji Hamidou Kassé, currently advisor to President Macky Sall for cultural affairs.
According to Senegalese media, Thione Seck was to be buried Sunday afternoon in the Muslim cemetery in Yoff, a district of the capital.
The musician's last years were marred by a long legal saga in a case of counterfeit banknotes, which earned him a nine-month pretrial detention in 2015. According to Khalifa Sall, it was during this period that the singer contracted the disease. cause of his death.
At the beginning of March, the Supreme Court of Senegal had annulled all the proceedings against, said Sunday his lawyer, Ousmane Seye.