Amadou & Mariam: Album/Tour

AMADOU & MARIAM TO HEADLINE NORTH AMERICAN TOUR IN JUNE BEFORE SUPPORTING COLDPLAY IN JULY
Because Music/Nonesuch Records Will Release Welcome to Mali March 24

Amadou & Mariam

Since meeting at the Institute for Young Blind People in Bamako, Mali, three decades ago, the singer Mariam Doumbia and her husband, the guitarist/vocalist Amadou Bagayoko, have become enthusiastically embraced by critics, fellow artists, and audiences in Europe and North America. Coldplay just selected the duo to support the multi-platinum, multi-GRAMMY Award-­winning band in July on a tour of the U.S., in which Amadou & Mariam will perform material from their highly acclaimed forthcoming album, Welcome to Mali. In June, the duo will headline in a number of North American cities and will perform at the Bonnaroo Festival. Please see below for an itinerary of these summer shows.

The March 24 U.S. release of Welcome to Mali, on Because Music/Nonesuch Records, follows numerous critical accolades for the album’s 2008 U.K. release. The recording made many Top Albums of the Year lists. In a five-star review, London’s Observer Music Monthly called it “the most exciting pop album of 2008…Welcome to Mali will be appreciated by millions not as ‘world music,’ but as the product of an authentically global pop phenomenon.”

Welcome to Mali follows Amadou & Mariam’s GRAMMY-nominated 2005 breakthrough, Dimanche à Bamako, which they made in close collaboration with Manu Chao. The new album’s opening track, the Damon Albarn-produced “Sabali,” shows Amadou & Mariam investigating different ideas from those on Dimanche. Albarn brings to the song a hip-hop rhythm and electronic elements more akin to his Gorillaz productions than to anything traditionally Malian. “Sabali” placed 15th in Pitchfork’s “100 Best Tracks of 2008,” and the widely read music blog Gorilla vs. Bear chose it as the “#5 Best Song of the Year.”

The rest of Welcome to Mali is produced by Amadou & Mariam’s longtime collaborators Marc-Antoine Moreau and Lauren Jais, who help the duo integrate a diversity of other artists and sounds: the hip-hop of K’Naan and Keziah Jones, the virtuosic kora playing of Nonesuch label mate Toumani Diabate, the funk of Juan Rozoff, the reggae of Côte d’Ivoire‘s Tiken Jah Fakoly, and the indie rock of Mathieu Chedid, who is well-known in France simply as M. The duo recorded the album in Bamako, Dakar, Paris, and London.

AMADOU & MARIAM U.S. TOUR
June 2 Chicago, IL Park West
June 4 Toronto, ONT Phoenix Concert Theatre
June 5 Montreal, QUE Metropolis
June 6 Boston, MA Paradise Rock Club
June 8 New York, NY Webster Hall
June 9 Philadelphia, PA World Café Live
June 10 Alexandria, VA Birchmere
June 12 Manchester, TN Bonnaroo

SUPPORTING COLDPLAY
July 10 Ridgefield, WA The Amphitheater at Clark County
July 11 George, WA The Gorge Amphitheatre
July 13 Mountain View, CA Shoreline Amphitheatre
July 16 Chula Vista, CA Cricket Wireless Amphitheatre
July 18 Carson, CA Home Depot Center
July 21 Dallas, TX Superpages.com Center
July 22 Houston, TX Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
July 24 Maryland Heights, MO Verizon Wireless Amphitheater