Mick Hartley

Vocalist Amadou Balake from Burkina Faso joins up with some of New York's finest salsa musicians:

Africando was a project of Senegalese producer Ibrahim Sylla, combining West African vocalists with NY instrumentalists. So far they've managed eight CDs, starting in 1993. Latin music has always been popular in West Africa, inspiring, most notably, the Congolese rumba that developed into soukous. No surprise really, considering the African roots of Latin music, but it's still extraordinary just how well the Africando project worked – and how popular it was.

Here, with gratuitous dancers, is perhaps their most famous tune, Yay Boy: La Bamba, from the early days: and - a Trinidadian touch – a version of that old calypso Shame and Scandal in the Family.