The Live Sound of Shabaka

Shabaka performing with his band

Surely one of the top dance floor fillers of the 1980s, Freddy Cole Shabaka’s “Dem Nor Wan Dance” was deliriously delivered live by this celebrated Sierra Leonean artist for the first time in years last Saturday. The event was a pageant for Ms. Sierra Leone USA 2010, now held biennially, in Silver Spring, Maryland. Shabaka’s music has always had that rootsy consciousness, and the newer songs he performed that night left no doubt that his art and heart still share the same space.