Bandleader of les Vautours
Cissé Abdoulaye
Cissé Abdoulaye grew up making music in the Banfora region of what was then Upper Volta. He taught himself guitar, trained as a teacher in the mid-1960s, and spent his weekends playing with the Super Volta orchestra. With his own group, les Vautours, he recorded for the Benin-based label Disques Tropiques in the late 1970s, and he was later rediscovered through Analog Africa's 2011 compilation Bambara Mystic Soul: The Raw Sound of Burkina Faso 1974–1979. He also hosted music programmes on national radio. In 1984 Thomas Sankara's government asked him to help organize the country's state cultural ensembles, work that ended with the 1987 coup. A recent profile found him still performing in Ouagadougou in his seventies.
Bombay Café