NO WAYYYYYYYY. I searched for a decent upload of this song so many times throughout the course of me running this music blog with the intention of posting this song, but never managed to find it until now. I was always so frustrated because I was eager to post this song and had almost lost hope. Such tight instrumentation! This is the first artist from Guinea I've posted, it seems.
I hope y'all appreciate the ridiculous amount of research that went into ATTEMPTING to title-translate and language-tag this post. I mean like combing through translation dictionaries for 3 different African languages, reading about how to play scales on the kora, researching grammatical particles type research--and even after all that I'm still not sure of either the language or the title translation. But I did my best. Can't say I didn't try!
I never found a translation for the word "silani", but I did find that words related to paths in Mandinka start with "sila," and I also found that "-ni" is a Mandinka suffix that means "little." "Sila baa", literally meaning "the great way," is the name of a scale of the kora, the instrument played by the primary member of the group, so I wonder if the title is maybe a play on words that reverses the size of the way that's normally referred to in relation to the kora. But of course if anyone knows the REAL translation of the title I'd love to be informed of it!
Ba Cissoko - Silani [The Little Way]:
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