Listeners who might not endorse Chao’s critique of globalization or his efforts to organize youth in the banlieues could mentally file the easygoing twinkle of the guitars and the hand percussion on “Clandestino” next to the unthreatening serenades on a Gipsy Kings CD. His politics hadn’t changed-the title track is a lament from the perspective of a worker “without papers,” and “Welcome to Tijuana” is a sarcastic celebration of Mexico’s sex-and-drugs tourism-but his music had. On “Clandestino,” Chao abandoned this well-meaning rumpus for a more precise sound, using a handful of guitars, percussion instruments, and unidentifiable noisemakers to tell stories. Mano Negra made several passable records of a vaguely political nature. His band, Mano Negra, had established a healthy following in France during its nine-year run, between 19, with a sound that was hard and hyperactive-a blend of rock, funk, and reggae heavily indebted to left-leaning punk bands and that strain of overemphatic ska which has become the default music for skaters and dreadlocked dissenters all over the world. Many French had already converted to Chao by 1998, when he released “Clandestino,” his début album.

And, in 2004, he released an all-French CD of songs about Paris enclosed in a book containing primary-color illustrations by Jacek Woz´niak-a project apparently intended for younger listeners still in need of conversion. He also produced-and co-wrote some of the tracks on-“Dimanche à Bamako,” an album featuring the blind Malian couple Amadou and Mariam, which was one of the most assured and finely detailed releases of 2005. He is completing an album of songs in Portañol (a hybrid of Spanish and Portuguese) and collaborating on another, with patients in a psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires. Chao maintains apartments in Paris and Barcelona, and spends part of each year in Fortaleza, a town in northern Brazil, where his eight-year-old son lives. Chao’s new album, “La Radiolina,” consists of twenty-two tracks in five languages, including English, which he learned as a teen-ager by listening to Lou Reed songs and reading crime novels by the African-American writer Chester Himes, who moved to France in the nineteen-fifties. “Macedonia!” Total mayhem.įew pop performers take the idea of being a global musician so literally. He shouted out the names of countries, and people cheered, often in reverse proportion to the nation’s population: “Uruguay!” Some whoops. Toward the end of a live show, weary musicians often appeal to the audience with a stock phrase intended to invigorate the proceedings: “How is everyone feeling tonight?” “I can’t hear you!” “Cleveland, make some noise!” Manu Chao, a wiry forty-six-year-old of Spanish extraction who grew up in Paris, used a different tactic when he played the first of two sold-out shows in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in June. Few performers take the idea of being a global musician so literally.

Manu chao tablatures