Victor Deme

• Genre: Afro-Pop

About

His mother was a griot, his father a tailor, and Victor Deme has spent his life fulfilling both his parents' vocations. After a long sojourn in Cote d'Ivoire, where he worked as a tailor, Deme returned to his native Burkina Faso in the late 1980s on the heels of a new political movement and found himself in high demand at nightclubs around the country. Then life intervened, and Deme didn't perform for years. When he tried to get back into clubs in the '90s, club owners often asked him to perform covers of Salif Keita or Mory Kante songs. But Deme continued to write his own music, and in 2007 he recorded his debut album, an innovative mix that references folk as much as global styles; it gained him some international acclaim among world music critics.

- Sarah Bardeen