Afro Celt Sound System Quotes

In 1997 I was at a music festival and was asked to play for five minutes before Salif Keita took the stage. I said, 'Yes, of course!' 
N'Faly Kouyate 

Along with modern times comes modern music. Now techno and hip-hop are the preferred music of the modern young generation. With Afro-Celt, we are fusing the ancient and the new hence re-evaluating traditional music within a different context. So, we are moving forward without losing sight of the root that allowed us to get here. 
N'Faly Kouyate 

On Volume II, N'Faly had just joined the band, and we were just finding our feet as a live act, and we had lost Joe. Volume III, we had done a lot of gigging and we were writing, arranging and producing the tracks as we would play them live. A song like Colossus. I think really has the power of our live performances. You would never know that the different instruments had been recorded in different places all over. But that is the live sensibility, the live dynamic. 
Simon Emerson

I was a record producer and was sought out by African Afro Jazz pioneer Manu Dibango after he heard "Acid Jazz And Other Illicit Grooves - Vol.1." I then started working with Femi Kuti. After that I began work on Baaba Maal's album. While we were in the studio in 1992 I was working on Baaba Maal's album, and Davy Spalan played this lovely Irish low whistle and it worked perfectly in the track. It was sort of an epiphany And he said that he had always been told that the Aboriginal Irish were probably from Africa, dark skinned, and that some of the Celts probably come from the Berber people, North African. And he just told me all of this amazing stuff and just encouraged me. 
Simon Emerson