Tuki is the first album under his own name on ECM by Momodou "Miki" N'Doye, the Gambian percussionist who has lived and worked in Oslo since 1976. The record is built on the buzzing, circling patterns of his kalimba, on his voice and on West African drums. Around them the pianist Jon Balke shapes a spare Nordic sound world.
Balke was a founding member of E'Olen, N'Doye's first band in Oslo, and the two have worked together for three decades. In 1984 N'Doye's later group Tamma played in Oslo and Molde with Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell. N'Doye made his ECM debut in 1990 on Balke's Nonsentration with Oslo 13, and later appeared on Statements by Balke's percussion group Batagraf. They produced Tuki together at Rainbow Studio in Oslo between 2003 and 2005. N'Doye plays kalimba, the tamma talking drum, the m'balax drum and bongos, and sings. Balke adds keyboards and prepared piano, Per Jørgensen plays trumpet and sings, Helge Norbakken plays percussion, and two Gambian singers living in Oslo join the choruses.
The kalimba has become N'Doye's main tool for composing, and its metallic, repeating figures often prompted the words he sings, half song and half storytelling. Jahlena, sung in Wolof, means "I'm worried" and keeps asking where we are to go. The title piece takes its name from the Wolof word for travel. On Kalimba 6 Balke's prepared piano meets the thumb piano head on, two percussive keyboards from distant traditions sounding like close relatives. Jørgensen's trumpet comes forward in Loharbye and Rubato, while Balke keeps his electric colours low beneath the leader's drums and voice.
In The Guardian, John L. Walters found that the album "seems low-key at first, but it's a grower", and noted how many tunes are driven by pulsed kalimba motifs. Writing in The Irish Times in 2006, Ray Comiskey heard "a hauntingly insinuating delicacy" in the music. Other critics placed it close to minimalism, with Mark Hudson in the Daily Telegraph pointing to the Cage-like prepared piano as the source of its trance.
This is the original CD edition, ECM 1971, released in June 2006, with thirteen pieces composed by N'Doye.
