Defying labels, Alune Wade shapes his own genre

Alune Wade’s face lit up when I asked when he first heard “Watermelon Man,” by jazz legend Herbie Hancock. He was 10 years old and living in Senegal, the singer, multi-instrumentalist, composer and filmmaker told me as we talked over Zoom. “I said ‘Wow! That’s so beautiful,’” he recalled.

He’d heard the song on a French commercial in the days before the internet, and it took him a while to track down the original recording. When he finally did, he was struck by the horns — a sound he’d always felt drawn to as the son of a military-band horn player. Decades later, during the COVID lockdown, Wade finally made his own version of the tune, passing files back and forth with musician friends in Cuba, New York, Brazil, Rwanda, Cameroon and Senegal.

That reimagining became the first single off his album “New African Orleans,” released  in May. On Nov. 19, Wade brings the project to the Cedar Cultural Center, where audiences will see a 30-minute cut of his documentary “Tukki, From Roots to Bayou,” co-directed with French filmmaker Vincent Le Gal, before Wade takes the stage with his band. With a photobook arriving this spring, the broader project traces the trans-Atlantic story through food, music and spirituality.

As a kid, Wade didn’t divide the world into categories like jazz, Afrobeat or pop. “I just wanted to listen to music,” he said. His mother favored Malian and traditional Senegalese music; his sisters gravitated toward French and American pop; his uncles played Miles Davis and reggae from Peter Tosh or Bob Marley; his father listened to Beethoven, Bach and Ravel.

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Wade has lived in Paris for nearly two decades, having left Senegal in 2004 with plans to set up meetings for his first album. But once he arrived, the city’s dense artistic ecosystem took over. He kept meeting musicians, getting invited on gigs and finding new collaborators. Gradually, France became home.

In Paris he has crossed paths with artists from Austria, Brazil, the United States, and far beyond, collaborating with top jazz figures like Marcus Miller and Joe Zawinul of Weather Report. “It’s easier for me to live in Paris because that’s helped me a lot to have those connections between continents,” he said. “There’s just like, more people from all over the world in Paris.” As a young man he had dreamed of studying at Berklee College of Music in Boston, but his family ultimately decided it was too expensive.

How Alune Wade became what he heard

Wade says his musical style has grown through this steady stream of encounters. “It’s like when you eat food, we become what we eat,” he said. “As a musician, we become what we hear.” His collaborations have pulled in groove, funk, and jazz idioms from across the globe. “That’s why people cannot yet find a name for my music,” he said.

Sometimes he sings in the style of a Senegalese or Malian griot; sometimes he sounds like a crooner; sometimes he channels Nigerian musical vocabularies — despite not being Nigerian himself. “I never put borders around music,” he said. “Because when you say to someone, ‘my music is jazz,’ you just limited his vision of what you are playing. I just play my music and let the people describe what they think my music is.”

His partnership with Le Gal on “Tukki, From Roots to Bayou” deepened that boundary-breaking approach. The film explores the musical and spiritual connections between West Africa and New Orleans. Its origins trace back to 2012, when Wade organized a jazz festival on Gorée Island in Senegal, bringing in musicians from Martinique, Mali, France and the United States. The idea was to create a space for artists of the African diaspora to return to the land and reconnect with their roots.

A kinship with New Orleans

Gorée, once the largest slave-trading center on the African coast, made the experience especially charged. The festival clarified for Wade that it was time to look across the Atlantic. That conversation accelerated when Marcus Miller recruited him in 2014 to work on “Afrodeezia,” an album exploring African roots from an African American perspective. Wade became interested in the reverse journey: as someone born in Africa, he wanted to explore African branches in the United States. “We have many similarities between West Africa and the United States, particularly New Orleans,” he said, pointing to food, voodoo spirituality and music. “It was a moment to shine a light on what we share with Americans.”

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The film begins in Nigeria, moves on to Dakar and Saint-Louis in Senegal, then travels to New Orleans before crossing the Atlantic again to Ghana. Wade and Le Gal are currently submitting the feature-length documentary to festivals, while also using a 30-minute version for music engagements — including their upcoming appearance at the Cedar Cultural Center.

Wade says he feels a natural kinship with communities in New Orleans. “They love family,” he said. “They want to get the love from other people. They love when they know people love them and people give them respect… we are like that in Senegal.” While filming, he was struck by how many people wanted to help — and how often he’d meet someone who looked uncannily like a member of his own family. “They are like my sisters, like they just left Africa yesterday, but they didn’t even know where Senegal was.”  

The experience reinforced the purpose of his wider project: “to make our history, or American history, more rich and more beautiful,” he said.

“An Evening with Alune Wade” takes place at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 19 at Cedar Cultural Center. ($25 advance, $30 show.) More info here.

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