Orchestra Baobab's Made in Dakar tour of the States culminated last night with a concert at the intimate Dakota Cafe in Minneapolis that lead Minneapolis City Pages reviewer Peter S. Scholtes to exclaim: "Orchestra Baobab is the kind of band that makes critics (at least this one) resort to hyperbole and sociology: They sound like God ..."

Scholtes distills "last night's fun at the Dakota" into "terms any rocker would get: Their star player among stars, guitarist Barthelemy Atisso, delivers the same giddy, sensual pleasure in mastery as a Van Halen or a Greg Ginn."

Read the concert review at blogs.citypages.com.

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This past weekend, the band played before a rather larger crowd in Chicago: an audience of some 13,000 at Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavillion in what Chicago Tribune critic Howard Reich calls "the most jubilant concert yet" in the city's free world-music concert series Music Without Borders.

"Orchestra Baobab gleefully shattered stylistic boundaries that usually distinguish East from West, continent from continent, past from present," writes Reich. "Certainly few ensembles merge musical practices more joyously, or more skillfully, than Orchestra Baobab."

The band made note of that diverse mastery in the title of its 2002 "comeback" album Specialist in All Styles and in the song selection on their new album, which covers their many years of music-making together. What's more, says Reich: "By now, this vocal-instrumental powerhouse does more than dip into an eclectic mix of styles: It fuses them with tautly conceived, finely honed arrangements."

He concludes:

But the crowning achievement of Orchestra Baobab's show lay in the amount of musical information packed into every number. Imagine keening electric guitars, steeped-in-jazz saxophones and multiple layers of percussion interacting with clockwork precision, and you have a basic idea of the textural density of this enterprise.

To read the article, visit chicagotribune.com.

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This Thursday, the band continues its round of free outdoor concerts at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre with music from Made in Dakar, which the city's Toronto Star calls "a lively and surprisingly contemporary disc."

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Last week, during a tour stop in New York City for two free outdoor shows, the band was featured on WNYC's Soundcheck. You can listen to the episode online at wnyc.org.