I first met Malick in 1996 and I proposed to him to record a couple of songs as a test for a bigger collaboration. Initalially I wanted to combine a few Malick songs with a few Abou Thiam songs (see Ngaari Laaw) to have a halpulaar CD. However, after a few months I dropped the idea as Abou was proving too difficult to work with and anyway Malick disliked the idea.

I did all the arrangements of this CD : Malick gave me 'carte blanche' to modify his songs as I wanted and accepted a big part of my ideas, which included re-harmonization, changes of structures and additional lyrics. I also included in the arrangements the musical ideas of Martial Parisis who had been Malick's guitar-player since his debuts in Belgium.

Due to technical limitations I could not record live drums at this time so I programmed the whole drum parts with some advices from Christian Thirion. The percussion parts were played by Sidiki Camara, Mbasso Bodiang and Malick.

After the first seven songs were completed I decided to put them on a cassette, as it was cheaper than a CD and could also be sold in Senegal. This cassette was released in September 1997. Malick sent one of them to Baaba Maal, his former boss, who liked it very much and thus we got an opening to release a CD with Baaba's producer, Jumbo Vanrenen formerly of Island Records.

We recorded three more songs and the final CD was released on Yoff, Baaba Maal's new label, in August 1998.