Record producer who helped bring African music to a worldwide audience in the 1980s
Of all the figures who manoeuvred African music into the world spotlight in the 1980s, Ibrahima Sylla, who has died after a long illness aged 57, was one of the most influential, knowledgable and tasteful, but one of the least known. In the 80s, Sylla's record shop near the Gare du Nord in Paris was a key meeting point for African music lovers, an equivalent of Sterns in London. It was not long before Sylla's new record production company, Syllart, began to co-operate with Sterns on distribution, introducing British audiences to a succession of some of the finest African popular albums of the 20th century.
The most recent, and Sylla's last work as producer, was the eighth in the series of records by the group of African and New York Latin musicians known as Africando, released weeks before Sylla's death, and as meticulously conceived and executed a triumph as all his best work.
Sylla was born in Senegal, in the southern river port of Kaolack, centre of peanut and salt export. His father was a traditional high dignitary in the Tidjaniya religious sect, known throughout west Africa, and his mother from adjacent Mali, another rich repository of traditional music. Sylla's earliest musical memories were of the traditional genealogical and praise songs sung at family celebrations by the griot minstrels who attached themselves to prominent households.
Sylla had an itinerant education, at a French school in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, in Qur'anic tradition in Chad, and travelling throughout west Africa with his father. He eventually found himself in Paris in the late 1970s, sent to study economics and management. By this time he had already developed a passion for the Cuban and Cuban-American music becoming extremely popular across Africa, and in Paris he devoted himself less to study than to the acquisition of a legendarily huge record collection.
Returning to Dakar in 1979, Sylla got a job in a recording studio owned by the son of the country's first president, Léopold Senghor, and within two years was producing his own records. Early clients included the seminal Orchestre Baobab– one of the outstanding creators of the then new mix of traditional Wolof voice and percussion with Cuban rhythm and brass, a graceful and hypnotic sound revived decades later with international success when the original band reformed.
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Other artists within Sylla's ambit at that time included the young Youssou N'Dour, later to become a world star of the new mbalax style and a Senegalese government minister, and the singer Pape Seck, a pivotal figure in the introduction of traditional sabar drums into Senegalese popular music, who was also part of the Africando project.
In 1983 Sylla moved back to Paris to continue his record production based in the shop in the rue de Rocroy, where he began to record a wide range of African artists, including the new generation of Congolese musicians then making the most popular dance music of the continent, and often chauffeuring Sylla around Paris in their spare time.
Three years later, Sylla took up the challenge of producing a record for the Malian star vocalist Salif Keita. The result, Soro (1987), combining rock and funk arrangements by the Parisian keyboardist Jean-Philippe Rykiel (son of the couturière Sonia), became an international hit, a benchmark for modernised African music and greatly enhanced Sylla's reputation.
For the rest of his life, Sylla continued to produce a steady and varied stream of fine recordings, by both traditional and popular artists from across west and central Africa, frequently achieving a charmed combination of high quality and commercial success, and almost as frequently guiding the records' protagonists in fruitful new directions. A case in point was his nurturing of the collaboration between the Senegalese singer Thione Seck and Indian and Egyptian orchestras on the album Orientation (released in 2005, but recorded a few years earlier), an idea later taken up with equal success by N'Dour.
A short, decisive and undemonstrative man, Sylla was to be found in later years, when not commuting between Paris, Dakar, Abidjan or Kinshasa, working from a modest office in the shadow of Montmartre, fielding phone calls constantly, deploying his extensive list of contacts, and listening to and reflecting intently on whichever musical project he was engaged upon. "I have two rules," he once said, "never sign a contract with an artist for more than one album, and never do what people expect you to."
He is survived by his wife, Tapa, and five children, Binetou, Fanta, Hassan, Sadio and Yasmina
• Ibrahima Sylla, record producer, born 2 April 1956; died 30 December 2013