I've heard those early recordings, and they're quite spare, just the two voices and Amadou's mellifluous guitar playing. Even so, the sound they established then is still very much apparent in the maximalist, pan-global pop records they've made recently. They began adding a band in the mid-90s, finally traveling to Europe late in the decade to record. It's this transitional phase, where the duo began to try on a dizzying array of styles and incorporate a broad range of instrumentation, that's covered on The Magic Couple, a sharp retrospective that shows clearly that they didn't arrive at Dimanche à Bamako and Welcome to Mali by accident. The set draws from three albums, Sou Ni Tile, Tje Ni Mousso, and Wati, recorded from 1997-2001 and released in 1999, 2000, and 2003, respectively. (It has a very different tracklisting from Je Pense à Toi, another A&M best-of released several years ago that covers roughly the same period.)

The tracks of the three LPs are jumbled together in favor of flow, and the period of recording covered here is so distinct and unified that the lack of chronological tracking isn't really a big deal. Wati is only represented by two tracks, but they're clear arrows pointing to their watershed. "Sarama (La Charmante)" is generously splattered with tumbling jazz piano, an extremely unusual texture for Malian music, while "Poulo (Les Peuls)", a song about an ethnic group from the Sahel region more widely known as the Fulani, has a hyperspace beat that mixes kit drumming, slashing guitar, and traditional flute and stirs. Flute also drives the hard funk of Tje Ni Mousso's "Beki Miri", a song that finds Amadou leaning on his wah pedal as he and Mariam sing in unison.

Tje Ni Mousso is the funkiest of the three albums drawn from here, and it produces what might be the compilation highlight in "Chantez-Chantez". The song is an interstellar Afrofunk jam, riding a heavy, sped-up "Green Onions" groove from Mali to Memphis and back. Amadou reels off a brilliant guitar solo that's enough to make me a little sad that his guitar has been relatively played down on their last two albums. At the other end of the spectrum is "Je Pense a Toi", one of the duo's most stunningly gorgeous songs. The couple sings its way in and out of harmony over simple hand percussion while Amadou's snaking guitar trades leads with a cello played in a mixture of Arabic and European styles.

The Magic Couple is a good overview of the middle period of Amadou & Mariam's recording career, and should serve a lot of listeners who got on board with Dimanche or Welcome quite well. If you like Amadou's guitar work, you'll be happy to hear a lot more of it right out front here than on their two most well-known albums. If you're very into the group's sound, you might do better to skip past this and simply pick up all three albums-- they're still available, and they're all very solid. If all you need is the overview, though, this will do the trick.