After an eight year hiatus, one of Africa’s most celebrated musical artists is back in the recording limelight with a new album and music fans in Los Angeles recently received a privileged look at his new work.

Senegalese international star Baaba Maal was here to promote his new album, “Television,” released last month on Palm Pictures, a subsidiary of Island Records.

The album, which fuses traditional African beats with western pop and electronica and is sung in French, Italian and Maal’s native Pulaar, is the artist’s first recording since 2001’s “Mi Yewnii” (Missing You).

Maal is joined on the eight-track CD, featuring stand-outs like its title, “Cantaloupe” and “Dakar Moon,” by his English song-writing partner Barry Reynolds and singer Sabina Sciubba and keyboardist Didi Gutman of the Brooklyn-based dance outfit, Brazilian Girls.

Maal’s North American trip has included a performance at UCLA’s Herb Albert School of Music, a Tuesday night set on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and numerous radio shows in L.A. and New York.

“Television is having a huge impact on the African continent,” explained Maal.

“The television set is like a stranger you didn’t ask for coming into your living-room. You don’t care about who he is; he just seems to come from nowhere and gives you information.”

He added: “Sometimes it can be negative, like when it’s in the hands of corrupt governments. For instance, many African nations have national TV stations and that can have a bad influence because people believe a hundred percent what’s on television.

But it can also be a great instrument to educate people and spread the culture. I mean take sports like soccer and here in Senegal, wrestling. It’s a tradition and part of the culture, but through promotion wrestlers have become millionaires. No one goes out when it’s on TV and what used to happen at the corner of the village or in between two streets, now takes place in stadiums with 70,000 people.”

The cultural popularity of sport in Senegal can’t be understated as the country boasts its own Greco-Roman wrestling warriors under such stage names as “Tyson” and “Yekíni” (a famous Nigerian soccer star) whose televised bouts are watched religiously in every city, town and village in the country.

As for Maal’s eight-year absence, he puts a lot of that down “re-energizing” his spirit and in his own way spreading the traditions of his ancestry throughout the world.

“Many things were happening in my life, but I really wanted to put on this festival in my home village,” recalled Maal, a Youth Emissary for the United Nations’ Development Program.

“It’s called ‘Blues du Fleuve’ (The Blues of the River) and takes place in Podor, a town on the banks of the river Senegal that borders Mauritania, Mali and Guinea. I wanted to have musicians come and play and the media to come and discover this place. Also, working with the UN’s program, I wanted the festival to be a platform for education and health where professionals could come and sit down for two days to share ideas.”

Although Maal wasn't completely inactive on the performing front.

This June, he took part in a 50th birthday concert in London for Island Records that featured colleagues U2, Grace Jones and Sly and Robbie.

Maal’s family is Hal Pulaar, known in the English speaking world as Fulani. His father worked in the fields but was also given the honor and responsibility of using songs to call worshippers to the mosque.

Meanwhile, his mother, a musician who sang and wrote her own songs, educated her son in the musical forms of the area and encouraged him to value intelligent and thoughtful lyrics.

His musical journey has taken him from school in St. Louis, the original French colonial capital, to an art scholarship in the modern capital Dakar, and then after training with the Asly Fouta musical group he toured for two years with Griot (wandering musician) guitarist and friend Mansour Seck.

Later, after studying and living in Paris, he returned to Senegal to form his band Daande Lenol (Voice of the People).

“I was born into a family of nomadic tribes, we don’t see borders between countries,” said Maal.

“[For] 200 years these musicians would take their voices and instruments and travel from place to place. They would travel for years, and be given gold, horses or sometimes a wife. So that’s what I and Mansour said we wanted to do. We learned a lot and for me meeting different people is one of the greatest gifts in life.”