Blog Meridian

at 8:28 PM

My music is about where I come from and our way of life and it is full of important messages for Africans. In the West perhaps this music is just entertainment and I don't expect people to understand. But I hope some might take the time to listen and learn. --Ali Farka Touré, liner notes to Niafunké

Partly to play catch-up with the Mali Mondays series, and partly to drive my reader(s) not yet persuaded of this week's musician's greatness either to the links below or to madness because I keep mentioning him all the time, here are selections from two of Ali Farka Touré's finest albums.

The marketing angle for Touré's music, at least in this country, has been to call it (and that of other bands from northern Mali, such as Tinariwen) "Desert Blues." It's one of those labels that is initially helpful; those of you familiar with the Howlin' Wolf/John Lee Hooker branch of American blues will quickly hear certain melodic similarities. However, the more one listens to Touré, the more one will hear the differences rather than the similarities. Both musics sprang from the same root but headed in different directions: a musical diaspora mirroring the human one. But having said that, I admit to taking Touré's music with me whenever I drive through the Mississippi delta region that gave birth to what we now call the Blues: something about its austere sound and lyrics borne of community and labor and struggle against oppression from all sides--natural and human in origin--seems to me a just-about-perfect soundtrack for that landscape.

Niafunké

As with any art form, some music we like "just because;" some we like because we recognize its greatness; and some we like because it rearranges something inside us such that the world looks a little different after we've heard it. For me, Niafunké falls into that third category. The first album by African musicians I ever bought was Ladysmith Black Mambazo's Shaka Zulu: a gorgeous album of the South African group's beautiful a capella singing, to be sure, but for many years it remained for me a pretty piece of musical exotica and nothing more. It didn't prompt me to seek out any more "African" music. But from the first time I heard the opening notes of Niafunké (the name of Touré's hometown, on the banks of the Niger at the edge of the Sahara), I was drawn, to the extent it was possible for a white guy from Texas, to hear this music not as exotica but on its own terms. Though you'll find Touré's music in the "World Music" or "International Music" bins at your local record emporium, it announces from the opening notes of the first track, "Ali's Here," that it comes from a place in the world, and not from some collaboration between some expatriates and European record producers. It's that sense of rootedness that makes Niafunké (and Savane, below) such compelling listening. These albums made me want to hear more . . . and, yes, post stuff about what I heard.

Here are four tracks, along with the accompanying liner notes (and lyrics, in some cases):

"Ali's Here" (3:17): "This is a message to my people that honey does not only taste good in one mouth. I'm here and I'm going to share it. Everything I have gained through my music goes back into the land for the people." [Touré identified himself as a farmer; at the time of recording Niafunké, he had not recorded in five years and had all but retired from performing. Even as he recorded this album, he also tended his fields. Touré also financed irrigation projects for his city and had even served as mayor there. How many more reasons does one need to admire this guy?]

"Mali Dje" (5:41): [Lyrics] "People of Mali,/Let us remember that God/Opened our mouths/To put two things into them;/either food to live/or sand to die./It is often said/that patience is a golden road./It is certainly true./But we must not fold our arms/and let nature take its course./No matter what it costs/Survival is all."

"Saukare" (2:51): This is a wedding song. [Lyrics] "We cannot stop laughing/We speak face to face/Secret nights/Rare nights, Saukare/I will offer you my heart/African night, Saukare/I will offer you a bull, my love/The secrets of the halls by the light/of the moon/Saukare, we will join our destinies/To live and die together."

"Howkouna" (5:59): I've noted before that this song has one of the most remarkable vocal lines I've ever heard, the way it works its way down the scale like water seeking its own path across a surface. [Lyric] "Worthy sons of Mali/Let us set to work/Only work can set men free/Men, women, young and old/Our country needs your stones/to build it/While there is still time/Fishermen, farmers,/Shopkeepers and students/Do you understand the priorities/of the hour?/Change of attitude comes first/And the rest will follow automatically."

Savane

Touré died from bone cancer in March of 2006; Savane was released in July of that same year. Whereas Niafunké was recorded in the town of the same name in a (very) makeshift studio (an abandoned mud building, with electricity supplied by a generator) and Touré's electric guitar on some tracks the only electric instrument (all the other instruments are traditional to Mali), Savane was recorded in Mali's capital, Bamako, and has a fuller sound, with electric bass on most tracks, larger choruses, and even, on a couple of tracks, harmonica and saxophone. Thus, there's a sense on this album of a pushing against Niafunké's boundaries, though without compromising that earlier album's sense of place.

"Erdi" (4:43): This song's lurching melody, almost as though it's stuck on some middle section in some longer melodic line, reminds me of Led Zeppelin's arrangement of "When the Levee Breaks." The song praises the first-born son of the family, for, "like in life, one can have only one life without children, or without a first child." [Spoken words] "First son who has never been matched/Thank you for what never ends, yes!"

"Yer Bounda Fara" (4:18): [from the liner notes] "A song about those who have been elected. They should work for those who have chosen them, and not for themselves. This song, in the Sonrai language, attempts to make a comparison between the Mali of yesterday--characterised by dictatorship and corruption--and the democratic Mali of today."

"Soya" (4:39): [Lyric] "Daughter of my heart/Future woman of the Peul people/Soya, I really love you/Future woman of the Arma (Sonrai)/Soya, I really love you/And with an honest love//Don't be angry, forgive me/Your beauty, like that of a she-devil,/Soya, I love you completely/But forgive me if I have offended you/You are an incarnation of the dove,/symbol of peace"

"Machengoidi" (3:35): Musically and lyrically, an extraordinary work-song--but one that summons the whole country to labor . . . and to account for itself. [Lyric] "What is your contribution?/What is your contribution to the development of your country?//(chorus) Who has worked?/What has he done?//I am a peasant, I have worked the earth/I have produced crops and cotton//(chorus) Who else? What have you done?//Me? I am a teacher/All my life, I have tried to share my knowledge.//(chorus) Who else? What have you done?//We are one/We are one and indivisible."

at 8:22 PM

Nonesuch/World Circuit

[Now expanded to include some comments on the sound of this instrument.]

("Monday?" you're thinking. Yeah, yeah. School. Other blog. Dog-walking. Lay off already, and enjoy this.)

For the next few Mali Mondays, I'll be posting on specific albums that I find particularly moving and that you might, as well. Some of those future posts will be on samplers; I want to begin, though, with an album only a couple of months old.

I have posted on Diabaté before. He is by consensus the world's greatest player of the kora, the 21-string west African harp. Diabaté's stature is due not just to his virtuosity but also to how he has expanded the kora's repertoire (this year he is touring with Bjork) without betraying its traditions that reach back centuries. The Mandé Variations isn't a retrospective, in the usual sense, of Diabaté's career; it is, instead, something more like a collection of songs that demonstrates in miniature his contributions to kora playing--both the deepening of its traditions and the expanding of the horizons of those traditions. In other words, the album is by Diabaté, but its subject is the kora.

The three pieces I've selected for this post should give an indication of this album's range. They are long, as are all the songs on the album (the shortest one is 5:45), but they are far from tedious. Also, this is an instrumental album, which may be an advantage for those of us who, as they've listened to other Mali Monday musical selections, have found ourselves wondering just what we've been listening to. (Just to reassure on that point: the vast majority of Malian music's lyrics are affirming songs about such things as the importance of community, social cohesion, the value of work on behalf of the nation, pleas for greater freedom for women . . . emo or death-metal, it is not.) Finally, the sound: just Diabaté and his kora: rich, flowing, repeating melodic phrases dominated by the mid-range and bass punctuated by lightning-fast glissandos of high-end notes. He plays two different koras, each with a different tuning, depending on the song. What's fascinating to me about its sound is the relative prominence (compared to other harp-like instruments) of the bass--of course, that has to do with the fact that the kora has only about ~~a quarter~~ half the number of strings that harps used in Western orchestras have. It's not a "dreamy" sound of the sort associated with those harps; it's a more beat-heavy sound, though not as overtly percussive as Issa Bagayogo's kamele n'goni.

"Djourou Kara Nany" (6:53). According to Diabaté's father, this is the Arabic name for Alexander the Great. This suggests that this song is quite old indeed.

"Ali Farka Touré" (6:20): This piece is quite unusual in that it was completely improvised in the studio, "inspired by my feelings of sadness but admiration for the man."

"Cantelowes" (6:57): Dedicated to a friend in whose house on Cantelowes Road in London Diabaté stayed on his first visit to the UK, it's a reworking and rerecording of a song from his first album for solo kora, Kaira, but with a familiar musical surprise awaiting the listener at its opening.

If you like what you've heard, I recommend buying from the Nonesuch website. From them, not only do you get the CD (whose booklet is wonderfully informative not just on the songs but also on kora tradition and instruments), you also get free mp3 downloads of the album. Even with the CD on sale at Amazon for $13 and downloads for $8.99 (which, however, doesn't include the CD's opening song), you'd end up paying several dollars more if you wanted both. If I could do it over again . . .

at 1:24 AM

Image found here.

Official website (adventurously translated from the French).

From Bamako (Mali's capital, in the south of the country) and the child of musician parents, Sidibé got her start as a backing singer for Oumou Sangaré. She has also provided backing vocals for Issa Bagayogo. Like Sangaré, Sidibé's subjects are women's issues and problems confronting Malian youth; like both Sangaré and Bagayogo, she has melded traditional instruments and song structures into heady dance music. Nimissa, her first album, is more obviously techno in its approach; Mussoya, her most recent, is more subdued and, to my ears, owes its more acoustic approach to Rokia Traoré.

Sidibé is well-known and well-regarded in her country, but her music is difficult to find in this country. However, samples and downloads of both albums are available via Calabash music.

Here is the video for "Foulbé," from Mussoya:

at 12:12 AM

Image found here.

Official website (in French)

allmusic page.

Wikipedia entry

Keita, born in 1949, is, along with the late Ali Farka Touré, one of the patriarchs of Malian popular music. In Mali, even being of royal descent is sometimes not enough to guarantee success. A direct descendant of Sundiata Keita, the founder of the Mali Empire in the 13th century, Salif Keita was ostracized by his family and the community because of his albinism (thought to be a sign of bad luck). Strike two against him was when he announced his intention to become a musician: in the southern part of Mali, where Keita is from, the social caste system of the time determined that only griots could be musicians. Apparently, royalty can't do anything they darn well please. A gifted guitarist and a marvelous singer, Keita began his career in Europe; a few years ago, though, he returned to Mali to live.

Keita's albums in the '90s tended toward the slickly-produced, sounding like Western dance music with only a patina of West African stylings. But with Moffou (2002) (Amazon link is below), he returned to traditional instrumentation for both dance numbers and quieter pieces.

Here are two videos. In the first, "Folon," he demonstrates his elegant guitar playing and his affecting high tenor:

In this one, a video for "Madan," Keita, his band (all-acoustic) and singers get their groove on. This is from the album Moffou, which I cannot recommend highly enough--and not just for the quality of the music, but for how beautifully the record has been engineered: it has a great live feel to it that makes it feel as though the music is in your lap and not just coming out some speakers.

at 9:42 PM

Onstage with his kamele n'goni. Image found here.

Biography, rather adventurously translated from the original French.

Page at Six Degrees Records.

I'm running a bit late in posting this installment--apologies.

I no longer remember just how it was that five years ago I came to learn about Sya, Bagayogo's first album but second U.S. release. But no matter. It's in large measure due to my hearing Sya back then that caused me to want to seek out more music from Mali and, now, want to share a bit of that with you in these posts.

Of the artists I've posted about so far here, Bagayogo is the one who most fully embraces Western styles and production values in his music-making. But what makes Sya so striking is that "embrace" isn't quite the right word: it's more like a seamless melding of Malian and Western-pop sensibilities on the common ground of a groove that will. not. stop. but doesn't lapse into thump-thumpiness. The overall feel is that of music that, as stated in the Six Degrees link above regarding his third album, Tassoumakan, is "gritty, organic . . . , even when at its most electronic. There's no sense of something Western being imposed on a native tradition." It feels genuinely new yet familiar, too.

By way of illustration, here are the first two tracks from Sya, the title track and "Gnangran." In each, you can hear Bagayogo's kamele n'goni's simultaneous melodic and percussive qualities to it, adding yet another layer of rhythm to each song.

Speaking personally, his U.S. debut (but actually his second album), Timbuktu and most recent album, Tassoumakan, tilt the musical balance West-ward a bit much for my tastes. Sya's music feels spacious, giving the record a "live," almost acoustic feel, but these records seem intent on filling up those spaces. They're not at all bad records; they're just not Sya. Tassoumakan was released in 2004; nothing more recent turned up while I gathered material for this post.

Alas, no performance videos this time. The one live performance video consists of him clapping his hands onstage with a bunch of other people at a performance in California. For those interested, though, this takes you to some videos for songs from Timbuktu and Tassoumakan; they range in quality from cheap to state of the art . . . and one in particular will be startling to us in the States who have become attuned to and revulsed by certain caricatures of black people. Just so you know.

at 8:15 AM

Image found here.

Tartit on Divanoprod (scroll down the right-hand side to find the link to their page)

Wikipedia entry

Like Tinariwen, whom I posted about here, Tartit (which means "unity") is also comprised of Tuareg people, and the two bands occasionally perform together. Also like Tinariwen, Tartit also formed in a refugee camp. The chief differences, though, are that Tartit is more acoustically-oriented than Tinariwen, and Tartit is female-led (it's hard to see in the video below, but the women in the group are unveiled, but the men are veiled). In Tuareg society, women have relatively more power than is true in most west African cultures: they can choose their own husbands and have the power to divorce them as well.

Tartit's music is, on the whole, less accessible to Western listeners than that of the other musicians I've posted so far, with its emphasis on single, chanted lines. However, some of the songs on their most recent album, Abacabok, also include electric guitars, which gives their songs a fuller and smoother sound.

But a Tartit performance is also about dance as well as music. Here is part of their performance from the FMM Sines 2007, a music festival in Sines, Portugal:

There is also this video, shot during Tartit's performance at the Festival in the Desert, a 2003 gathering of, mostly, Malian and other western Saharan musicians. Not your ordinary rock & roll festival, as you'll see. Here is more about the Festival's goals.

at 1:50 AM

Image found here.

Official site (which offers a free downloadable track, the lovely down-tempo "NeBife," from her most recent album, Oumou).

Biography

Along with Rokia Traoré, Sangaré is among the best-known female Malian singers in a country whose musical traditions are still dominated by men. Would-be female singers still often meet with stiff resistance from their families and achieve any sort of career at all through sheer force of will (Traoré is an exception to this, though). That sense of having earned her role under duress, I think, is easily visible in Sangaré; no shrinking violet, she. She is a singer of Wassoulou, a contemporary genre of songs, relatively pop-oriented in feel, that deal with themes that confront women in West Africa: the freedom to choose a mate; childbirth; polygamy; etc. She is an advocate for women's rights in a place where the most fundamental of those rights are still very much at issue.

Here are performances of two songs at the Africa Live: Roll Back Malaria concert:

"Tienadjan"

and "Wayenia":

at 12:45 AM

Image found here.

Official website

Wikipedia entry

"If West Africa or Mali were a living being, griots would be the blood running through the veins."

Griots are dynastic musicians: for these families, music is a trade passed down from parents to children. Diabaté's family's involvement in music, including his son, totals 72(!) generations in all. His father was a master of the kora, the versatile and ethereal west African harp. Diabaté himself, as you'll see in this promotional video for his new album, Mandé Variations, not only perpetuates this music, some of it centuries old, he also expands its idiom to incorporate other African and Western musics.

The video is long-ish but well worth the time: it's part biography, part instruction in how to play the kora, part how to build koras, and a discussion of the album as well:

And one more: Diabaté accompanied by Danny Thompson of Ketama on bass, included because of the close-ups of Diabaté's fingers as they play and because the song is beautiful:

Also: Diabaté's "big band," the Symmetric Orchestra, a pan-West African assemblage of players, is not to be missed. Here is an NPR story about the Orchestra, with three full-length tracks from their album, Boulevard de l'Independance

at 1:06 AM

Image taken by Thomas Dorn and found here.

Official site

The second installment of Mali Monday features a band I have mentioned on this blog before and whose most-recent album, Aman Iman: Water is Life, was among my selections for the best music of 2007. The YouTube video linked to below is a documentary intended to promote Aman Iman (all the music you'll hear from it and Part II, below, are from that album), but it also gives you a strong sense of the geographical, cultural and historical contexts out of which Tinariwen was born. Powerful viewing.

Part II of the documentary is here

An observation:
Once you hear this band's music, you'll sense that its emphasis is on groove, that there is most often only a lyrical difference demarcating verses and choruses. Though there is space set aside for instrumental solos, the playing during those breaks tends not to be at all flashy. Still, you'd think a rock-n-roll guitarist steeped in the blues and attuned to world musics would fit well with this sort of music. Someone like, say, Carlos Santana. You would think. I'll let you find and listen to the results for yourselves--in the YouTube section of Tinariwen's website, they've linked to two performances where they shared a stage with Santana, and I made it only half way through one of them. The awkwardness of their performance is such that you can't pass it off as being unrehearsed (all Santana was called upon to do was improvise leads). I'm no musicologist, so what follows is mostly speculation on my part: We in the West have groove-based music, too, but the groove is in the rhythm section. We tend not to associate the melody with the groove; that leaves plenty of room for a soloist to do his/her thing and not interfere with anyone. Tinariwen's music, though, is of a piece: everything counts; even the singing is part of its groove. Because there's nothing extraneous, there's no real space for a soloist. Hence that painfully awkward-sounding performance--there was really nothing, musically-speaking, for one of the world's greatest guitarists to do during his performances with Tinariwen.

None of this is a criticism of anyone, by the way. It's more an expression of surprise that it didn't work--that it didn't come close to working. It's also a useful reminder that, as similar as these musics from Mali sound to the U.S.'s tradition of blues and blues-based musics, their differences lie deep below those surfaces.

at 2:00 AM

The master guitarist takes his ease. Click to enlarge the image. Originally found here.

Official website

Wikipedia entry

Long-time visitors here I have mentioned and linked to Touré's music in several posts. It seems appropriate, therefore, to kick off Mali Mondays with the undisputed king of his nation's music.

The Making of Niafunké (click on the 4th thumbnail-pic from the bottom-left). Both an ad for this stunning album and a glimpse of the life of this man: a former mayor of the town for whom the album is named and a farmer growing rice in the desert. Roots music indeed.

And this clip from a multi-part documentary called African Musical Legends (for which a couple of hours of searching failed to yield further information). It's here, though, because you get a good view of the calabash and njurkle (a small monochord guitar), both typical Malian instruments.

I hope you enjoy what you hear.

at 8:05 PM

Official website.

"Sara," from Bowmboï.

This is a sneak peek for "Mali Monday," something I hope to remember to do often enough that regular visitors here will come to look forward to/dread.