Malian music Notes from the Niger

Ok, this is the last one for now. I was browsing around the Economist and found this one too...

Malian music Notes from the Niger

Aug 18th 2005 BAMAKO AND TIMBUKTU
From The Economist print edition

The quiet influence of Lobi Traoré

MOST Saturday nights, when he is in Mali, Lobi Traoré plays the Espace Academia club in the old airport district of Bamako. The club is like a Mississippi blues joint, minus the menace. It is about the size of a garage, with painted concrete walls, a couple of flickering light bulbs, a television over a rudimentary bar (playing French soap operas and old Paris-St Germain football matches), and an audience that includes Turkish road engineers smoking fake Dunhills, and a set of Malian girls swaying gently by a cramped stage.

Mr Traoré, squat and thoughtfully glum, arrives late in the evening, just as the crickets are stilling themselves on the dust outside. He sits at this correspondent's table, under a poster of an American rapper Tupac Shakur. Sipping pineapple juice, he fixes a stare. “So, what do you think of Jackson Browne? Cool?” Mr Traoré beams. “Yes, cool.” Such are Malian inductions into its music.

Some musicologists consider the steamy malarial swamps of the Niger river in west Africa to be the real home of the blues. Nowadays, with Air France jets streaming to Paris and beyond, the musical styles cut back and forth in Bamako. Not just the local Bambara and Songhai tunes, but soul, Congolese rumba, Cuban rhythms from socialist connections, rock (though mercifully not French rock) and latterly hip hop.

Mr Traoré has something of a hip hop look himself. His cap is slightly turned to the right, and his amulet necklace, traditional in much of Mali, is etched not with star systems or Koranic verse like those of the shepherd musicians at the edge of the Sahara, but with a bling silver guitar.
When Mr Traoré finally gets up on the stage, it is crowded with his group: bass player, another guitarist who doubles on the ngoni—a four-stringed lute—a rock drummer, a traditional Malian drummer and a percussionist feverishly working the calabash. Mr Traoré sings in a flat, strangely penetrating voice, somewhere between rap and blues, alternating between Malian languages. When he plays the guitar, the entire club turns to watch.

Although Mr Traoré regularly tours Europe and was recently voted “best rock artist” by Libération, a mainstream French newspaper, and even “best world artist” by Le Monde, there has been no commercial breakthrough. Instead, his work has become a valuable raw material, a kind of musical obsidian for other artists, several of whom have remixed his songs. The same is true for other Malian stars including Habib Koite, Boubacar Traoré, Amadou and Mariam, a couple who met in Bamako's school for the blind, and a Touareg group called Tinariwen. Several members of Tinariwen, whose sensibility lies somewhere between The Clash and Jimi Hendrix in the desert, were guerrilla fighters in the Touareg insurgency in northern Mali.

Legend has it they went into battle with electric guitars on their backs. Mr Traoré is less martial. Born in a village on the banks of the Niger in 1963, a little way from Ségou, he did not belong to Mali's musician caste, who sing songs at weddings about kings of Timbuktu and are themselves feted as princes. The first guitar he saw, he says, belonged to a man being cured by Mr Traoré senior, a well-known healer. Young Lobi was captivated by the instrument, and he later drifted to Bamako to explore its possibilities. His breakthrough came in 1994 with his second album, called “Bamako”, which was produced by Ali Farka Touré, one of Mali's brightest stars.

Several more albums followed. The best is, arguably, the latest, called “The Lobi Traoré Group”, which was recorded in live sessions around Mali. Mr Traoré's strength on it, as with Malian musicianship in general, lies in the effortless mix of old ballads with modern riffs. “My music resembles the blues”, he says, “but it belongs to Mali.” He is modest, but not shy. “By the will of God, I will be famous,” he says. Hopefully so.