Première Anthologie de la Musique Malienne: Le Mali des Sables, les Songoy (1970)
10 tracks, 51 minutes
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The Première Anthologie de la Musique Malienne is a legendary set of six recordings by Bärenreiter-Musicaphon from Germany. They weren’t quite the earliest studio recordings made in Mali, but as far as I recall, they were the first recordings commissioned by the Malian government. The country was only 10 years independent by the time these records were released, and they were meant to instil in Malians a pride based on the heterogeneity of their new nation. So, of the six recordings there is an album by the Instrumental Ensemble of Mali, whose members represented a broad range of Malian cultures; one by Fanta Damba, a Bamana jeli (griot) who was considered the best singer of her generation; Cords Anciennes, a famous recording – the first ever – of instrumental kora duets and trios featuring the masters Sidiki Diabaté, Djelimady Sissoko and Batourou Sekou Kouyaté among others; and then three compilations of field recordings arranged by ethnicity, one on the music of the Mandinka, one of the Fula (or Peul) and one of the Songhai. All six are exquisite records of wonderful music and I urge everyone to listen to all of them.
Buuutttt, I’ve chosen to highlight the Songhai album in particular, for no special reason other than it’s quite rare nowadays to hear the ‘traditional’ music of the Songhai, who mostly live around the Niger bend in the north of Mali, including the cities of Timbuktu and Gao. There is quite a lot of Songhai music available nowadays – guitarist Ali Farka Touré is probably the most famous exponent – but so much of that music takes a lot of cues from rock and blues. That’s not a slight either, a lot of it is absolutely brilliant, but it does mean that the older roots of the style are heard much less outside of Mali than the rocked-up versions. This album gives a glimpse into what those traditions sounded like in the 1960s.
Because the album is part of an anthology, it makes sense that this compilation traverses a number of styles from the Songhai people. Most of the pieces are songs or recitations, performed by men and women and usually with the accompaniment of the ngoni, the boat-shaped lute found throughout Mali (although I don’t know the Songhai name for the instrument, sorry). Because there’s such a variety, each piece has a different aspect to it that you should definitely check out, but there are two tracks that really electrify me.
The track ‘Takamba’ (which is actually the name of the style, rather than the piece) is simply stunning. It’s a solo ngoni piece and it’s 7000% blues. I sat down today and tried to play it on the guitar. Obviously I couldn’t do it (my guitar skills leave much to be desired), but what was clear was that all the way through, the ngoni is playing exactly what we would call the blues scale, every one of the notes lines up, all the bends are in the same places along the scale, and even the hammer-ons and pull-offs are exactly what would be expected from a delta blues player. There are even points where you could slip right into the riffs from ‘Rollin’ Stone’ and there would be no clashes in there at all.
There’s also a really fascinating track, here entitled simply ‘Moorish Guitar’. Most of the tracks have at least a small description of the song, its lyrics and its cultural meaning (although the description for ‘Takamba’ is literally just ‘Played on a three-stringed guitar’), but this one says nothing other than it was recorded at Banamba. So this is a guess, but from what my ears are telling me and the ‘title’ of the piece, this is a Songhoi musician playing the oud in a sort of half-ngoni way, including tapping the soundboard of the instrument to provide percussion, and of course with all the bluesiness along with it all.
One of the reasons Malian music has been so successful internationally is because there’s just so much of it, with such huge variety of different styles and sounds to be heard across the length and breadth of the country. If you want to have a little bit of a primer to the more traditional side of things in Malian music, the Première Anthologie de la Musique Malienne is a great place to start.
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