348: Savane, by Ali Farka Touré

Ali Farka Touré (Mali)
Savane (2006)
13 tracks, 59 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

In 1961, a compilation of 16 Robert Johnson tracks returned him to the popular consciousness and inspired a whole load of white kids to become rock musicians. 23 years after his death, that album enshrined Robert Johnson as The King of the Delta Blues Singers. Released just four months after his own death, the cover of Savane proclaims Ali Farka Touré as the ‘King of the Desert Blues Singers.’ It’s an ultimate superlative and, as with Johnson’s title, it’s hard to argue that it is undeserved.

For most music fans, Ali Farka Touré was the first time they’d encountered the concept of the ‘African blues.’ When his albums of his voice-and-guitar renditions of the traditional Songhoi style were re-released in the UK in 1986, it was an absolute revelation. Music fans, journalists and DJs fell off their chairs at this wonderful, hither-to unknown (to them) music that sounded (to them) so reminiscent of the blues, especially John Lee Hooker’s drone-based delta style but with the high-pitched, slightly Arab-influenced vocal melodies of the Sahara desert. In fact, for most of the time, Ali claimed never to have heard blues music until he came to Europe in the late 1980s…that doesn’t appear to be exactly true, but then Ali was known for often speaking in deep metaphors and near-impenetrable riddles. It’s quite possible that he didn’t consider blues to be a style of music at all; for him it was just a subgenre of his own.

By the time it had come to his last album, though, there was no doubt that Ali had taken blues as a vital component into his sound. For me, Savane is Ali Farka Touré’s masterpiece, and he thought so too. He was dying as he made it, and he knew it; there was no point in leaving any of the stops un-pulled. But instead of filling it with American or European guests such as those he’d worked with in the past, this one was all about him. There are still big names on the disc – Bassekou Kouyaté on ngoni, Afel Bocoum on backing vocals, Pee Wee Ellis on tenor sax and Little George Sueref on harmonica – but they are all working for Ali, prostrating themselves musically at his giant’s feet.

The whole album is gloriously cool. Ali’s voice has a lower pitch than he had 20 years earlier, but it means he can get to a menacing growl when he wants to. His guitarwork is sublime, whether he uses acoustic or electric, and his bandleadership is beyond reproach – there is not one solo or one lick that is out of place. Whether the tracks are in a stripped-back and traditional mode with just guitar, ngoni and calabash behind him, or a full-on rolling desert blues explosion like the opening track ‘Erdi’, which sees the one-string njarka fiddle trading lines with the blues harp, all of it is fit to explode your expectations.

When you know that a work is going to be your last, it’s got to be a good one. Ali Farka Touré didn’t want to leave his fans wanting, and so he recorded a blockbuster. He never lived to see it released, but he did get to give the final approval weeks before he left. After decades of creating music that made jaws drop around the world, what an awesome way to close it with a bang. Whether of Songhoi music, a nebulous ‘desert blues’ or just his own wonderful style, Ali Farka Touré was, without a doubt, the King.

331: Now, by Electro Bamako

Electro Bamako (Mali/France)
Now (2015)
12 tracks, 50 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

I opened my review of Now by Electro Bamako in the dearly departed fRoots Magazine with ‘Phwoar! Now this is an album,’ and that much really cannot be disputed (although you’re welcome to try).

The premise is simple: it’s wassoulou music from the streets of Bamako, represented here by the voice and kamelengoni harp, meets underground club music, courtesy of Damien Traini and Marc Minell from France. As a fusion, this one ain’t big and ain’t clever. It doesn’t break any major boundaries, and nothing about it particularly leaps out as a surprising, first-of-its-kind, turn up for the books. When you go into this album, you know what you’re going to get, even right down to the band’s name.

But it sure is funky. Music doesn’t have to innovate wildly at every turn to still be a bloody good time, and I feel like this album exemplifies that. Maybe the artists involved wouldn’t necessarily agree with me, and maybe they’d be put out at that assessment, but a good album is a good album, and Now is. It does everything right. Every groove it layers up is interesting and full of vibe, the Malian element is pronounced and treated with dignity while still chopping it and changing it to suit the transcontinental context, and it has beats for days. If you got rid of the three superfluous ‘radio edit’ versions at the end (the only thing I can fault of the album), it’s also a tight 40 minutes – just long enough for a satisfying time without dragging.

Now won’t create a new futuristic way of telling the time, but it’s definitely an album you can set your watch by. This is one to enjoy with no complications and no hesitations. And, after all, isn’t that what we all want from our music listening experiences, most of the time?

309: Farima, by Bamba Wassoulou Groove

Bamba Wassoulou Groove (Mali)
Farima (2015)
11 tracks, 61 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Mali does guitars well. A list of great Malian guitarists would be as long as my leg, and there’s always forward-thinking young musicians just waiting to rise through the ranks too. It helps that there are so many different guitar styles in the country: there’s the Songhai blues of Ali Farka Touré, the Tuareg essouf of Tinariwen, the metropolitan funk of Amadou Bagayoko, the Cuban-influenced dance-band style of Djelimady Tounkara, the Afro-rock of the (confusingly-named, considering this list’s first entry) band Songhoy Blues, and on and on and on. One of the most exciting Malian guitar bands I’ve seen in the last few years play Wassoulou music from the south-west of the country. That band is – obviously, I mean, come on – Bamba Wassoulou Groove.

Bamba Wassoulou Groove are a spiritual continuation of the legendary Super Djata Band, which was fronted by guitarist Zani Diabaté. When Zani died in 2011, Super Djata percussionist Bamba Dembélé took on the role as bandleader of the reformed ensemble and continued the good work. Just because it was led by a percussionist doesn’t mean the guitar is any less front and centre, though. In fact, it makes up most of the sound.

On Farima, the defining sound is of its three guitars – two electrics (Baïni Diabaté and ex-Rail Band member Moussa Diabaté) and an electro-acoustic (Dramane Diarra); live they also play with a bass guitarist too. It works so well because each of them plays their own thing, and they all do it at the same time. Sometimes the parts can be as distinct as solo, riff and rhythm parts, but usually they’re all playing a different melody. It never sounds chaotic, however, because their lines interlock in the most satisfying ways. When they all hit that groove together, they can sound like one big, stringed balafon, an effect which is even more uncanny on the three tracks that actually feature a balafon.

That’s not the only instrument that is brought to mind by the technique of the guitars. The Wassoulou style is all based around the sound of the kamalengoni bridge-harp, which itself is evolved from the powerfully spiritual donsongoni, the hunter’s harp. These instruments have a very twangy, percussive sound, and although that distinctive timbre isn’t present in this line-up, the guitars settled into the riff provide the same driving and swinging backdrop that allows the singer to push onwards into different territories.

Mix those things up with healthy doses of rock, blues and Latin music, and Bamba Wassoulou Groove pick out a proper storm with a whirlwind of strings. There’s always more great Malian guitar music waiting to be heard and this group’s wonderful and classy take on Wassoulou music is no exception – if you’ve not experienced it before, you’re in for a treat.

271: Kayira, Vol. 2, by Awa Kassemady Diabate

Awa Kassemady Diabate (Mali)
Kayira, Vol. 2
4 tracks, 46 minutes
Awesome Tapes from Africa

One of the biggest and most hyped albums on the world music scene in the past few years has been Ladilikan by Trio Da Kali and Kronos Quartet. Globally-minded string quartet the Kronos Quartet we already know, but Trio Da Kali are a relatively new outfit, that were put together specifically for that project. Ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán brought three of Mali’s most exciting jeli (griot) musicians that as well as being well-versed in traditional music, had also worked in other fields – there was Fodé Lassana Diabaté, a balafon player extraordinaire who has adapted the ancient wooden xylophone to reflect the influence of jazz on his music; Mamadou Kouyaté, son of Bassekou Kouyaté and member of Ngoni Ba who plays a modified bass ngoni lute, and is also active in Mali’s hip-hop community; and Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté, daughter of legendary singer Kassé Mady Diabaté and a wonderful singer in her own right, who is very inspired by soul and gospel music. Together, this simple trio of musicians make powerful music that is at once deeply traditional but forward looking, and their collaboration with Kronos Quartet was incredibly successful critically, commercially and artistically – it is a musical relationship that has continued past the album’s life cycle.

It was an honour to meet Trio Da Kali on their first visit to the UK, when they were in London in (I think?) 2012 for initial meetings with the Kronos Quartet. They came and gave an intimate performance and seminar at my university, and it was a joy to hear and see the intricacies of the music and instruments up close. They were lovely people too.

So it was doubly interesting when only a few weeks later I stumbled across Kayira, Vol. 2 from Trio Da Kali’s Hawa (although with a slightly alternate spelling) on Awesome Tapes from Africa, in which she’s in a musical context I’d never heard her before. Born into a long line of griot musicians, Hawa had no choice but to take on the role too (it is a hereditary profession – you cannot become a griot or renounce it, you either are or you aren’t). Her music is therefore inextricably rooted in the jeli tradition, but that doesn’t mean she can’t also be a pop star. This is pop music as made in a culture of ancient, living traditions.

The tape is undated, but I’d guess it’s from about the mid-2000s, but its cheesiness level strikes me as an early 90s sort of sound. There are traditional acoustic instruments such as kora, ngoni and djembe, as well as some typically Malian guitar, but the rest of the accompaniment is bulked out by synthesised sound. The djembe is joined by drum machine, and all of the rest of the programming is even more interesting: a series of bleeps and bloops coalesce to form what is unmistakably a balafon part, a synth saxophone sound provides wailing solos that would be more expected of an electric guitar, and even more abstract synth timbres are used to take the music to other places entirely, sometimes even echoing (to my ears) the sound of the algaita shawms of the West African Sahel. Over all the electronic wizardry is Hawa’s voice, stunning and soaring, singing traditional jeli repertoire, including the famous title track ‘Kayira’, meaning ‘peace.’ I don’t mean to downplay Hawa’s wonderful vocals, only that it is the least surprising thing about the album. She sings amazingly soulful and deeply Malian music and it’s no different here – to have that offset by this crazy, slightly reggaeish synthfest next to acoustic Malian instruments is what gives this album its unique appeal.

This isn’t ‘world music’ – it’s not music that is carefully and subtly polished and moulded to fit the ears of Western listeners as comfortably unfamiliar and pleasantly exotic. You won’t hear it played in your local hippie crafts shop. This is Malian pop music that gives the people what they want to hear, and it’s a real thrill to walk through that bustling foreign market and feed your own ears something unexpected.

250: M’Bemba, by Salif Keita

Salif Keita (Mali)
M’Bemba (2005)
10 tracks, 60 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Salif Keita has spent his career at the top of his game. His first real engagement as a singer of the Rail Band, one of the two big dance bands of Bamako of the 1970s. After a few years of lighting up the Bamako scene with his golden voice, he left the band…and joined Les Ambassadeurs, the other big dance band of Bamako. In his spells with these two bands, he played with some of the biggest talents in Mandé music – Mory Kanté, Djelimady Tonkoura, Kanté Manfila, Cheick Tidiané Seck, Amadou Bagayoko and Kélétigui Diabaté to name just a handful.

Then in the 1980s, he moved to Paris to pursue a solo career and smashed that too. His first solo album from that period, 1987’s Soro, was a huge international hit that defined the terms of Afropop: this was dance music for the discerning listener, full of all the mod-cons but with a distinctive Malian flavour. At the dawn of the ‘world music’ boom, the album made Salif Keita a superstar. After more successful albums throughout the 90s, 2002’s Moffou changed the game again, with a more down-to-earth production and much more focused on Keita’s own take on Malian traditions as opposed to pushing the boundaries of African pop. While there were still upbeat tracks on the album, it was the quieter, more contemplative and acoustic songs that really grabbed the attention, and Keita had another hit on his hands.

So now we get to M’Bemba from 2005 and it is, for me, a career high point for Keita. For this one, it feels as if he’s amalgamated all of the different aspects that made each of his previous sounds so special, turning them into one masterful sound. In his dance band days, the music was based on traditional Malian styles – especially that of the griots – but vamped up with a Cuban edge; then his style went to pop and disco, and the production turned his music into international dancefloor hits; in his later, more introspective work, he went back to his roots, using mostly traditional instruments and wrote music that connected with ancient pathways. In M’Bemba, the sound is stripped back and mostly acoustic, but the way he approaches the compositions gives them a real bite that keeps them perfect for dancing.

He made this album in the studio he built himself in Bamako – it’s the first album he’d made there since his Ambassadeurs days. That’s not the only return, either, as the lead guitar and arrangements on the album are provided by Kanté Manfila. The involvement of Kanté and other musicians including the legendary kora player Toumani Diabaté give this album a real traditional edge while still creating something excitingly new.

Of course, the highlight of the album is Keita’s voice. Over 35 years into his musical career and his voice belts somehow even more powerfully than ever. It’s an immediately recognisable sound with that indefinable quality that separates great singers from unbeatable ones – he has all of the subtlety and techniques that you could ask for, but what makes him special is…I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the particular shape of his vocal cords that sets him apart, or something equally minute, but whatever it is, it certainly works. It’s what he sings, too: as a member of the royal bloodline, he was never supposed to sing, that’s a job for the griots, so when he did sing, his own vocal style imitated the griots in so many ways but with the freedom to change things up, bringing elements of other types of voice and musical styles into his performance.

Considering his string of international successes, M’Bemba is never really viewed with the same reverie among fans as Soro or Moffou in Keita’s discography. But for me, it shows exactly why he is such a special talent. His voice is a Malian treasure all by itself, but his gorgeous balancing of the very serious and traditional alongside fun, danceable and internationally-conscious side of music leaves this album with something for all his fans regardless of what era they prefer, while still maintaining a coherent, beautiful sound throughout.

215: Soku Fola, by Zoumana Tereta

Zoumana Tereta (Mali)
Soku Fola (2009)
8 tracks, 49 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Another one-stringed fiddle! That’s two days in a row now. Yesterday’s was the Juldeh Camara’s Fula nyanyero from Gambia, today we hear the Zoumana Tereta’s soku from Mali. The instruments are very similar, in shape and sound, but the musical traditions are noticeably different.

Zoumana is Bozo, but his music is mostly in the Bamana style of the Ségou region of central Mali, the same bluesy pentatonics that will be familiar to those who know the music of Bassekou Kouyaté. Soku Fola has a delightful stripped-back and all-acoustic sound, just acoustic guitar, ngoni lute, a calabash for percussion and Zoumana’s soku and rich, raspy voice. It all allows the fiddle’s unique sound of horsehair-on-horsehair to come across, its scratchy sounds amplifying its complex harmonics. Sometimes they even take it right down to the bare essentials – ‘Beni a Jarabi’ is just soku, voice and calabash, and all the more wonderful for that.

Zoumana is not as well known in Europe as many of his compatriot musicians, but if you’ve listened to Malian music with any interest, it’s very likely you’ve heard him before. He was in high demand, featuring on recordings by Bassekou Kouyaté, Oumou Sangaré, Toumani Diabaté, Sali Sidibé, Amadou & Mariam, Issa Bagayogo, Sidi Touré…the list goes on. He didn’t just appear with Malian artists, either, with Tiken Jah Fakoly, Béla Fleck, St Germain and Dirtmusic all requiring his services at one point or another. That demand came for a reason, and not just because of his exceptional musical talents alone: for a long time it looked as if Zoumana would be the last great soku player – the young people of Mali just weren’t interested in the instrument or its repertoire at all. Luckily a few did pick it up in recent years and there seems to be, if not quite a revival, at least a resuscitation of the instrument. It was a close one, too – Zoumana passed away in 2017, at only 54 years old.

For all his renown in Mali and his near-ubiquity as a guest on albums by other Malian artists, Zoumana Tereta never really made the leap to a solo artist. He released just a small handful of albums as a bandleader, but they still give a great insight into this wonderful performer and a different side to Malian music that isn’t heard nearly as often as it should be.

198: Première Anthologie de la Musique Malienne: Le Mali des Sables, les Songoy, by Various Artists

Various Artists (Mali)
Première Anthologie de la Musique Malienne: Le Mali des Sables, les Songoy (1970)
10 tracks, 51 minutes
Download from the Anthems for the Nation of Luobaniya blog ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

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.

195: Volume 2, by Mariam Bogayogo

Mariam Bogayogo (Mali)
Volume 2
6 tracks, 45 minutes
Awesome Tapes from Africa

This is a strange one for me. I can never really listen to more than a couple of minutes of this album at a time. Nevertheless, I think it definitely deserves its place as a Good Album due to exactly that, really, just for how jarring it is to Western ears. Malian music is huge in world music circles and even in the mainstream in the West, in part because of how closely our two musical cultures align aesthetically, but this one is way out.

I don’t know much about this tape, but the comments section on Awesome Tapes from Africa thinks the original recordings were probably from the 1960s, when the singer Mariam Bogayogo was at the height of her fame. It’s hard to find out any information on Bogayogo online, so I don’t even know what style of music this is, but I know the accompanying instrument is the balani xylophone – the name means ‘small balafon’ and is the ‘pop’ version of the balafon, a version that does not have the same strict associations with the griots. So this is more of a pop style than a deeply traditional one…but that’s all I can find out.

But let’s talk about how it sounds. The original ATFA post describes it as ‘scary’ and ‘apocalyptic,’ and I get that. To my stupid ears, it sounds as if the vocals (of Bogayogo and her backing vocalists) and the balani players are playing in entirely separate keys. It doesn’t even sound as if someone’s out-of-tune, they sound as if they’re just playing two completely different – and opposing – sets of notes. All of their timing matches up too, so it’s not even as if one part of a multitrack recording was played back at the wrong speed. It sounds amazing, to be honest; completely unpleasant to my ears, but in such an intriguing way. I wish I knew what was going on here. On top of that, you have that standard thing of a very, very short melodic section that is repeated ad infinitum on the balani for the entire length of the track over which Bogayogo stretches her brilliant voice, but when matched with that mad tuning, the insistence of the repetition becomes really creepy, helped along by the poor audio quality and echo no doubt created through decades of copies-upon-copies.

See how long you can listen to this tape for. It’s such an exciting sound and a real puzzler for me. Please tell me if you know anything about this at all, but if not, just let those otherworldly tones get deep in your brain and mess things around a bit.

177: Jama Ko, by Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba (Mali)
Jama Ko (2013)
13 tracks, 58 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

This album was one of the very first that I reviewed when I was making my tentative steps into music journalism, for the now sadly defunct website Musika.uk.com. Thinking back on it now, I reckon I was a little harsh on Jama Ko when it first came out, so here I’ll try to rebalance it a little bit.

So obviously, the album is a bit of a grower (for me at least). Over time, I’ve come to realise some of the components that make it a really good album, although I can still acknowledge its flaws.

Jama Ko marked the first time that Malian ngoni lute player Bassekou Kouyaté had really ‘plugged in’ on record. That was something that had been resisted by his previous producer Lucy Durán, but which now forms a crucial part of his sound. I do think that nowadays he’s perhaps a little too over-reliant on his electronic gizmos such as distortion and wah-wah, but on this album it’s used sparingly in a way that makes it exciting each time it rolls around. In fact, it’s a really special moment when he first busts out that wah-wah during his solo in the album’s opening and title track – I like to say that this is one of the best guitar solos I’ve ever heard, and it’s not even played on guitar.

This album is Bassekou’s third as a solo artist (or rather, as bandleader) and although it shows a definite expansion of its sound into more Western directions in terms of some tonalities, harmonies and chords here and there, his repertoire here still owes a lot to Malian music traditions. A big theme on this album is singers. Over the course of the 13 tracks, there are five lead singers, and through them, the album explores different aspects of Malian tradition: there is Amy Sacko, Ngoni Ba’s regular singer, from the Bamana tradition, as is the legendary Kasse Mady Diabaté; Zoumana Tereta, usually known for his one-string soku fiddle playing, here sings in the style of the Wassoulou hunters; Khaira Arby is half-Songhai and half-Tuareg from the north of the country; and Taj Mahal guests on a track, representing Malian music’s distant nephew, the blues. Bassekou himself even does some singing opposite Taj Mahal and does a great job of it, it’s a shame we don’t get to hear his vocal prowess more in his performances.

There are some slip-ups though. There are some tracks which seem the most ‘produced’ and they’re the ones with the least soul. The song ‘Wagadu’ is a great example, with its artificial echoes, piano chords and glockenspiel; the song itself is great, but these production elements seem unneeded in the context of the rest of the album. It basically seems whenever they let Canadian co-producer Dominic 'Mocky' Salole go from behind the desk to in front of the mics, the album as a whole suffered from it. A shame.

Despite remembering being quite harsh on this album, at the end of the original review I wrote back when it was first released, I did say that ‘Bassekou’s latest album is his most musically progressive and perhaps his most enjoyable,’ and actually, yeah fair enough. Even after releasing several albums since, I reckon that Jama Ko is his best of the bunch, his balancing of traditional and modern directions almost – almost – perfect. Take a listen and hear for yourself. And if you don’t believe me, maybe give it another listen and see if you change your mind.

166: Dimanche à Bamako, by Amadou & Mariam

Amadou & Mariam (Mali)
Dimanche à Bamako (2004)
15 tracks, 57 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

By this point, the blind husband and wife duo Amadou & Mariam had been slowly gaining international attention with their über-cool, extra funky Malian rock; Dimanche à Bamako tipped them over into world music superstardom.

It’s a little ironic, then, that although the album is credited to Amadou & Mariam, it would perhaps be fairer to bill it as ‘Manu Chao featuring Amadou & Mariam.’ The anarchistic French ska-punker was brought on board as a producer for this album, but he didn’t restrict himself to behind the mixing desk – he’s all over it. He contributes guitars and backing vocals to the mix as well as the programming of various samples, and he even takes on lead vocal duties on several tracks. In the end, the whole thing is much more akin to Chao’s other work than A&M’s. That’s just his way of working, too - his production on Calypso Rose’s album Far From Home (released 12 years later in 2016) has the same sort of sound.

That’s not to say this isn’t a great album, of course. I loved this album when it first came out, and must have played it to death; until I listened again in preparation to write this, I didn’t realise that I knew every track from beginning to end, but I did. I guess that in the intervening years, the Manu Chaoness of it all sort of clouded my perception of it. I’ve seen the duo live quite a few times now over the years, and I truly believe that Amadou is one of the very best guitarists I’ve ever seen, and when he gets going on a solo, all sorts of mad colours come flying out of his axe. When you have a musician like this at your disposal, why mess around with over-production? Hit record, let him do his thing, and let us hear that!

Maybe I resent Chao’s heavy-handed approach to production taking away from Amadou & Mariam’s whole thing a little bit too much. But if the album wasn’t so successful, I probably wouldn’t have heard of them at all (or had my exposure to them delayed at least). And besides, it is still almost an hour’s worth of good music regardless of whose sound it is or isn’t. Gotta accentuate that positive – the album is good, enjoy it.

156: Farka et Haïra, by Ali Farka Touré & Khaira Arby

Ali Farka Touré & Khaira Arby (Mali)
Farka et Haïra (1986)
8 tracks, 63 minutes

I compiled an eight-track version of this tape (in mp3 form obviously) from the downloads available at both Voice of America and the worldservice blog. Check out those blogs and all they have to say about the tape, and if you want to download the whole tape directly, let me know and I’ll send it over.

Really, those blogs tell you all you need to know about the background of the tape, and any information about it that I could tell you would just be rewording their own research, so please do check them out – I’ll just give my own thoughts of the tape here.

When this tape was recorded at a live concert in 1986, Ali Farka Touré and Khaira Arby were both famous across Mali, but this was before either of them attained the international fame they later achieved. These recordings give you an idea of what both musicians sounded like without having their sound tempered towards an international audience, either in their way of playing or the sound quality that comes with it. Because that’s a big part of this record’s charm: it’s obviously been copied and recopied so many times across many decades of cassettes that everything sounds super crunchy. It really suits Ali’s guitar playing, and Khaira’s voice cuts all the way through the noise, so that the poor quality of the recording doesn’t affect the appreciation of the music it contains in any way.

It’s also interesting to hear their repertoire before they both brought the influence from the blues to the fore. With Ali’s heritage as Songhoi and Khaira’s as mixed Hassani-Tamashek, their music together bares elements from all of these cultures from the north of Mali, as well as the music of the Bamana from the south of the country. On top of all that, it just sounds like a totally relaxed gig, with the musicians taking everything at their own pace while making some absolutely stellar performances.

Really, I just included this as a little-known early recording of two great musicians who went on to have worldwide success, and I reckon more people should hear it. So if you’re a fan of Ali or Khaira, or any Malian or Saharan music in general, get those blogs linked at the top read, and definitely get these amazing sounds in your ears.

125: Enregistrés Pour Yehia le Marabout, by Super Onze de Gao

Super Onze de Gao (Mali)
Enregistrés Pour Yehia le Marabout (1994)
2 tracks, 47 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Super Onze are the masters of takamba music. It’s a style with an interesting history, having originally been associated with the nomadic, Sahara-dwelling Tuaregs, over time, it became popular with Songhai musicians in the north of Mali, who brought in their own influences and made it their own. Now takamba is mostly known as a Songhai style, but one that retains the signature lope and slightly Arabic sound from Tuareg music.

At its heart, takamba music is one rhythm – always the same, it’s the takamba rhythm – played on two calabashes or, less commonly, one calabash and a metal drum (such as a cooking pot or a jerrycan). For those of you who understand TUBS, here is the rhythm as described by Banning Eyre:

|: X.X...X.X... | X...X...X... :|

Here are Super Onze’s percussionists playing the takamba rhythm, and improvising on it:

On top of that rhythm, the melody is provided by at least one kurbu, or as we often call it, an ngoni (Super Onze have two). The kurbu plays a short riff that repeats on as long as you want, often improvising on that riff and providing endless variations. The vocalist uses all this musical information to create an epic improvised sermon of praise – sometimes sung, usually recited – to whoever the patron happens to be, perhaps the bride and groom of the wedding party, the host of the political event, or even the person who commissioned the tape, which is the case on this one, in honour of a wealthy holy man (or marabout) named Yahia.

So that is takamba. But it doesn’t really tell you what’s so electrifying about Super Onze du Gao. For starters, it’s because they are electrified – their kurbus are hooked up to amps and the whole thing is run through bullhorn speakers. Then it sounds like it was direct onto a tape deck, and then transferred from there (probably after quite a few cassette copies) to digital. Distortion is added at every step along that journey, so by the time you’re listening to it, those lutes sound like some of the dirtiest punk blues guitars, and the calabashes sound like cracks of electricity. Their improvisations on just the one short rhythm and super bluesy riff last for the entirety of a two-sided cassette – just over 20 minutes per side – and you’ll fall into a deep desert blues trance if you’re not careful. It’s all so raw that I’m surprised it hasn’t been picked up in other situations: for me, this music is crying out to be looped and sampled, and used for the basis of a hip-hop track. Get on it, producers.

Takamba is huge in the north of Mali, but it’s not really permeated outside of the country to any significant degree. Considering how popular Malian music is in Europe and the Americas, perhaps that won’t be the case for very long. I hope that Super Onze will be the ones to bring this amazing sound to the world.

123: Feel Like Going Home, by Martin Scorsese, dir.

Martin Scorsese, dir. (USA)
Feel Like Going Home (2003)
110 minutes
I’m having trouble finding anywhere to watch this online in the UK – legally or otherwise – but if you know anywhere, please let us know. Americans can probably watch it on the PBS Vimeo page, and non-Americans can watch the trailer there instead. However, it is really cheap to buy on DVD second-hand on Amazon.

Okay, controversial: this isn’t an album. It’s a film. But it’s a film about music, with tons of great music in it that you’re not gonna be able to hear elsewhere, so I’ll allow it. Because it’s my blog and I get to allow things like that.

Feel Like Going Home is the first of seven films collectively known as Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues, where different directors – from Wim Wenders to Clint Eastwood – were drafted in to look at different aspects of the blues, and they all have their different methods, with historical documentary, contemporary interviews, reconstructions and even a fiction screenplay. For the first of the series, though, Scorsese took the reins himself, for a dive into delta blues and its roots.

The film follows bluesman Corey Harris as he travels around the Mississippi delta getting to grips with the story of the blues, from his own contemporary take, to the delta guitar styles and even further back to fife and drum music and field hollers. And then even even further back, with a trip to Mali, where he meets Salif Keita, Habib Koité and Ali Farka Touré. It’s interesting and entertaining as it should be, but the reason I’m including this film on an album blog is really because of the music. There’s a bunch of cool archive footage of blues legends such as Son House, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, but the real draw is the performances recorded especially for the film, and Harris is often involved too. We see and hear him jamming with old bluesmen Sam Carr and Willie King in Mississippi, with Otha Turner and his fife and drum band, and, most thrillingly, with Ali Farka Touré in Niafunké in Mali. You can watch a little bit of that section here, where they play a beautiful mash-up of the classic ‘Catfish Blues’ and Touré’s song ‘Mahini Me’:

The idea of West African music – especially Malian music – being the starting point for the evolution of the blues is a really attractive one, although a literal ‘Malian music → blues’ timeline, such as is presented in Feel Like Going Home is a little too over-simplistic. Nevertheless, collaborations between the two never cease to be intoxicating for me, as long as they’re done well, and this jam between Harris and Touré most definitely is. I wish I could have been there under those trees with them! Makes you wonder what other stuff they played together that never made it into the film.

There are absolutely tons of music documentaries out there, covering every sort of music you can imagine, but Feel Like Going Home is one of the best I’ve ever seen. The story it tells is fascinating and touching, and the arguments are compellingly made (even if I don’t wholly agree with them), but the music is something else. If there ever was a film that you can listen to as you would an album, it would be this one.

065: Moussolou, by Oumou Sangaré

Oumou Sangaré (Mali)
Moussolou (1989)
6 tracks, 32 minutes
Bandcamp • Spotify • iTunes

Oumou Sangaré is known as ‘The Songbird of Wasulu,’ and for good reason. Hers is a voice with such an awesome power and utter majesty. My heart leaps every time I hear Oumou sing, and I’m not the only one – she’s one of the biggest names in Malian music, both at home and abroad. Oumou’s style is wassoulou (named after the Wasulu region of Mali – it’s a subeditor’s nightmare), a style based on the sacred music of the hunters that was turned into a pop music by the youth of the 60s, using the signature sound of the kamelengoni bridge-harp. Oumou has revolutionised the style throughout her career, but on Moussolou (Women), her debut album, her sound was far rootiser.

The album was recorded in Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire to put out as a tape for the local market in Mali. The album sold over 200,000 copies and made Oumou a star; it was this attention, together with a recommendation from Ali Farka Touré, that led to the album being released internationally by World Circuit Records. It’s a short one at just over half an hour and only six tracks long, but it’s all there needs to be to make a really well-crafted piece. The ensemble is also quite small – that’s where the rootsy sound comes in: it’s just kamelengoni, guitar, bass and violin, and with a couple of backing singers. The violin – played by Aliou Traoré – is an interesting addition to the style. It switches between a more American style such as would be found in country music and a most definitely West African sound that imitates the one-stringed soku fiddle.

The proper highlight, it almost goes without saying, is Oumou’s voice. It’s indescribable, really. You’ll just have to listen and find it out for yourself. I will do a bit of name-dropping here, though: of all the musicians I have interviewed, Oumou Sangaré may just have been the most thrilling. When I asked what song she sang when she entered a competition as a six-year-old, the title didn’t come to her straight away, so she sang a short refrain of it to jog her memory. This was as she was just putting on her make up backstage before a show, but the sound that came out of her mouth was from another dimension, it was so beautiful. Just imagine what it sounds like when she tries.

Moussolou was recently remastered and reissued in 2016 – that’s the version that’s on Spotify and everything (and that's the cover, above left) – and as a download it’s really cheap at only £5. There’s really not much excuse not to dig into this record that made a superstar.

024: The Mandé Variations, by Toumani Diabaté

Toumani Diabaté (Mali)
The Mandé Variations (2008)
8 tracks, 58 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

With 70 generations of jeli griots behind him, and his father known as the king of the 21-stringed Mandinka bridge-harp, the kora, Toumani Diabaté's path was all but laid out for him. By the time The Mandé Variations came out, he was already a star. Launching his career with an accomplished solo album, Kaira, in 1988, he’d gone on to release albums in collaboration with Taj Mahal, Damon Albarn, Danny Thompson, Ballake Sissoko and his own dance orchestra, and even won a Grammy for his duets with Ali Farka Touré. By 2008, twenty years since that first album, he decided to record another solo album: not as a talented young musician stepping out of his father’s shadow, but as the greatest living exponent of the kora.

This album is breathtaking. Every track is perfectly considered, and there is not one note out of place. Toumani’s nylon strings ripple like water, taking in unorthodox tunings to give textures traditionally inaccessible to kora players. There are breezes of influence from all through his career – flamenco here, Hindustani music there – but it all slots entirely into place. As is the way with the kora, it’s sometimes quite hard to get your head around the fact that what you’re listening to is just one person playing with two fingers and two thumbs; that’s even more the case with Toumani. It can sometimes feel like there’s three or four different melodies all happening at once, somehow juggled in the mind of a master.

The Mandé Variations is an album for contemplation. It’s always gentle, often bittersweet, and sometimes downright sad, but in the most beautiful way. Even one or two fun quotes (such as referencing The Good, The Bad and the Ugly theme in the track ‘Cantelowes’) don’t take away from the profundity of the piece, but just gives a glimpse into Toumani’s personality. For all his genre-bending projects before and since, this album remains the definitive Toumani Diabaté, and even quite possibly the last word in solo kora.

004: Donso, by Donso

Donso (France/Mali)
Donso (2010)
11 tracks, 49 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

This is the first album of Malian music on my list and it took four whole days! Malian music is massive. Musicians from Mali have a worldwide reputation for their prodigious skills, and the country seems to produce a new ‘world music’ star every month. There’s plenty more to come as well, but for now…

Donso stand out from the rest with a mix of styles that isn’t often heard. Their name comes from the Bamana word for ‘hunter,’ so it makes sense that the band’s sound is based on the music of the Bamana hunters. Hunters’ music is incredibly powerful both sonically and spiritually, with its never-ending 6/8 rhythms, bluesy pentatonics and the harsh tones of its two main instruments, the karignan iron scraper and – most importantly – the donsongoni, a rattling, thumping bridge-harp. It’s a fantastic tradition that is unfortunately overshadowed by other styles of the region – particularly that of the jeli griots – in the West.

A music with such deep roots may seem an ill fit with dance music, but that’s just what Donso do, and they do it excellently. The two Malians and two Frenchmen that make up the band mix so much into their music, but at the core is that mix between electronics and acoustics. Donsongoni, jelingoni (a fretless lute related to the banjo), guitar and synths play off each other to create a tapestry of timbre while drum kits, karingnan, tama (talking drum) and drum machine make mad polyrhythms that are 100% designed for dancing, and it’s all tied together by the voice of Gédéon Diarra.

It feels like it shouldn’t really work, or if it did, it shouldn’t work this well. But of course it does. While their spirituality may be different, Bamana hunters’ music and electronica share their focus on repetition and trance, and they lose none of that when they’re combined. Turn your brain off when you listen to Donso, and let it make you feel how it wants you to feel. Play loud and dance out of your head!