The Music of Mali — Part 2
The last thing I wrote before my latest spell of disillusionment with writing and music was this piece on the music of Mali. In that piece, I gave the sort of brief overview a guy who’s never visited Mali would give of its sociopolitical reality, spoke of the Tuareg rock of Tinariwen, and announced plans to ‘further the notion that there is a ‘sound of Mali’, attack it, and hopefully destroy it.’
I’m here to do just that.
Ali Farka Touré: The Godfather of Desert Blues
As I said in the first part of this series, Tuaregs represent a small percentage of the Malian population, which is mostly of sub-Saharan ancestry. These are folks with a completely different musical vocabulary¹. The music of these peoples bears a striking resemblance not only to the Tuareg music from part 1, but also to the music of the larger West African scene. One of the most famous guitarists from this scene was Malian legend, Ali Farka Touré, who, before his death from bone cancer in 2006, helped shape a formidable regional musical scene that continues to blossom.
His success helped launch a couple of generations of ‘African blues’ guitarists after him². But Touré, in many ways a traditionalist, hated being called a blues guitarist. That said, the guitar isn’t by any means a traditional African instrument. It reached Touré much after other traditional Malian stringed instruments did, e.g. the n’goni (a lute-like instrument), the djerkel (a single-stringed instrument), and the njarka³ (a violin-like instrument). When he picked up the guitar, he migrated his traditional finger-picking playing style and Western African scales, creating a sort of hypnotic — and to the uninitiated like me, mysterious — style of guitar-playing that reminded many of John Lee Hooker⁴. It’s hard to see Touré agreeing with that assessment.
In his obit for Touré, Robin Denselow recalled Touré telling him that he played African music, not the blues. In the same obit, the writer recalls Touré telling him:
This music has been taken from here. I play traditional music and I don’t know what blues is. For me, blues is a type of soap powder.
Through his years of recording, he’d grown increasingly concerned that new generations of Malians were unaware of traditional Malian music, and he released albums with traditional musicians, using his fame to bring this music to a wider audience. This grappling with the traditional and the western is apparent in the story of the final decade of his life. In this decade, he grew tired of music, quitting to farm and participate in the local community of Niafunké, his hometown. He was made the town’s mayor, and used the money he made plying his trade (mostly to Westerners) to irrigate the land, and make it suitable for agriculture.
Despite this lengthy absence, he returned in 2005, a year before his death, to release a phenomenal album called In the Heart of the Moon with Toumani Diabaté, considered the world’s prime exponent of the kora, a traditional Malian harp-like stringed instrument. Diabaté was a member of the first generation of Malian musicians inspired by Touré. More of their recordings from 2005 were released in 2010 as the equally phenomenal Ali and Toumani. Crucially, from a musical perspective, the release of In the Heart of the Moon meant Touré returned to stage one last time, fighting illness, to deliver his last bunch of spellbinding performances, such as the one below, taking the music of Mali to the world one final time.
Ali & Toumani — Old Meets New
The story of Touré and Diabaté deals with that most common of post-colonial tropes — the clash of the traditional with the foreign, the old with the new, and the combination of these creating something that’s both of the here and now, and of the there and then. This clash is a constant feature of the music too, with the guitar and the kora neither ceding the limelight nor hogging it, but with both sharing it. Much like the post-colonial culture that birthed them, these albums are a mish-mash of influences that merge into one music that’s at once familiar and foreign⁵, but entirely unique.
Despite Touré’s status as a veteran, in many ways it’s the protégé, Diabaté, who represents the traditional, juxtaposing the Malian kora with the decidedly western guitar. The result is something that references an aspect of the ‘sound of Mali’ completely separate from Tinariwen, but also hints at there being no such thing⁶. In part 3 (hopefully the final part), I discard the notion that the only way to talk about the music of Mali, and the music of any unknown culture, is sombrely. And I learn to dance.
¹ I, perhaps (almost certainly) stupidly, think of the split between the Saharan and sub-Saharan music forms as similar to the split between Hindustani and Carnatic music. It’s an oversimplification, like if all American music were either ‘white music’ or ‘ethnic music’. But bear with me as I further deep-dive. This is the very notion that I plan to ‘attack and… destroy’.
² His son, Vieux Farka Touré included.
³ On which he recorded songs.
⁴ The blues are just an Americana-infused descendant of the sort of music that Touré would’ve played on those traditional Malian instruments. That said, it’s clear why you would be frustrated with such comparisons if you were Touré.
⁵ For me, the western is familiar, the sound of the guitar being plucked reminds of the blues. The kora reminds me of a strange harp I’ve never heard before.
⁶ Just as there’s no ‘sound of India’.
