Ali Farka Touré, who died last week of bone cancer at 66, was a farmer who late in life became mayor of Nia-funké in northern Mali. But he also played the blues: slow, taut, dry desert blues that resonated far beyond the Sahara. He has been described as an African equivalent of John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins and the great Delta bluesmen, but he insisted it was the other way round: “The music was taken from here.”
In the 1970s he recorded for Radio Mali, where he also worked as an engineer, as part of a cultural education campaign established by the new president Modibo Keita and maintained by his successor Moussa Traoré (the reverberations of which still underpin Malian music today). Some of these recordings were re-released by a Parisian label, and Touré became an ambassador for African music in Europe.
He was championed from the 1980s onwards by the disc jockey Andy Kershaw, who picked one of his records out of the bargain bin in a Barbès record shop – listeners of a certain age are unable to read Touré’s name without imagining it pronounced in Kershaw’s distinctive accent – and by the London record company World Circuit, which gave his albums a sympathetically spare production, with guests to support Touré without diluting his essence.
Touré had his own centre of gravity. When he collaborated with western music-ians, it was done on his terms. (Compare his compatriots Baaba Maal, Salif Keita and Amadou and Mariam, all of whom compromised with African notions of what modern western music should sound like.) The Source saw him joined by Taj Mahal and Nitin Sawhney; The River (almost imperceptibly) by Sean Keane and Kevin Conneff from the Chieftains. But they, and Rory McLeod playing harmonica on “Heygana” or Steve Williamson playing saxophone on “Ai Bine”, became honorary citizens of Niafunké. This is not a clash of civilisations: the guests are respectfully subordinate. Even on Talking Timbuktu, Touré’s Grammy-winning series of duets with Ry Cooder, recorded in Los Angeles, Cooder’s sweeping slide never dominates Touré’s sandy licks.
The exception was In the Heart of the Moon, last year’s album with Toumani Diabaté, which also won a Grammy. This was a meeting of a griot from the south of Mali with a northern non-griot, but the two meshed perfectly. With his virtuoso kora-playing counterpart spinning intricate webs of melody, Touré stepped back and turned his guitar into a rhythm instrument, providing an unshowy bedrock on which Diabaté could build. “I will give you everything; you do what you want,” Diabaté recalls Touré telling him. It was a supremely generous gesture. Diabaté knew how to pay tribute: he titled one track “Monsieur le Maire de Niafunké”.
Ali Farka Touré opened the ears of the west to the music of northern Mali. The German Network label produced two excellent compilations, Desert Blues 1 and Desert Blues 2, covering the whole range of this sound, combining tracks from Touré himself with other musicians from the area, including Baaba Maal, Youssou N’Dour and Oumou Sangare. Boubacar Traoré, a Malian pop star from the 1960s who fell out of music for decades after the death of his wife, returned as a bluesman in similar vein, and duetted with Touré on Je Chanterai Pour Toi, the two improvising together as they ambled through the construction site of a school in Niafunké. The Touareg supergroup Tinariwen, though they blended the Sahel with a dash of Clash and a hint of Hendrix, owe something of their style to Touré as well.
Ali Farka Touré was successful on his own terms. He never made the compromises other African musicians have felt they needed to make in the (usually vain) pursuit of western fame. His songs deal with the minutiae of life in Africa: walking miles to visit a lover, river spirits, the social contribution of the agricultural sector, camels. He was confident his audiences would find him and, by chance or tenacity, they did.
