Music

The Source

Ali Farka Toure

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Jan 01, 2004
Category: World

Six hundred years ago, Timbuktu was the trading capital of the world. One hundred thousand people lived there, including 25,000 scholars and students. Now the city in dusty, hot Mali is home to only 4,000, and planes land there just once a week.

Skip the easy moral — “things change” — and consider Mali ‘s greatest export these days: music. For one thing, women are encouraged to sing, and you will be well rewarded if you go to Amazon.com right now and order “Divas of Mali .” For another, Mali is the home of Ali Farka Toure, a singer-guitarist who blends gutsy blues with some of the most delicate playing ever recorded.

World musicians get validated in a strange but wonderful way these days: The American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder shows up at their doorsteps and entices them into a collaboration. So it was with the Buena Vista Social Club. So it was with Ali Farka Toure — the Toure-Cooder CD, “Talking Timbuktu ,” was the first album to debut at #1 on Billboard’s World Music Chart. It stayed #1 longer than any other release and won Down Beat’s Critics Poll for Beyond Album of the Year.

What’s the fuss about? A tall, robed, ornery guy with a guitar that sounds like no other and a rhythm section that has your feet moving every which-a-way. And a fascinating life story.

Ali Farka Toure was born in 1939, the l0th child — and the first born alive — of a noble family. Though he was interested in music, he didn’t pick up a guitar until he was 17. Happily for us, he listened to lots of American blues: John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Big Joe Williams. Of these influences, Hooker was dominant — because Toure believed Hooker was playing Malian music.

Toure’s first recordings were a disaster for him; he never got a royalty check. “If I could see him [the head of his early label] today,” he has said, “I’d change his skin to drops of water, cut his throat and make mincemeat of him.”

Toure became a sound engineer and a farmer. Eventually he was coaxed back into recording. Four releases later, Ry Cooder showed up. Fame followed. But Toure didn’t follow fame. He retreated to his rice farm. In order to record “Niafunke,” Producer Nick Gold had to bring a studio to Toure, using gasoline generators for electric power. Then he waited until Toure finished his chores and prepared to play. The CD was a success; Toure toured America again. It wasn’t a happy experience. Speaking in French at a concert in New York in 2001, he announced his retirement. “Farming is more important,” he said. He has not yet changed his mind.

Toure’s lyrics are about his homeland, about water and farming and village customs. But the words don’t matter. The sound does — at once wondrous strange and totally familiar, old-fashioned down home blues filtered through an African beat. It’s addictive stuff. Consider yourself warned.

Common sense would tell you to start with the Ry Cooder collaboration. For once, common sense is over-rated. Better to go back to the “pure” Ali Farka Toure of “The Source.” After that, you’ll buy “The River.” Because Butler would bet you can’t stop at just one.

— by Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com

To order “The Source” from Amazon.com, click here.