The river of sound from Mali never stops flowing. War in the Sahara and the constant threat of Jihadists haven’t stopped the ceaseless wave of creativity that surges through the West African country.
The Malians speak of music giving courage, of song’s capacity to warm hearts. Vieux Farka Touré’s latest in a line of splendidly "encouraging" albums is guaranteed to move, get you up on your feet. and celebrate. The Touré family aren’t griots or praise-singers but members of the warrior caste, and their hereditary vocation is palpable in the great power of their music.
A massive counterblast to the uptightness, puritanism and hypocrisy of fundamentalist Islam
This music surges from the soul with unrelenting force, as on songs such as “Samba Si Kairi” in the gently lolloping mode now commonly known as "desert blues", and made famous by Vieux’s father Ali Farka Touré: the guitar and ngoni playing woven together with great delicacy, in subtle and seductive conversation.
There are some extraordinary solos, as on the up-tempo “Bai Kaitere”, reminiscent in their intense wildness of Hendrix or Prince at their very best, a rich and mind-bending guitar sound produced by a combination of reverb and delay. On stage, this kind of material, playing on repetition, has a trance-inducing quality. Vieux Farka Touré and his fellow-musicians summon the spirits of Northern Mali, and are carried by the spiritual force that survived the horrors of the slave trade and was reborn in gospel, blues, soul and rock.
Vieux Farka Touré takes us to the sacred heart of rock’n’roll, a spirituality that is rooted in sexuality as much as the heart and spirit, and provides a massive counterblast to the uptightness, puritanism and hypocrisy of fundamentalist Islam. It is said that Ali Farka Touré was inspired by John Lee Hooker. His son has listened to the best of rock’n’roll, and this has made it possible for him to re-invent his own ancestral music, as if, in some miraculous way, the dark heritage of slavery had been magically reversed and Africa’s song revitalised by an infusion of pain-soaked energy.