Interview with Vieux Farka Touré

Stefan Simanowitz interviews Vieux Farka Touré.

We meet in London some weeks before he has to fly out to South Africa. Although Dingwalls in Camden is a far cry from Johannesburg’s Soccer City stadium Farka Touré appears to be enjoying the intimate setting. He is relaxed and cheerful despite a grueling tour schedule, starting his set gently with a song called ’Slow Jam’ before gradually moving up the gears to finish an electrifying set with the infectious ’Awei Womei’.
Nicknamed ’the Hendrix of the Sahara’ Farka Touré blends desert-blues with rock, reggae, funk and R&B. Combining strong catchy baselines with intricate guitar work and gentle vocals he seamlessly fuses traditional Malian music with modern instrumentation to produce a distinctive trancey sound. Unlike the some desert blues which is raw and deliberately dissonant, Farka Touré’s sound is rich and warm. His songs are heavily instrumental and at times he drifts into wonderful labyrinthine guitar improvisations that last a full five minutes.

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Tinariwen Performance Review

Mark Jenkins reviews Tinariwen's performance at Lisner Auditorium.

It's been only a decade since the core members of Tinariwen, who performed Thursday night at Lisner Auditorium, were in revolt against the government of Mali. Nowadays, the group expresses the travails of the nomadic Tuareg (or Tamashek) people with music that meshes traditional melodies with twangy electric guitars. The robed and turbaned musicians' material doesn't offer a lot of variety, but its loping rhythms and scratchy, scrambling timbres are exhilarating.

Tinariwen is a loosely aligned outfit, and only five of the 15 musicians featured on its latest album, "Aman Iman: Water Is Life," appeared at Lisner. In promotional photographs, bushy-haired Ibrahim Ag Alhabib usually stands at the center, but on this tour Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni led the band (as he did in 2004). By singing solo or playing acoustic guitar Spanish-style, Alhousseyni sometimes varied the group's sound. More often, however, he joined the communal clatter of such tunes as "Tamatant Tilay," a onetime war anthem that works just as well as an ecstatic dance song.

If the members of Tinariwen were once outcasts, their opening act was a consummate insider: Vieux Farka Touré is descended from generations of Malian nobility and is the son of the revered singer-guitarist Ali Farka Tour¿, who died last year. Yet the two acts proved both musically and personally compatible; Tinariwen bassist Eyadou Ag Leche joined the opener for one song, and later Touré added his guitar to the headliners' arsenal.

Tour¿ didn't sing much, ceding some of the occasional vocals to his quintet's percussionist. The 50-minute set was haphazardly paced and didn't encompass the stylistic range of his recent self-titled album, which features two duets with his father. Yet none of that mattered whenever Touré unloosed his guitar, playing fluid, eloquent solos.

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Vieux Farka Touré

A preview of Vieux Farka Touré's performances in Burlington and Montreal.

hen famed Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré died last March there was speculation as to who would fill this musical giant's shoes. Worry no more. Vieux Farka Touré, his 26-year-old son, appears the heir-apparent to his father's title as "King of Desert Blues."

Malian blues is not like the American variety. Here, the soulful music that Black Americans created toward the end of the 19th century has a specific structure based on 12 bars of music with generally a three-chord major key structure. American blues guitar styles come in a variety of types from finger-style players to flat-pickers, but their common ground is the beat. Some also tune their instrument to an open chord, such as G or A and frequently use a slide to create the unique crying sound the instrument can produce. The words, when authentic, are about hard work, hard living, love and sex and living with "the blues."

Ali Farka Touré's music was widely regarded as representing a point of intersection of traditional Malian music and its North American cousin, the blues. Filmmaker Martin Scorsese characterized Touré's tradition as constituting "the DNA of the blues." He was ranked number 76 on Rolling Stone's "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time."

As the first African bluesman to achieve widespread popularity on his home continent, Touré was often known as "the African John Lee Hooker."

Vieux Farka Touré's blues, like that of his father, is based on a more lyrical guitar sound than the American variety. It forms a repetitive pattern with a pulsating bass line of just a few notes with percussion from instruments other than a full drum kit. Vieux's father was the premier stylist in this musical genre and traveled worldwide performing this unique music on an instrument, guitar, that is not native to the Sahara Desert.

Now we have his son to carry on the tradition. On his first self-named CD we find a mature guitarist whose sound on acoustic and electric guitars is both powerful and haunting. Vieux doesn't wail on guitar as Robert Cray or Eric Clapton might. Instead he plays very clean, distortion-free single note melodies avoiding crunch chords and electronic gadgetry.

Vieux's recording melds sounds from traditional Malian music with electric bass and also the Kora, or African harp. The songs are sung in a variety of dialects from this part of Africa and thus, for American ears, are both unintelligible and exotic.

Listening to this album, one is struck by the power of simple musical lines, simple guitar figures and chanted vocals. While American music wants to propel the listener to new spaces, Malian music wants the listener to stay put, transfixed in a single line of musical content, as if to fully digest the message.

If you are unfamiliar with this style of guitar playing and musical expression you have two chances to hear Vieux Farka Touré and his band. They'll be at Higher Ground in Burlington on Nov. 11 and in Montreal on Nov. 23 at Club Soda.

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Rachid Taha & Vieux Farka Toure at the Barbican, London

Vieux Farka Touré has a lot to live up to, especially with an electric guitar round his neck. The death last year of his father Ali, the great master of the desert blues, was a huge loss to music, and for his son to carry on the family business is a tall order indeed. Ali preferred Vieux to be in the Malian army than in a Malian dance band, but the mulish genes of the father have been passed down, and there is a crackle of expectation at seeing what this young man can dish out tonight, in an inspired pairing with the Algerian-born rai rocker, Rachid Taha.

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Joe Tangari reviews Vieux Farka Touré's album.

Vieux Farka Touré's debut album is a transitional work, representing the passing of a standard from a father to a son. Some of Malian guitar legend Ali Farka Touré's final recordings are here on his son's debut, which takes the signature desert guitar style of Ali and subtly builds on it. It's difficult for a young musician to step out from the shadow a parent so revered in the same field, but to his credit Vieux is content to move slowly and find his own approach to the style.

Vieux and Ali play together on two tracks, and their interaction-- the son plays rhythm guitar and gives his father's unmistakable leads free reign, with interjections from ngoni player Bassekou Kouyaté-- is not surprisingly marked by deference and respect. "Tabara" is a slow and meditative instrumental spotlighted by a mellifluous lead from Ali, into which Vieux perfectly slips his minimal backing rhythm. The other collaboration, "Diallo", is a conversation between Vieux's wizened, parched vocals and Ali's electric guitar, which carries his distinctive pinched tone. The rhythm is propelled by hand percussion, which is this case means sound actually created by the hands, without drums or blocks.

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Interview with Vieux Farka Toure

When the footsteps you’re following in are as big as Ali Farka Toure’s - a guitarist and singer renowned as one of Africa’s greatest artists - you’re bound to encounter a few bumps along the way.
When it’s Toure’s son who’s doing the following - and against his father’s wishes - the bumps can seem like mountains.
Vieux Farka Toure, who makes his local debut Thursday at Johnny D’s, decided to do exactly what his father didn’t want him to do: pursue a life in music.
“As soon as I told my father that I wanted to enroll in Mali’s National Arts Institute in Bamako and become a musician, he came down very hard on me,” Toure said in an e-mail exchange that was translated from French. “He was completely against the idea, and reacted very openly and strongly against it: He stopped paying for my transportation, doing me favors where he used to without question, and so forth.

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Interview with Vieux Farka Touré

It must be tough being the son or daughter of a famous musician, especially when you aspire to follow in their footsteps. Unfortunately for Vieux Farka Touré, he's the son of the late, great Ali Farka Touré, a veritable guitar hero of Malian desert blues music (and mayor of his home town, Niafunké), who died recently from cancer. But fortunately for him, he's a promising musician in his own right and has been creating quite a buzz with his self-titled, debut album.

When Ali Farka Touré passed away, he was fiercely proud of his 25-year-old son (one of 11 siblings), but it wasn't always the case. After many wrangles with record labels, Farka Touré senior had developed a huge distrust of the music business. It wasn't until he joined up with Nick Gold's World Circuit label that he felt he'd got a just deal, and so when his son showed signs of early musical talent (playing drums and calabash) he was understandably concerned, and tried to dissuade him.

"It was difficult," says Farka Touré, "but I persisted with my music cautiously and quietly, and eventually my father was convinced that my desires and passion were greater than his worries about my following him into that world."

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