He had by then returned home, having given up his job at the radio station, and was startled to learn he was a cult hero in Britain. Anne Hunt, of World Circuit, went out to Mali to track down Toure, and did so after putting out a radio appeal for him. He played it on his show, and the reaction was remarkable.
Ali farka toure talking timbuktu rar series#
With typical confidence, he began sending his tapes to recording companies in France, along with photographs of himself, and Sono Discs were wise enough to realise his potential.Ī series of albums, all entitled simply Ali Farka Toure, were released for the Parisian African market in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and in 1986 the Red album (so-called because it had a red cover) came to the attention of the British DJ Andy Kershaw. He started to broadcast and was able to record his own songs the radio station owned what was then the only recording studio in Mali. His musical career began when he moved to the capital, Bamako, to take yet another new job - working as a sound engineer at Radio Mali. He switched to guitar after hearing the great Guinean guitarist Keita Fodeba, and insisting: "I have as much music as him." First he learned to play such traditional instruments as the lute-like n'goni, the djerkel (a traditional single-stringed guitar) and the njarka violin. He started out as a farmer, boatman, mechanic and tailor and became interested in music after watching religious spirit ceremonies on the banks of the Niger. He was the first surviving child in a family where nine elder brothers had died in infancy. He was, said Gold, a man who for much of his life "found things easy", and had the confidence to succeed at almost anything he attempted, although he never went to school and could neither read nor write.īorn in Niafunke, Toure earned his nickname of Farka, or donkey (which is certainly no insult in Mali) because of his strength.
He was too late, for Toure had died in his sleep. It was being taken out to him this week, along with the final mixes of his forthcoming album, by Nick Gold, of the World Circuit label, who had been a close associate since producing his first British release in 1987. Last month, he won a second Grammy for the album with Diabate, but he was never to see the award. It was already clear that Toure was seriously ill, but he went ahead with the concert and a recording for BBC Newsnight despite being in considerable pain. His album, In the Heart of the Moon, recorded with the world's leading kora player Toumani Diabate, was an exquisite selection of gently virtuoso duets, and last June the duo played together at the Barbican in London. In 2000 Toure announced that he had given up performing, but last year he had returned to music with a vengeance. He toured the world and won his first Grammy for his 1994 collaboration with Ry Cooder, Talking Timbuktu, then retreated to his home town of Niafunke, on the banks of the Niger river in north-west Mali, where he devoted his time to farming and his role as the local mayor, spending the money he earned from his albums on irrigation and development schemes that transformed the region, making it self-sufficient for food. Though Toure was the first of a long line of great musicians from Mali to find fame in the west, he insisted that music was not the only interest in his life.
I play traditional music and I don't know what blues is. He told me that he played African music, not blues, and that "this music has been taken from here. His work certainly echoed the blues - and, in particular, the playing of John Lee Hooker - but it was a comparison that first boosted his career, and then infuriated him. The "godfather of the desert blues", he was the first African musician to show, through his often hypnotic, rhythmic and self-assured playing, that the blues had originated in his home country, out on the edge of the Sahara. Ali Farka Toure, who has died of bone cancer in the Malian capital Bamako in his late 60s, was the finest, most influential and best-loved guitarist in Africa.
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