29 July 2008

Back to Africa, Crossing Cultural Boundaries

Contemporary African sounds enrich American popular music

Mali-born Ali Farka Toure is known as the most important interpreter of “African blues.”

(The following is excerpted from the U.S. Department of State publication, American Popular Music.)

By the 1990s collaborations between American and foreign musicians had become more common, spurred on the one hand by folk and alternative music fans’ search for a broader range of musical experiences, and on the other by the globalization of the music industry. Two interesting examples of this sort of transnational collaboration are the album Talking Timbuktu, which won the Grammy Award for Best World Music Recording in 1994, and a sampler album inspired by the film Dead Man Walking, which reached Number 61 on the album charts in 1996.

South African cornetist Hugh Masekela performing at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2004.

Talking Timbuktu was produced by the singer and guitarist Ry Cooder, whose career as a session musician and bandleader had already encompassed a wide array of styles, including blues, reggae, Tex-Mex music, urban folk song, Hawaiian guitar music, Dixieland jazz, and gospel music. The sound and sensibility of Talking Timbuktu are derived from the music of Ali Farka Touré, a guitarist and traditional praise singer (griot) from the West African nation of Mali.

Encountering a track like “Diaraby,” an American listener is likely to be struck by the music’s close affinities with the blues. This is no accident. To begin with, the blues styles of Mississippi, Texas, and other southern states were strongly influenced by the traditions of African slaves, many of whom came precisely from the Sahel region of West Africa, homeland of Ali Farka Touré’s people, the Bambara. The high-pitched, almost wailing sound of Touré’s singing; the percussive guitar patterns; and the use of song as a medium for social and personal commentary – all of these features represent an evolution of centuries- old links between the West African griot tradition and the blues created by black musicians in America’s Deep South. It turns out that Touré’s style was directly influenced by American blues musicians such as John Lee Hooker, whose records he discovered after his career was established in Africa.

Talking Timbuktu features contributions by the blues guitarist and fiddler Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and various prominent session musicians. The result hews close to its African roots, with the American musicians playing in support of Touré. The lyric of the song is itself reminiscent of the bittersweet emotion of some American blues:

What is wrong my love? It is you
I love
Your mother has told you not
to marry me, because I have
nothing. But I love you.
Your friends have told you not
to marry me, because I have
nothing. But I love you.
Your father has told you not
to marry me, because I have
nothing. But I love you.
What is wrong my love? It is you
I love.
Do not be angry, do not cry, do
not be sad because of love.

The sound and sensibility of “Diaraby” provide additional evidence of the deep links between African and American music. This is not music functioning as a universal language, but a conversation between two dialects of a complexly unified Afro-Atlantic musical language.

[This article is excerpted from American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3 by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman, published by Oxford University Press, copyright (2003, 2007), and offered in an abridged edition by the Bureau of International Information Programs.]