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(More customer reviews)One of the incredible tragedies in Music this year is the passing of Ali Farka Toure. It is impossible to exagerate his importance to African, Malian, Blues, World musics. He is as seminal figure as anyone in any discipline. Last year he recorded the mystically beautiful IN THE HEART OF THE MOON with Toumani Diabete, and this record as well as Diabete's magical SYMMETRY ORCHESTRA recording just out were recorded nearly simultaneously in the same hotel as the MOON sessions.
Toure's hypnotic guiatr work is set to haunting effect alongside ngoni players like Mama Sissoko, American sax player and Van Morrison collaborator Pee Wee Ellis, calabash virtuouso Souleye Kane, and percussionists like Oumar Toure. This is the cream of Mali's traditional music set, and some of the best international sidemen you can have. For Ellis, it must have been a career highpoint to join in such august company and he plays as though this may never happen again.
And sadly, it will not. These are love songs, songs about life along a river, songs of politics and wisdom that ring with an authenticity that almost all of today's music lacks. There are few if any African-Americans whose records could hold a candle to this, let alone white, Carribbean, or any other ethnicity. This is music born of a culture that transcends those identifying markers and reaches into that which is quintessentially human in all of us. Considering that Human Life likely started in these environs, that should not be surprising. That Toure can articulate what is so primally essential to life and bring forth such brilliant contributions from his collaborators set this effort on a plain few have even thought about reaching.
This is the blues. Close your eyes, forget the language differences, and it is the voice of John Lee Hooker, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Asie Payton crying out from the Delta, from the northern Mississippi fields. It is a call that began with the dawn of man and continues to call him home. It is the struggle and the passion, the poetic and the political, the directions in the human soul that seek peace, love, justice a safe and clean home, a regard for the planet as a nuturing place instead of a field to be exploited. And in what may yet prove to be his most prophetic call, the last song on the CD, "N'Jarou" tells the story of a brave man who resisted both the tyranny of white colonialization and the the chains of expansionsit Islam to be true to what he knew in his heart and soul. In a Greek context, we might call this Socratic. In any context, it is profound.
This is not a dance record. It is meant to be listened to thoughtfully. While "Savane" speaks literally about a drought and the damage wrought thereby in the savannahs, metaphorically, Toure is talking about the drought in our hearts and souls in these times we live in. We ought to listen carefully to this marvellous griot's valedictory farewell.
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Toure recorded Savane in the Malian capital of Bamako, as part of a three-disc project dubbed the Hotel Mande Sessions, after the studio in which the albums were cut. Savane is the last, perhaps most eloquent, installment. In concept and execution, the sessions recall teh magical combination of spontaneity and virtuosity that marked the debut releases from the Buena Vista Social Club. Toure offers reverberating, incantatory vocals to accompany his lean, hypnotically repetitive guitar lines.
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