PhilPaine.com

I’ve writ­ten else­where of my love for the music of Ali Far­ka Touré, whose every chord calls back mem­o­ries of the Sahara, and whose spir­it hov­ered above Tim­buk­tu like an angel. His was a pro­found and sub­tle art, which turned the “blues” into a clar­i­on of sub­lime affir­ma­tion. His native Mali suf­fered the exploita­tion of dic­ta­tor­ship and the hor­rors of civ­il war, but he remained undaunt­ed in his opti­mism. While oth­er Malian musi­cians fled to Europe and Amer­i­ca to pur­sue their careers, Touré stuck it out at home. The over­throw of dic­ta­tor­ship pro­duced a renais­sance of Malian music. Touré was the very sol­id rock on which that renais­sance was found­ed. True to his char­ac­ter, he spent the last years of his life serv­ing as may­or of a small vil­lage near Tim­buk­tu, spend­ing the mon­ey from his inter­na­tion­al record­ings to pro­vide it with sew­er­age and elec­tric­i­ty. My favourite album of his will always be The Source (1993), but jostling against it for that posi­tion is this won­der­ful 1995 col­lab­o­ra­tion with Amer­i­can gui­tarist Ry Cood­er, Talk­ing Tim­buk­tu. Unlike some of the rather patron­iz­ing duets between African artists and Euro­pean or Amer­i­can super­stars, this one is an easy-going ses­sion between two pro­fes­sion­al musi­cians who have lit­tle patience with stage-egos or man­u­fac­tured images. Cood­er is as Amer­i­can as they come, and Touré as African as they come, and both under­stood how those two places are musi­cal­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly inter­twined. Amer­i­ca could not have become Amer­i­ca with­out Africa. It would just have been one more place where they danced with wood­en clogs in 4/4 time, and played the accor­dion. It could not have brought forth Elling­ton, Gersh­win, Satch­mo, Good­man and Chuck Berry and all that came from them. Lis­ten to the mar­velous per­for­mances of “Ai Du” and “Diara­by” on this album, and you’ll hear that brotherhood.