Afropop Worldwide (New York)
Banning Eyre
7 March 2006
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We've lost a giant. Immodest, brilliant, inscrutable, and luminous, Ali Farka Toure has died in Mali, after a long battle with cancer. Born in Kanau, Mali, Ali always remained loyal to the desert north, its peoples, traditions, music and mysteries. Music entranced him from youth, but his noble bloodline never allowed him to embrace it as a profession without misgivings. In discussing his recent collaboration with kora player and griot Toumani Diabate, Ali always pointed out that Toumani was a real musician, as if somehow, he was just hanging in there. That didn't stop the CD, In the Heart of the Moon, from winning a Grammy Award this year, Ali's second in a long, remarkable career.
Ali will probably be best remembered as a guitarist. He was already a teenager skilled at traditional instruments when he first played guitar, encouraged by Guinean maestro Fodeba Keita, founder of the Ballets Africaine. That was in 1956. In the 1970s, Ali began making commercial recordings. But even then, he preferred life on his farm on the banks of the Niger. In the 1980s, Ali became swept up in the burgeoning world music frenzy in England. BBC broadcaster Andy Kershaw was mad about an album he had come across and this man simply had to be found. Soon came the 'African bluesman' tag, and decades of discussion about whether John Lee Hooker influenced Ali, or Ali held the ancient keys to Hooker's magic. Ali never wavered in his contention that American blues musicians were playing half-remembered Malian music, songs whose origins they could not possibly comprehend. If this at times sounded arrogant, it was always delivered with a smile, and often an obscure aphorism: "Honey does not taste sweet in only one mouth."
Ali's London days also brought him under the wing of producer Nick Gold of World Circuit Records, the label that would eventually release all of Ali's recorded works, including an as yet unreleased band album recorded last year.
Afropop Worldwide will savor many great memories of Ali, from our first interview in 1993, when Ali wowed us with his mystical take on history and geography, to our 'Visit to Niafounke' program a couple of years later, the time I got to sit in on guitar during Ali's encore at the Middle East in Cambridge, MA, in 1998, Ali presiding over the burning of illegal cassettes in Bamako, watching Ali jam with Bonnie Raitt at the 2000 WOMAD festival in Seattle, and of course, Ali's ecstatic festival-closing set at the 2003 Festival in the Desert near Timbuktu. Watch this space for much more on a towering musical figure and a great man. Ali, may you rest in peace!
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