It all starts with the mercurial Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré doing a little black-slope run down some scales, to whoops of anticipation from the crowd. Most of his tracks tonight begin with this offhand prelude, common to west African music – a foretaste of what’s to come. What invariably follows is a dazzling workout ranging across cultures and lineages, where Touré’s lacy fluency is always offset by anchoring groove.
The 43-year-old has been dubbed “the Hendrix of the Sahara”, an honorific that requires unpacking. (The same label has been used of Niger’s Mdou Moctar, a rising star of the region.) Touré’s electric guitar playing is, yes, off the hook. But he is no showboater. He plays the guitar tonight as though it were an extension of his own inner monologue, rather than as an instrument to be bitten or set alight. Notes fall from his fingers like rain on to water, where the insistent refrains of his rhythm section – three-strong, here – anchor the arpeggios and filigree.
Still: Touré is quite rock’n’roll. He pairs a traditional tunic-and-trousers combo with aviator shades throughout this engrossing set, one that draws from all corners of his discography and beyond. Two songs in, the calabash player Adama Koné transfers over from the traditional west African percussion gourd to a full drumkit, while Touré swaps his amplified acoustic guitar for an electric.
There are times when the heavy blues of Amandrai become so weighty as to briefly suggest Black Sabbath, and other passages where Touré combines ancestral northern Malian forms and his own, sometimes kora-like playing with the thump of a rock band (bassist Marshall Henry plays electric throughout). Billed as the international premiere of Touré’s “traditional acoustic quintet” in the wake of his 2022 album Les Racines (Roots), in which the questing musician explored more storied regional forms – ngoni player Ousmane Dagno is a relatively recent star addition – the evening ends up offering a much wider palette than advertised.
If the Hendrix comparison is quite a hefty one for Touré to lug around, another figure looms even larger in his career: his illustrious father, Ali Farka Touré (1939-2006), very much present tonight in a handful of songs. Amandrai is one of his – a version recorded with Ry Cooder appears on the elder Touré’s renowned 1994 album Talking Timbuktu, the record that made international audiences sit up and realise how incredibly close the blues of the Mississippi Delta and urban Chicago still were to the loping, plangent sounds of west Africa.
Touré the elder became a superstar. He was also a dad who wanted his son to go into the military to save him from the vicissitudes of musicianship. The two fell out when Vieux pursued music, initially as a percussionist. Eventually, Touré the younger ended up apprenticed to the kora master and Ali collaborator Toumani Diabaté and began a career trying to move out from his father’s shadow. International cross-genre collaborations peppered Vieux’s records, which threw reggae and Dave Matthews guest spots into the mix.
After five studio solo albums, the imperative to do his own thing changed with the pandemic. A slew of records in 2022-3 resulted, with Touré’s Les Racines returning to the Songhai tradition and the desert blues associated with his father. Then came Ali, a feted two-hander with Texas exotica-rock band Khruangbin, in which Vieux’s father’s songs gained imaginative new treatments and, last year, Voyageur, a compilation of unreleased Ali Farka Touré recordings made with Vieux’s input. Tonight’s kaleidoscopic set syncretises all of this recent history, finishing with Diaraby, an Ali Farka Touré song and west African staple.
But although Mali, and Malian traditions, figure strongly – Yer Gando, from Vieux Farka Touré’s 2013 album, Mon Pays (My Country), implores rival ethnic groups to unite – this surging summer festival set seems made for dancing and sloshing drinks around. Concert hall etiquette prevails, however, until Touré urges everyone gratefully on to their feet near the end.
Onstage, he often coaxes Dagno into little dance steps as the two stringed instrument players face off against each other on tracks such as Allah Bori or Ngala Kaourene – the latter, another plea for unity in a country that has faced not just internecine strife but Islamist insurgency, a pair of coups in 2020-1 and, most recently, a move towards increased authoritarian rule, with promised elections being cancelled.
These guitar-lute face-offs are, though, more question-and-answer sessions than attempts at one-upmanship; musicianly dialogue that illustrates Touré’s wider point. And although nothing tonight is quite as fusioneering as the Khruangbin collaborations – tour, please! – there remains a strong sense of tradition in dialogue with the present, of Mali in conversation with the world.
