Daby Touré, two in one

Touculture

Paris 

08/03/2007 - 

Stereo Spirit, the title that Daby Touré has chosen for his new album, sounds like an allegory of his own life. Brought up between Mauritania and Senegal, he is a son of Africa, as well as being a child of the modern world, and a griot of his own moods and impulses, which he incorporates with subtlety and talent into his “pop” musical arrangements.

A few sentences serve to sum up the troubled past of Daby Touré. His father was a doctor and musician who did not want his son to follow in his footsteps. He spent his childhood going back and forth between the Mauritanian desert and Casamance, in the south of Senegal. His passage into adulthood was marked by uprooting and moving to France, when his father Hamidou Touré went to join his brothers Sixu and Ismaël in the already legendary band, Touré Kunda. And so this “son of” musician managed to carve out a first name for himself and find his own sound.

“I was born right in the desert,” says Daby Touré, “but my personality really started to take shape in Djéole in Casamance, where I came into contact with the Soninke, Toucouleur and Wolof cultures. As a teenager, I came back to Nouakchott and then left it for France in ’89 with my father,” says the musician, before describing a much more musical kind of route B. “From a very young age, I was reared in a traditional environment, lulled by the instruments of my ancestors. It was only as a teenager that I became attracted to the guitar and started to get interested in other types of music. But the real trigger was my arrival in France. That’s when I was able to start playing with musicians from other countries.”

Laddé, a first album recorded with his cousin Omar under the name of Touré Touré, came out in 1999. Convinced that he would only get anywhere if he could control everything, Daby shut himself in his bedroom with his home-studio and composed, arranged and polished up the bare bones of Diam, his first solo, which was to be released on Peter Gabriel’s label, Realworld, in 2004.The roots were already deeply entrenched in pop land.

Wherever I lay my hat

"I haven’t stopped composing since,” explains Daby Touré. “Spontaneously, I should say. Even if I have sometimes thought about constructions and things in advance, I’ve often changed them later. In fact, the album is pretty spontaneous and the colours of it came all by themselves, easily, because the music was doing me good. You could say that music is a therapy for me,” says the musician, who claims it’s what keeps him alive. “In fact, music means that I can unite, or rather bring together, or make a bridge between, all these different cultures of mine. Stereo Spirit does exactly that".

The dozen tracks on this new album do indeed weave links between his pastoral cultural heritage and his currently urban day-to-day life. “I realised on a recent tour in the States that I could just as easily live in New York as in Paris or in my village in Africa, and that I am at ease in any country or any culture. I feel exactly that way when I go back to Mauritania or Senegal. In fact, I feel good anywhere,” claims this “countryman who isn’t scared to move on,” as he puts it himself.

Taking on every role

As the author, composer, arranger and producer of Stereo Spirit, Daby Touré has chosen to occupy all of the key roles in the album’s conception. “I hope I have been as far as I can go. I worked for several years as a musician in a group.

I’ve done duets with my cousin (Ed.: Omar Touré, with whom he formed Touré Touré), and I know by experience that if I want to assert my own sound, I need to do everything. In the era of the Stones and the Beatles, groups stayed together for years and the musicians are dedicated to them. A group had the time and the means to mature and master its sound. I never had that time, or the possibility of trying to reach that level of coherence – that lab work– with other people. That’s why I decided to draw everything in around myself,” He then goes on to talk about the role of Bob Coke, who advised and assisted him in producing this album. “Bob is a great producer who worked, for example, on Ben Harper’s first record. He brought me more maturity and experience, a degree of self-assurance, and an ear that I didn’t have before. It’s like being able to stand back and get the necessary distance from what you’re creating,” analyses the creator and final decision-maker on this album.

Practising optimist

If Daby is the only master on board his Stereo Spirit, there is nothing egocentric about the album. My songs talk of children and their right to be cared for; they sing of the love between human beings and the complexity of their relationships. They are stories that have been lived, directly or indirectly, and each story is different,” Daby Touré sums up. “It’s an optimistic album. In any case, there’s no choice, you have to be an optimist. Sometimes, I can see so much beauty and sincerity in someone’s expression that I tell myself that I was right to believe.”

Daby Touré Stereo Spirit. (Realworld/Virgin/EMI) 2007
Playing on 20 March at the Cigale in Paris.

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Translation : Anne-Marie  Harper