Album review

The Rail Band

Soundiata

Paris 

12/09/2007 - 

Soundiata, the first installment of a three-volume series featuring songs recorded by the Rail Band between 1970 and 1983, gives fans the chance to (re)discover the original sound of Mali’s legendary orchestra. The Rail Band, so-called because they made their name playing down at the local station in Bamako, pioneered a trend for Mandingo music and boasted Salif Keita, and then Mory Kanté, as lead singers.

Thirty-seven years ago, in July 1970 to be exact, Salif Keita stepped in front of the microphone at the Buffet Hotel at Bamako railway station. This was his first appearance with the Rail Band, the Buffet Hotel’s regular orchestra. On this occasion, the young albino singer performed with a towel covering his face, not wishing anyone in the audience to recognise him. (Keita’s social caste prevented him from playing music in public). Keita would go on to remove the towel for future performances, of course, eventually giving in to Tidiani Koné’s demands to join his nascent group.

Around this time just over the border in Guinea, President Sékou Touré instigated a vast cultural drive, creating national orchestras in Conakry whose members were all given civil servant status. The idea soon caught on in Mali, too, and the musicians in the Rail Band were all made state functionaries. Thanks to this privileged status, which gave members of the group a regular salary, the Rail Band turned professional. The group were also free to start experimenting with a more “authentic” style of music rather than just churning out covers of international hits (which was very much the practice at the time). And thus it was that the Rail Band became musical agents of change, launching themselves into a radical modernisation of traditional Mandingo folk sounds.

Many of the Rail Band’s songs revived legends and ancestral heroes from the past such as Soundiata Keita, after whom this double album of songs (most of them recorded in the first half of the ‘70s) is named. Three of the eleven tracks featured on Soundiata pay tribute to this famous 13^th-century king and conqueror whose legend continues to exert a powerful fascination today. On Soundiata, l’exil, for instance, the Guinean singer Mory Kanté (who joined the Rail Band around 1972 at a time when the group was significantly expanding its line-up) recounts a momentous episode in the life of this illustrious ancestor of Salif Keita’s (who had since parted company with the Rail Band).

Much more than a song, Soundiata, l’exil might best be described as a musical ‘tour de force.’ The track lasts a full 27 minutes and contains spoken as well as sung sections as well as more rhythmic phases where the tempo speeds up at a giddying pace, driven by drums and the sudden eruption of brass and percussion instruments. Meanwhile, the repetitive figures Djelimady Tounkara conjures up on guitar structure the piece into a cohesive whole. Tounkara’s phenomenal playing style and the sounds he managed to coax from his guitar contributed to the Rail Band’s legend, helping to make the group an ongoing reference for an entire generation of musicians who have since gone on to become major ambassadors of Mandingo sounds themselves.

The Rail Band Soundiata (Sterns/Discograph) 2007

Bertrand  Lavaine

Translation : Julie  Street