Album review

Sidi Touré

Sahel Folk

Paris 

27/01/2011 - 

The unassuming face of Malian music and former lead of the Songhaï Stars de Gao, singer and guitarist Sidi Touré has gone back to basic, true blues in his album Sahel Folk, cooked up in the same convivial spirit it conveys.

Sidi Touré likes to open out to others and open up his musical universe, as is clear from one of most his recent partnerships. There is no doubt that the Malian guitarist knows how to seduce with his playing. In 2003, the Swiss rapper Jonas, who met him in Bamako, asked him to participate in his album Bagages. Then an episode of the “take away concerts” Internet series was devoted to him in 2008, in which he was seen marrying his strings with those of a cello, both playing on the side of the street.

This time, his charms attracted Covalesky, member of the Nantes-based collective Molecules5, from the world of electro dub. The Frenchman’s original idea was an album of sounds evoking Gao, the hometown of Touré, who was to make a simple contribution to the project. Things took a completely different direction when the fifty-something musician set up with his old cronies in the courtyard of his sister’s house, around the inevitable cup of tea.

The live recording, executed with the utmost simplicity, has an authentic edge. This is music for sharing and exchanging emotion. Played in a very spare acoustic style, against a purposefully repetitive background – both its charm and its handicap – during this unusual session Sidi Touré and his five guests interpreted the nine songs that comprise Sahel Folk.

Mali abounds with musicians inspired by the legacy of Ali Farka Touré, but few know how to manipulate the dryness of songhaï blues and extract its essence. Fifteen years after Hoga, released on the international market but particularly evocative of broken dreams and injustice, Sidi Touré now holds an album that might well give him a chance to perform, at last and for the first time, outside his own country. 

Sidi Touré & Friends Sahel Folk (Thrill Jockey/Differ-Ant) 2011

Bertrand  Lavaine

Translation : Anne-Marie  Harper