Ali Farka Toure - Savane
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CD Details
Artist: Ali Farka ToureEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2006-07-25
Music Label: Nonesuch
Soundtracks:
- Erdi
- Yer Bounda Fara
- Beto
- Savane
- Soya
- Penda Yoro
- Machengoidi
- Ledi Coumbe
- Hanana Soko
- Gambari
- Banga
- Njarou
Music reviews of Savane
Music Review: Farewell, Brave Friend
Rating: 5 Stars
One of the incredible tragedies in Music this year is the passing of Ali Farka Toure. It is impossible to exagerate his importance to African, Malian, Blues, World musics. He is as seminal figure as anyone in any discipline. Last year he recorded the mystically beautiful IN THE HEART OF THE MOON with Toumani Diabete, and this record as well as Diabete's magical SYMMETRY ORCHESTRA recording just out were recorded nearly simultaneously in the same hotel as the MOON sessions.
Toure's hypnotic guiatr work is set to haunting effect alongside ngoni players like Mama Sissoko, American sax player and Van Morrison collaborator Pee Wee Ellis, calabash virtuouso Souleye Kane, and percussionists like Oumar Toure. This is the cream of Mali's traditional music set, and some of the best international sidemen you can have. For Ellis, it must have been a career highpoint to join in such august company and he plays as though this may never happen again.
And sadly, it will not. These are love songs, songs about life along a river, songs of politics and wisdom that ring with an authenticity that almost all of today's music lacks. There are few if any African-Americans whose records could hold a candle to this, let alone white, Carribbean, or any other ethnicity. This is music born of a culture that transcends those identifying markers and reaches into that which is quintessentially human in all of us. Considering that Human Life likely started in these environs, that should not be surprising. That Toure can articulate what is so primally essential to life and bring forth such brilliant contributions from his collaborators set this effort on a plain few have even thought about reaching.
This is the blues. Close your eyes, forget the language differences, and it is the voice of John Lee Hooker, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Asie Payton crying out from the Delta, from the northern Mississippi fields. It is a call that began with the dawn of man and continues to call him home. It is the struggle and the passion, the poetic and the political, the directions in the human soul that seek peace, love, justice a safe and clean home, a regard for the planet as a nuturing place instead of a field to be exploited. And in what may yet prove to be his most prophetic call, the last song on the CD, "N'Jarou" tells the story of a brave man who resisted both the tyranny of white colonialization and the the chains of expansionsit Islam to be true to what he knew in his heart and soul. In a Greek context, we might call this Socratic. In any context, it is profound.
This is not a dance record. It is meant to be listened to thoughtfully. While "Savane" speaks literally about a drought and the damage wrought thereby in the savannahs, metaphorically, Toure is talking about the drought in our hearts and souls in these times we live in. We ought to listen carefully to this marvellous griot's valedictory farewell.
Description of Savane
Toure recorded Savane in the Malian capital of Bamako, as part of a three-disc project dubbed the Hotel Mande Sessions, after the studio in which the albums were cut. Savane is the last, perhaps most eloquent, installment. In concept and execution, the sessions recall teh magical combination of spontaneity and virtuosity that marked the debut releases from the Buena Vista Social Club. Toure offers reverberating, incantatory vocals to accompany his lean, hypnotically repetitive guitar lines.Savane, the great African guitarist and bluesman Ali Farka Touré's final solo studio album, was recorded in his native Mali toward the end of his life, when the artist knew his days were numbered. He spent his last years in his home village of Niafunké, concentrating on farming and family matters, jamming with local musicians of an evening. This impassioned, roots-drenched, mostly acoustic valedictory finds the Maestro's stalking rhythms and high-noon-at-the-crossroads, dusty desert-to-delta vocals in no less than life-summing form. "Soya" (track 5) seems to stand still in a million directions, while "Hanana Soko" (track 9) features a searing njarka fiddle spinning delirious circles around its throaty accompanying percussion. Pee Wee Ellis (sax) and Little George Sueref (harmonica) each manage to make strong impressions while adhering to the groove at hand. Afel Boucoum, a talented younger musician who has been mentioned as Touré's most likely successor (as if such a thing were possible!), graces "Njarou," the last tune. The other players are also at the top of their game, as fluttering ngoni (a West African spike lute) riffs weave in and out and airy female vocals float like a breeze off the river Niger. There are reports that Touré senior sat in on his son's upcoming album and scads of archival material will undoubtedly materialize. But his unsentimental, voluptuously masculine, spirit-guided magic is captured at its best, for all time, in this magnificent farewell. --Christina Roden
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