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The
Siren Song of Mali
Ed Alcock for The New York Times
Toumani Diabate,
who plays the 21-string kora, won the Grammy this
year for best traditional world music album for “In the Heart of the Moon,” a collaboration with Ali Farka Touré. Mr. Diabate is a
descendant of 53 generations of kora players from the
Malinke tribe.
WE were walking down a
dirt road in a neighborhood of Bamako with the mellifluous name of Badalabougou, following the rhythmic beating of a bongo
drum. Then we saw it: down an alley lined with dusty neem
trees and flowering jacarandas, a few hundred wedding celebrants had gathered
under a canopy made from scraps of United Nations-issue sheeting, intently
watching a local percussion band play a rousing music known as deedadee.
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Sampling the
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(April 2, 2006)
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Ed Alcock
for The New York Times
The circumcision of a child is a reason to
dance in the streets of Bamako.
Ed Alcock
for The New York Times
A dancer and drummers entertain at a wedding
party.
Ed Alcock
for The New York Times
A griot sings with
the band of Adama (Star) Dramé
and Marium Koko Dembele at the Cheval Blanc club in Badalabougou.
Lithe
male dancers wearing leather headdresses, cowrie-studded
orange vests, burlap shorts and iron bangles leapt and shook rice-filled
calabashes known as yabbaras. A jembe
fola ("he who talks with the drum") pounded
on a bongo fashioned from sheets of horsehide stretched over a gasoline can.
Another percussionist banged a grooved metal cylinder called a karinyan.
Then the dancers
disappeared and a petite female singer moved in, circling through the crowd and
singing praises to relatives of the bride and groom. Suddenly, she began
gesticulating in our direction, while guests looked on, amused.
"She is singing
about you," one told me. "She is praising you for visiting
Mali."
The band had been playing
for six hours when we arrived, at 4 p.m., and the music would go on until long
after dark. As the light faded, people spilled out of their houses and
gravitated toward the tent. Street vendors circulated on the periphery of the
crowd, selling peanuts, chewing gum, bananas, tea, firewood, sandals, toothbrushes
and sunglasses. The whole neighborhood had turned out for the show.
"This band usually
plays at weddings for people from Bamako who have
roots in the Niamala region," said my companion,
Paul Chandler, an American record producer and schoolteacher who has lived in
Bamako for several years, "but their music is free to everyone who wanders
by."
Bamako, a hot, dusty city
that sprawls along both banks of the Niger River in southern Mali, near the
border with Guinea, does not, at first glance, bear the markings of one of the
world's great cultural capitals. Although it is the capital of the former
French colony and has a population estimated at more than a million, in many
respects the city feels like an overgrown village, with a handful of high-rises
along the wide and murky Niger, goats grazing at roadside and a sprawling
market, the Grand Marché, filling much of downtown. Yet its musical tradition
goes back at least six centuries, and public open-air performances by itinerant
musicians, like the one we saw, are as much a part of life here as pickup games
of le football. Moreover, during the last decade, the city has undergone a
transformation.
A Malian music boom that
began in the 1990's, when the soulful vocalist Salif
Keita and the singer-guitarist Ali Farka Touré achieved international stardom, has brought an influx
of tourists, record producers and aspiring musicians seeking to emulate the
stars' successes. (The news of Mr. Touré's death on
March 6 from cancer resonated around the world.) As a result, Bamako has become
a meeting place and incubator for West African talent, and one of the best
places on the planet to hear live music.
Bars and nightclubs have
sprung up, often intimate venues with thatched roofs, bare scuffed walls and a
few dozen rough wooden tables and chairs, where some of the biggest names in
Malian music drop by to play when they're in town. (Several of these
establishments, including Mr. Keita's Mofu and Oumou Sangare's Hotel Wassulu, are owned by musicians.) Such Western artists as
Robert Plant, Ry Cooder,
Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker and the French Basque
star Manu Chao have visited Bamako to jam and record
with the local stars.
The city has become a
cultural hothouse, in which singers and instrumentalists from Mali's myriad
tribes — the Tuaregs of the Sahara, the Sorhai of Timbuktu, the Malinkes
from the border region south of Bamako, the Dogon
cliff dwellers, the Wassalous near the Ivory Coast,
the Peuls of central Mali — mix and fertilize one
another's art.
"The number of
ethnic groups here is vast, and each culture is distinct," said Mombé Traoré, a dreadlocked disc
jockey in his 30's known as D. J. Vieux who agreed to
be my guide during several days of sampling the music scene in early February.
"Everyone meets up in Bamako."
Mali musical tradition
goes back to the height of the Songhai Empire, in the
early 16th century, when a caste of itinerant entertainers — oral historians
called griots — emerged in the villages along the
Niger River, the third longest waterway in Africa. Known as jeli
in the local Bambara language, the griots developed musical narratives whose aim was to
celebrate the achievements of kings and to chronicle the culture and history of
their communities.
"If you think of
West Africa as a body, then the griot is the
blood," I was told by Toumani Diabate, a virtuoso of the 21-string, harplike
kora who won a Grammy this year when "In the
Heart of the Moon," a collaboration with Ali Farka
Touré that the pair recorded in Bamako, was named
best traditional world music album. "We are the guardians of West Africa's
society. We are communicators."
Mali's griot music has developed many permutations over the
centuries, but common denominators still exist: a hypnotic, haunting melody
based on a pentatonic scale, the piercing vibrato of the kora,
energetic drumming and the plaintive wail of the singer-narrator. (The griot still ranks low on the social hierarchy, however: Salif Keita, a descendant of a royal Malinke
family, earned his clan's scorn when he chose the career of the griot.)
I arrived in Bamako at
the end of the cool, dry season, when tourists from Europe and, increasingly, the United States converge on
Mali to hike among the villages of the animist Dogon
tribe, or to venture to Timbuktu and the Sahara beyond. Bamako used to be just
a way station, but increasing numbers of tourists are staying a few days to
check out the music scene.
Bamako remains one of the
poorest capitals in West Africa (Mali has been independent since 1960). But it
is also perhaps the most welcoming, and visitors find almost none of the
hassles encountered in other cities in the region.
After having my
credit-card number stolen at one of the best hotels in Lagos, Nigeria, and
after bribing my way past roadblocks manned by drunken soldiers and
club-wielding teenage vigilantes in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, I found Bamako a
relief. Taxi drivers are generally honest; street hawkers back off after a
single polite "non, merci"; the streets are
safe after dark. And if you can speak a little French and drop the names of one
or two Malian musicians, you'll find yourself engaged in animated conversations
at every turn.
At 11 p.m. on my second
night in Bamako, Vieux, which my dreadlocked guide
goes by, pulled up in front of my hotel on an aging Chinese moped and told me
to follow him in a taxi. His peacock-blue traditional robe, a bubu, fluttered in the breeze as we rode through dark
streets to Élysée, a barnlike
club on the outskirts of town.
Dimly lit, it was packed
when we arrived, filled with young Malian couples who danced slowly on a rough
mosaic floor or snuggled on banquettes. (Mali's men and women, despite living
in an Islamic country, are relaxed about displaying affection in public.) A
popular local singer, Lobi Traoré,
no relation to Vieux, sang melancholy tunes in Bambara, backed by a percussion band and two electric
guitars. The music, which Lobi Traoré
called the "Bambara Blues," contains
striking echoes of American R & B, and, like that genre,
is filled with themes of shattered romance and unrequited longing.
Lobi Traoré is not the first
musician to cite parallels between the music of the Mississippi Delta and that
of the Niger River. The late Ali Farka Touré, a Sorhai who grew up on
the banks of the Niger south of Timbuktu, once said that the American blues
were born along his bend in the river. Robert Plant found similarities between
the assouf music of the Tuaregs
and American blues when he played at the Festival of the Desert near Timbuktu
in 2003, one of several multiple-day outdoor concerts that draw thousands to
Mali each year.
The next night our
destination was the Cheval Blanc, an open-air bar in Badalabougou
owned by an American woman and her Malian husband, Lorelei Frizzell
and Ssasi Traoré. Under a
ragged thatched roof, we sat on plastic chairs at a crude wooden table, ate
brochettes of beef and downed cold bottles of Castel
beer while listening to a husband-and-wife band, Adama
(Star) Dramé and Marium Koko Dembele.
A Dogon
who grew up in the remote cliffs of central Mali, Mr. Dramé
fashioned his first guitar out of tin cans, he told me during a break, and had
done so well that he was recently hired as a guitarist by Mali's National
Orchestra. A Dunhill dangling from his lips, he moved effortlessly and
eclectically from reggae to Led Zeppelin-style blues to Dogon
melodies, accompanied by percussionists, a xylophone player and Marium's throaty vocals.
Some of the biggest stars
of the Malian music scene, including Amadou and Mariam and Habib Koité, were away at the Festival on the Niger, a three-day
outdoor concert in Ségou, 150 miles northeast of
Bamako. But Toumani Diabate,
the kora virtuoso, had skipped the event so he could
prepare for his trip to the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.
Vieux wrangled me a rare
invitation to meet Mr. Diabate at his home on the
outskirts of Bamako. I arrived at 1 on a Friday afternoon and waited for about
two hours in an anteroom; then Mr. Diabate, a slender
40-year-old, appeared at the door and invited me to sit with him on a veranda
and share a lunch of capitain, a succulent white fish
netted from the Niger.
We ate communally,
scooping the fish and rice with our fingers from a large metal plate. In the
adjacent courtyard, a half dozen female relatives, including one of his two
wives, were pounding millet, soaking string beans and simmering a stew over an
open fire. It could have been a scene in any village in rural Mali, except for
the occasional reminder of Mr. Diabate's celebrity.
In the middle of our meal his cellphone rang: it was
his producer from Nonesuch Records calling to finalize Mr. Diabate's
flights to Los Angeles via Paris the next day.
The scion of 53
generations of kora players from the Malinke tribe, Mr. Diabate grew
up in Bamako and began studying the instrument at the age of 5. He came to
artistic maturity just as Malian music was gaining exposure in the United
States, and played his first American concert at a club in New Jersey (he doesn't remember
its name) almost 20 years ago.
Since then, he's
performed "in 47 states," he said. He sponged up reggae, pop, jazz
and soul influences during his travels, and has collaborated with the likes of Taj Mahal, Ry
Cooder and the jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd.
"I take the old
Malian songs and give them modern arrangements, and I set new compositions to
the old music," he told me. "Today people want 'world music,' mixing
the old and the new, but you have to remain true to yourself. If you forget the
past, then you'll lose your way in the future."
Although he has had ample
opportunity to emigrate to the West, Mr. Diabate
remains firmly rooted in his birthplace; shuttling back and forth, he
explained, keeps him energized and inspired.
"I could never move
away from Bamako," he said. "To me, it's the most beautiful city in
the world."
MR. Diabate
was scheduled to perform that evening with his band, the Symmetric Orchestra,
at Le Hogon, one of the most popular music clubs in
Bamako. I followed Vieux's moped along the north bank
of the Niger, arriving at the club shortly after midnight. In contrast to the
scruffy bars I'd been visiting, Le Hogon was a
flashy, sumptuous place. Hundreds of patrons sat in the warm night on three
open-air verandas, each topped by a thatched, Dogon-style
roof that swept upward into a witch's-hat peak.
A few couples were
intertwined on the terra cotta dance floor. Behind it, bathed in hot-pink light
and arrayed in two neat rows, the 10-member Symmetric Orchestra performed
energetically. Four percussionists stood in the front row, beating on jembes and dununbas, slim tapered
drums that fit snugly in the armpit. Behind them, their backs against a
colorful mural of Dogon village life, sat acoustic,
electric and bass guitarists; a clarinetist; a balafonist
(playing a kind of xylophone); and a kora player,
plucking at the long-necked instrument almost imperceptibly with both hands.
The only ingredient
missing was Mr. Diabate. "He likes to sleep in
the evening, and he usually doesn't get here until 1 o'clock or 1:30," Vieux said.
A griot,
swathed in a dazzling white bubu, swept across the
dance floor, his melancholic voice reminiscent of Salif
Keita's. The glittering notes of the kora cut through
the pounding percussives and guitars. People left
their seats, embraced the griot and stuck money in
his gown, repeating a pattern that has played out for centuries.
"It is in our
culture to reward the griot for giving us
knowledge," Vieux told me. "In the
villages, they give cattle or even houses, depending on how rich they are. It's
not obligatory, but it is expected."
By 2 a.m., Mr. Diabate had still not arrived. During a break in the set, Vieux conferred with a friend in the Symmetric Orchestra
and returned to the table with bad news: the virtuoso would not be showing up.
"He says he's sick," Vieux said
skeptically.
The disc jockey suspected
a different reason: Mr. Diabate was involved in a
running dispute with the owners of Le Hogon over the
size of his fee, he speculated, and had decided to boycott the event.
"He's a big star," Vieux said with a shrug.
Then the lights came back
up, the band began to play, and soon, Mr. Diabate's
absence seemed hardly to matter at all.
Visitor Information
HOW TO GET THERE
The two easiest ways to
get to Bamako from New York are on Air France (www.airfrance.us) through Paris,
or on Royal Air Maroc (www.royalairmaroc.com) via
Casablanca. Fares for late April recently started in the $750 to $850 range.
Americans can get visas
($100) from the Embassy of Mali in Washington (202-332-2249; www.maliembassy.us).
WHERE TO HEAR MUSIC
The dialing code for Mali
is 223; many clubs do not have listed numbers.
Bamako is a city for
night owls: the music doesn't usually start until 11 p.m. and goes as late as 5
a.m. Many streets in Bamako do not have names, but taxi drivers usually know
how to find the hot spots. Even the best live music clubs rarely charge
admission of more than 2,500 CFA francs, $5 at 500 francs to the dollar.
Le Hogon, in the N'Tomikorobougou
neighborhood, is the most upscale of the clubs. Modeled after a Dogon village, it's the regular Friday venue of Toumani Diabate's Symmetric
Orchestra and, on increasingly rare occasions, Mr. Diabate
himself.
Savana (631-4156) in Korofina Nord. On
Wednesday nights, a popular singer-guitarist, Djibee
5, draws Bamako's hip young crowd with an eclectic mix that ranges from Bob
Marley to "House of the Rising Sun" to traditional Bambara tunes.
Djembe, in Lafiabougou, is a scaled-down version of Le Hogon with griot music in a
casual open-air setting. It's open nightly, but the best bands play on Friday
and Saturday.
Wassulu Hôtel Résidence, Route Aeroport, Place Sogolon (228-7373 or 228-7474; www.hotel-residence-wassulu.com),
is owned by the Malian diva Oumou Sangare,
who often performs there on Saturday nights.
Espace Bouna, in ACI 2000 Hamdallaye
(229-5467), is a large open-air club where Habib Koité, a renowned Mande singer,
plays the music of a variety of Malian ethnic groups on Saturday nights. Amadou and Mariam, the well-known
blind musicians, occasionally show up, as does Toumani
Diabate.
Cheval Blanc in Torokorobougou, on
the south side of the Niger River, is a new open-air club with crude
amplifiers, a ragged thatched roof and a Friday night lineup of up-and-coming
young musicians.
Élysée is in the Samé
neighborhood on the "ancienne route de
Kati" and is a dim, barnlike club with a funky
atmosphere where Lobi Traoré
is a regular performer.
There are also several
music festivals each year in Mali. Perhaps the most prominent is the Festival
of the Desert (www.festival-au-desert.org;
232-1804), which is scheduled for next Jan. 11 to 13 in the Tuareg
village of Essakane, two hours north of Timbuktu.
Then on Feb. 1 to 4, the Festival
on the Niger (www.festivalsegou.org)
is scheduled in Ségou.
And the Paris-Bamako
Festival is taking place this week at the school for the blind in Bamako (www.les-paris-bamako.com).
WHERE TO EAT
Restaurant Bla Bla, Route de Bla Bla, in the Hippodrome quarter (674-8264), is the trendiest
restaurant in Bamako. You can order capitain
brochettes and a Castel beer, sit back in a relaxed
setting and watch a pageant of Rastas, music stars,
Peace Corps volunteers and backpackers.
Da Guido,
in Hippodrome (679-0135 or 632-7788), is a small, lively place run by Italian
brothers, down the street from Bla Bla. It has, by all accounts, the best pizza in Bamako.
Open for dinner daily except Thursday.
San Toro, in Hippodrome (221-3082), is brimming with vintage
Malian artifacts, and has good Western food and live kora
music from 6 to 11 p.m. every night.
Restaurant Soukhothai, in
the Quartier du Fleuve along the river next to the bar L'Appaloosa
(671-1051), is a Thai restaurant owned by a Belgian expat
and his Thai wife. It serves authentic, fiery dishes that rival the best of Bangkok.
WHERE TO SHOP
The Ngolina Market,
down the road from the Sofitel L'Amitié
Hotel, is the best place for bargains on Malian handicrafts. The stalls are at
the far end, and you'll have to ask someone to lead you there, but it's worth
the effort. You'll find Dogon masks and doors, carved
Bambara wood-and-brass antelopes and Tuareg jewelry, much of it of fine quality. Bargain hard
and don't pay more than half the initial asking price.
WHERE TO STAY
Sofitel L'Amitié Bamako (221-4321; www.accor-hotels.com), a modern hotel near the Niger River, is
widely considered the best in town. It has a pool, tennis courts and high-speed
Internet connections. The French-style breakfast buffet is a treat. Doubles
start at 85,000 CFA francs.
Azalai Hôtel Salam, on the
north bank of the Niger (222-1200; www.azalaihotels.com), is a smaller and more intimate
alternative to the Sofitel. It has all the modern
amenities and, unlike the bland Sofitel, is decorated
in West African style. Doubles are 91,000 CFA francs.
Azalai Grand Hotel, Centre Ville (222-2481 or 222-2492; e-mail, grandhotel@ikatelnet.net), is downtown, a
five-minute walk from the Grand Marché and the National Museum. Doubles are
65,000 CFA francs.
Hôtel Le Rabelais, Quinzanbougou neighborhood (221-3637; e-mail,
touraine@afribonemali.net), is
a quaint, French-owned hotel with a beautiful pool and a friendly staff. Doubles with breakfast: 35,000 CFA francs.
BEYOND BAMAKO
Toguna Adventure Tours, ACI 2000 Hamdallaye (229-5366; www.geocities.com/toguna_adventure_tours),
is partly owned by an American, Karen Crabbs, and Aly Tembely, a Dogon. A 14-day trip that includes Djenne,
Dogon and Timbuktu costs from $2,735 a person for two
to $1,245 each for a group of 14. Ms. Crabbs also
knows the music scene.
JOSHUA HAMMER is Newsweek's correspondent at large, based in South Africa.