f76 Blues In The Ali
Ian Anderson looks back on our early encounters with Ali Farka Touré, to open a special retrospective on the great man.
tional legend, the great Malian singer/gui- tarist Ali Farka Touré. It was his first to be published in the Anglophone press, and the first of a number that we’d carry up until March 2006, when Hélène Rammant’s cover feature in fR273 – which sadly coin- cided with the great man’s death, as it turned out – was probably his last.
T His name had first appeared in our
pages in FR37, back in the summer of 1986, when I’d reviewed one of his French- released LPs after a tip-off from musician friend Mike Cooper. Around the same time, DJ Andy Kershaw had stumbled across the same record while browsing in Paris, not realising it was already available from Stern’s African Record Centre in Lon- don, and began playing it regularly on his BBC Radio 1 show. In these ways, interest among roots, blues and West African music fans – a rapidly growing bunch at that time –was piqued.
The main UK tour organisers for inter- esting music from faraway places back then – a year before the marketing tag ‘World Music’ was instigated –were Arts Worldwide, and their director Anne Hunt set off for Mali with the express intention of tracking Ali down and persuading him to come to the UK on tour.
Everybody’s guide, guru and infor-
mant on West African (and wider) music matters in those days was Lucy Duran, then working at the National Sound Archive. Lucy’s flat in London’s Camden was a buzzing hub where the door was always open. You could bowl up there and find kora masters or Cuban trumpeters ensconced in the sitting room, or Cretan musicians playing intense, intricate and apparently never-ending circular tunes at the kitchen table.
So it was that I showed up one sunny evening in 1987 to be greeted by Lucy with the biggest shit-eating grin imagin- able on her face. “Ian! You’ll never guess who’s here!” Er, no… “Come in, come in…” And there, sat in the armchair by the window, was an impressive, regal-
hirty years ago in FR56, February 1988, our cover feature was an interview – carried out the pre- vious autumn – with a man who would soon become an interna-
looking African man resplendent in a pur- ple robe. “This,” pronounced Lucy, unable to disguise her pleasure and excitement, “is Ali Farka Touré!” Anne Hunt had successfully found him.
Also around that time, Anne Hunt had decided that they ought to start a label to record the remarkable artists that Arts Worldwide were bringing over, and thus the eventually mega-successful World Cir- cuit Records, home of Buena Vista Social Club and all the rest, was born. She’d hired a young man called Nick Gold to run it, and one of his first duties was to pay visits to the people running some of the other little independent specialist labels putting out what was about to be called World Music and ask how it was done. He came to visit our tiny Rogue Records set-up among all the others. As Ben Mandelson of Globe- Style later commented, it was a good thing that he didn’t take any of our advice!
World Circuit put Ali into the studio on that first UK visit, to record his epony- mous first album for the label which really launched his international career. The trust built up between Ali and Nick meant that another four solo albums for the label would follow over the next two decades – The River (1990), The Source (’92), Nia- funké (’99) and Savane (2006) – plus his acclaimed collaborations with Ry Cooder (Talking Timbuktu, ’94) and Toumani Dia- baté (In The Heart Of The Moon, 2005, and Ali & Toumani, 2010) and a couple of re- issues of earlier material (Radio Mali, 1996, and Red & Green, 2004).
Also on that visit, Ali made his first ever unadvertised UK live appearance at the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden. We reviewed it in FR53. I’d taken my camera, and nearly drove off the road the follow- ing year when spotting one of my photos blown up huge on posters advertising the South Bank debut double bill of Ali and Jali Musa Jawara. My shit-eating grin was probably as wide as Lucy’s had been the previous year! It continued to stay plas- tered to my face when I was able to book him for our 1988 Farnham Folk Day. The following year, after I’d introduced my Womad friends to South Hill Park at Brack- nell, where they ran in ’88 and ’89 on adja- cent weekends to our Folk & Roots Festival,
he appeared with US bluesman Taj Mahal, one of his first cross-cultural collaborations.
Ali really loved my Thornbory acoustic guitar so I used to regularly lend it to him for his UK tours and recording, where he’d alternate it with his curious black Eastern European electric guitar. And so it came to 1994 when he was due to go to the States on the tour where he’d record Talking Tim- buktu with Ry Cooder. Nick brought Ali round to my house a few days before they left, once again in his best regal robes, and he did the whole pantomime schtick of falling to one knee and pleading with me to sell him my guitar so he could take it to America. Regretfully, I explained I could- n’t – it had been specially made for me to my specs and was far too personal (it’s still my main instrument to this day). But I asked Nick where their first date was. Turned out it was McCabe’s in Santa Moni- ca, which just happened to be one of the best guitar shops in the USA. Needless to say, they sorted him immediately.
(As well as Ali, that Thornbory used to be regularly borrowed by other visiting West African guitarists like Baaba Maal, Sékou ‘Diamond Fingers’ Diabaté and Dje- limady Tounkara. I fantasise that future guitar anoraks poring over photos will wonder what make of instrument – with its distinctive entwined serpents with vul- ture heads in mother-of-pearl on its head- stock –was favoured by all these players, not realising it’s always the same one!)
Our next cover feature on Ali was in
FR113, November 1992, and this time rather than by inquisitive but inexpert me, it was done by Lucy Duran herself. He was still declaiming, as he’d done in my autumn 1987 conversation, that he was about to retire and was still doing so when David Hutcheon interviewed him for us in 1999! We’re grateful that he never did until the reaper took him at the young age of 66.
We have pleasure in reprinting our first two Ali interviews and early reviews here, all long out of print, along with a selection of classic photos from those days, and a reminiscence from Nick Gold.
World Circuit Records are about to release a remastered and expanded ver- sion of Ali’s 1992 album The Source.
worldcircuit.co.uk/#Ali_Farka_Toure F
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