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San Diego Union Tribune, Concert Preview >>
The West African nation of Mali ranks as one of the poorest in the world when it comes to per capita income, but measured by the number of innovative guitarists, it's a very wealthy country indeed.
Americans first became aware of Mali's great guitar tradition through the work of Ali Farka Toure, who paved the way for the late-career renaissance of his contemporary, Boubacar Troare, and the Super Rail Band's Djelimady Tounkara. The next generation is now arriving on the scene, exemplified by Habib Koite, a nylon-string virtuoso with a burnished voice and a growing U.S. following. He hits UCSD's Mandeville Auditorium tomorrow with his band, Bamada, tomorrow at the start of a long U.S. tour.
Koite is still riding the wave of his latest album, 2001's "Baro" (Putumayo), a beautifully crafted set of tunes drawing on various Malian styles, as well as Cuban rhythms and Iberian cadences. It's a gorgeously textured session featuring traditional Malian instruments such as the kora, the lute-like doso n'goni and the xylophonesque, wooden-barred balafon. In concert, Koite commands attention with his 500-watt rock star charisma, playing intricate, flowing passages on his nylon-string guitar.
But it's not his electrifying stage persona that sets Koite apart from other Malian musicians. The ethnically diverse landlocked nation is home to a number of deeply rooted cultural currents, and its other international stars, like Toure, Wassoulou vocalist Oumou Sangare and powerhouse albino singer Salif Keita, have developed styles based on a particular ethnic tradition. Koite is forging a sound that draws upon the entire spectrum of Malian styles.
"In the north, we have many influences from Arab and Berber music mixed with black African music, and Mauritania and Morocco aren't far off," Koite says. "In the south, you have forest music. In the west, when you go near the Atlantic Ocean, the music changes, and when you go east, there are influences from Niger. We have so many different beautiful kinds of traditional songs and rhythms and melodies. I can understand each ethnic music in Mali because I studied and I have good ears and I create something with the roots of traditional music."
Born into a family of griots, traditional musicians who serve as historians, newscasters and ceremonial officials, Koite was surrounded by music as he was growing up. While it's been widely reported that he first started playing guitar with his mother, accompanying her while she performed rituals, he says that's a mistake. "When I was very young, maybe 4 or 5, I saw her when she sang at marriages and baptisms," he says. "But I never played with my mother."
He had planned to study engineering in college, but he displayed so much talent on the guitar that he was recruited by the National Institute of Arts in Bamako, Mali's capital, where he studied European classical music. Upon his graduation, the school hired him as a guitar professor, and for the next decade and a half, he taught class by day and performed at a top club six nights a week.
"I played jazz, European, Latin, and U.S. pop," Koite says. "I played for many people -- Europeans, American, Lebanese, from Africa and Mali -- so I learned many kinds of music because I tried to sing popular songs from everywhere."
This wide-ranging education eventually led Koite to the conclusion that he needed to develop a pan-Malian sound that would appeal to people all over the country, not just in the Bambara or Wassoulou regions. He coined the term danssa doso to describe his music, combining the name of a popular rhythm from his native city of Keyes (danssa) with the word for hunter's music (doso), one of Mali's most compelling and ancient musical traditions.
"I'm not a traditional musician," Koite says. "But when I see around the world, the young people want to go to the U.S. and Western side. We have something very beautiful, something only Malian people have. I say, 'OK, if you want to go down the road, take something personal with you, so you can have something special that you can exchange with other people when they come to meet you.' "
01/16/03
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