The courts of the 14^th Century West African emperors and dance floors of the 21^st Century are so far apart they might as well be in different universes, yet the music of Habib Koite links them.

“The people who sing the song [to the emperors] were very happy and had a good life,” says the guitarist-singer from Mali, a West African nation that was an empire from the 14^th to 16^th Centuries, became a French territory in the 1800s, and achieved independence in 1960. “I try to project my mind very [far] back to live with those people 10 or 12 centuries ago.”

While he draws inspiration from Mali’s past, Koite is very much a contemporary, international musician whose songs achieve a timeless, universal result – they make people move.

“Within the first song, people were up on their feet dancing,” recalls Michael Orlove, program director for the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, who brought Koite to Chicago for the 2001 edition of the annual World Music Festival.

“It’s like non-stop dancing – you can’t help but get involved in his music, it’s infectious.”

It’s dance music with a history behind it, booty-shaking combined with cultural preservation.  Koite was born into a family of griots – West African storytellers who maintain the oral history of their culture.  “The griot keep[s] the story in the mind of people,” he explains during a phone call while on his current U.S. tour.  “It’s the griot who tells the story from generation to generation until now.”

Koite learned to play guitar by watching his parents, and later attended Mali’s National Institute of Arts, where he played with Malian music and studied classical guitar, listened to American soul and British art rock.  After graduating at the top of his class, he became a guitar teacher at the school and performed jazz and rock on the side at a local club.  In his late 20s he formed his band Bamada and a few years later scored a West African hit with his anti-smoking anthem “Cigarette Abana” (“The Cigarette is Finished”).

His first two U.S. releases, 1999’s “Ma Ya” and 2001’s “Baro” (both on Putumayo), quickly established him as a rising star in world music, bringing him the attention of fans including Bonnie Raitt, who collaborated with Koite on her 2001 “Silver Lining” CD.

Koite’s growing popularity as a live performer is reflected on the new live double CD, “Foly” (World Village), on which his spiraling guitar lines, the chimes of the balafon – a West African xylophone – and percussion intertwine in surging, buoyant rhythms.

The music’s lovely, intricate patterns not only span centuries of musical tradition but the expanse of Mali from its nomadic northern desert tribes to the hunters of its southern regions.  Mali is a country of many different cultures, each with their own musical style, and Koite is noted for being the first artist to incorporate them into a unified sound.

“Habib to me is the closest thing to a pop musician in the sense that he’s aware of popular styles, not only of his group but of other people,” says Corey Harris.  A young blues musician who starred in the Martin Scorsese-directed “Feel Like Going Home” episode of the PBS television series “The Blues,” Harris continued the exploration of Malian music he began in the film (which included a visit with Koite) with his recent “Mississippi to Mali” CD.

“He had a really wide vision, a broad scope of the music that he used to make his own music,” Harris says.  “He’s got big ears, he’s really wide open.”

This nationally unified music has a corresponding message of pride in Mali’s heritage.  “We have some things…only for us,” Koite says.  “If we lose those things, out country, our music, our rhythm, we lose that for our country and for the whole world.”

Koite and his band turn these elements into dazzling entertainment, incorporating traditional clothes and instruments – including the calebass, a percussion instrument made from a gourd, and the kamala n’goni, a four stringed lute, along with Koite’s nylon-stringed guitar and funk bass lines.