In the frenetic, competitive world of Malian popular music, Habib Koité has always played by his own rules. Most singers stick with a particular ethnic tradition—the musical oratory of the Mande griots (praise historians); the pentatonic boogie of the Bambara people; the funky, hunter-inspired music of the Wassoulou region; or the desert blues popularized worldwide by Ali Farka Toure. Koité plays all these genres and more, sometimes combining them to create entirely new sounds. Most of Mali's popular singers do not play an instrument onstage, but Koité is a versatile and accomplished guitarist. What's more, he fronts his band, Bamada, with an acoustic nylon-string guitar, something unheard—of even among the few singer/guitarists on the scene.

These days, many of Mali's big-name singers constantly change backing musicians, but Bamada is one of the few Malian bands that has kept its personnel relatively intact. In the capital city of Bamako, the era of guitar-driven dance bands—like the legendary Super Rail Band—mostly ended in the 1980s when singers found they could program a drum machine and hire a few studio players to get their songs on the bustling cassette market. But from the moment Koité formed Bamada in the early '90s, he insisted on band loyalty, daily rehearsals, and hard work to develop a unique, personal sound, and Bamada's lineup has undergone few changes since. Koité's new double live album, Fôly! Live Around the World (World Village), testifies to the wisdom of these choices. It is the work of a gifted songwriter and one-of-a-kind guitarist at the helm of one of the tightest and most powerful bands in African music.

As he began his 2004 US tour, I spoke toKoité about the live album and his place in the pantheon of Malian guitarists.

Let's start by talking about Fôly!, a great of live recordings made at concerts in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands in 2001 and 2002. Were you recording all that time with the intention of making a live album? Or did the recordings come first and the album idea later?

KOITÉ We decided to do it first, and then we recorded. We decided to make a live album because people often asked us to do that: "You must make a live album!" People who know the group well had seen an evolution in the music. There are no new songs on the record. It's the old songs. But as we've been playing hem over and over, they have really evolved. Each musician has added things to the parts he plays. So we said, we'll record that.

I really needed a rest, so a live album made sense. That would give me a break, rather than having to record a new album. So we took the gear with us to make multitrack recordings. Then afterward, we kept choosing, choosing, until we found the best vrinof each one.

All over this record, you've extended what were five-minute songs to seven, eight, ten minutes. Much of what is added is great jamming with the band. How did these songs evolve?

KOITÉ This is a group that plays a lot, touring everywhere, all the time. When you play the same songs all the time, that happens. We have about 35, 36 songs. But that's not a lot if you want to change the repertoire a lot. You end up playing all 36 songs, year after year. Because of that, the musicians feel obliged to improve what they know, to do it better, to put something new in front of the people who see us play a lot. We play the old songs but add details to make it new. It's an interaction between the musicians and the public.

How much of any given performance is improvised?

STON DSIGNTIMESP=22452>KOITÉ Improvisation gives the music an atmosphere of adventure and helps people playing the same songs keep their enthusiasm up. Most of the improvising comes from the percussionist, the balafon, and me on the guitar. I don't improvise a lot, just a little each time. There is a structure, and that is respected. There is an arrangement, signals for things when they start or when they end. But between the two signals people have some freedom to improvise. Of course, that freedom is controlled too. There is a special role for those who take care of the groove: the drums and bass. They are in a different situation. They have to be together, straight-ahead, but they can do a break together and come back if it works with the song. Then we who improvise listen to that, adjust to that. If it's good, we accept t. It becomes a new signal in the song.

How did you get started with the guitar?

You platraitional Malian music, but you don't play in the typical ways of a Malian guitarist. You don't do the two-finger griot style like Djelimady Tounkara and other Mande guitarists, and you don't play the flatpick pentatonic style of Zani Diabaté and his many followers. What made you want to figure out your own ways to play Malian music on guitar?

KOITÉ It wasn't on purpose. I didn't start playing this way to avoid the way any other guitarist played. My way of playing came out of my experiences with the guitar and the way I approached the traditional music of my country. When I was young, playing with friends, what did I play? Rock music, a little jazz, a little varieté [established pop songs], black American soul music. I listened to cassettes and tried to play things on guitar. So I grew up doing that, but at the same time we grew up with traditional music. We heard it on the radio, in te street, live. W ivedwith that. It was in our bodies.

From the age of 11, 12, 13, I played in clubs and restaurants. I would go to a restaurant, maybe where a lot of Europeans came and Malians too, and I'd play guitar for people's pleasure. I was just doing it for fun. I wasn't trying to play traditional music. People might ask for anything. I had many kinds of music in my repertoire, the hits of that year—English, French, American. That experience made me familiar with the structures used in a lot of different kinds of music. It also helped me evolve my technique. But then I went to study at the National Institute of Arts (INA) to learn music. I studied classical guitar. I learned new positions for the back, the hands, the fingers—the classical way. That was a new beginning for me, putting the pick down and developing the ability to play with my hand, picking with thumb and fingers, playing arpeggios. That was very important in developing my approach to the guitar, especially th acoustic guitr,the cassical guitar. I got used to the sound and feelig of nylon strings.

When I finished my studies, they asked me to become a guitar teacher. Unfortunately my own teacher died, and they asked me to replace him. Now I had the responsibility to give courses, just as my professor had done. My professor had studied in Cuba at the conservatory. He had really achieved a high level. So this was a big responsibility. If I was going to teach things to my students, I needed to have them clear in my head, step-by-step, so I would know how to teach. That gave me confidence and made me very precise in what I do with the guitar. It was no longer the school of the street. I had to write things down.

Still, I was not a professor who had studied at conservatory; I also had to teach my students the things I learned in the streets, things you don't find in books. This was the point when Istarted trying to play traditional music, the music of stringed instuments suchas he kamlé n'goni—a harp, usually pentatonic, with six strings, played by young people in Wassoulou, in the southern part of Mali—and the donso n'goni, the hunters' harp, the ancestor of the kamalé n'goni. Hunters' harps are generally pentatonic also. Then I learned some of the music of the kora [21-string harp]. That's a Manding instrument, heptatonic, so you can play in a lot of other scales. I tried to learn songs like that to teach my students. I thought about the movement of notes in the music of kamalé n'goni and donso n'goni. There are always open strings, fixed notes. So I asked: "Can I do that on the guitar, an instrument where you have to put a finger on a fret to change the notes?" I can't say I wanted to do exactly what these instruments did. I just wanted to get close to that movement of notes.

id you change the tuning of the guitar to do that?

KOITSTRONG DSIGNIMESP="2474" DESIGNTIMESP=22600>É Yes. There are a lot of guitarists in Mali, in Africa, who change the tuning of the guitar to do a particular thing. I can give you two examples. There's a kind of hunters' music I play in G. To play it the way I like, so that it resembles the original, I raise the high E string to F. Then if I reach my thumb around to play a G on the lowest string and put another finger on the third fret of the second string to get D, and I don't touch any of the others, I get the notes I need.There are two songs on Fôly that use that tuning, "Ma Ya" and "Fatma."

The second example also comes from hunters' music, but Malinke hunters. They play an instrument called the simbi, which often plays in a minor pentatonic mode. For that, I tune the high E string to F and the B string to C. That sets me up to play in the style of the Malinke hunters. The song where I use that is "Woulaba," [from the album Baro]. It's not a song I play live very much, because in the studio, I added a lot of guitar parts myself.

From my time in Mali, I have the impression that a few distinct approaches to the guitar have developed. But what you do is different, whether or not you planned it that way. There's a theory among people who have studied African guitr music that the really great innovations happen during the first few generations, when new styles are being developed. After that, everybody follows the set road, and the innovation seems to stop. What do you think about that?

KOITÉ Me, I think things always evolve. I'm not a musical historian. I can't tell you about things that happened 50, 100 years ago. But I am convinced that things change a lot. All the instruments evolve, and the musicians who play them volve. The materil changes, nd the sound changes. There's a mlodic base that stays the same–that's the ethnic culture that goes with each instrument. That stays, but the player' way of playing changes with every new generation. Look at Djelimady Tounkara, Sekou Bembeya Diabaté, Kanté Manfila, and then, a little younger, Ousmane Kouyaté. These are four of the biggest Manding guitarists. But they don't have the same style, even though they have the same culture and come from the same world of the guitar. They did not come to the guitar by the same road, and this is why they don't have the same sound. So I think the songs that brought me to the guitar determined my style of playing: how I will play, what I will add.

Who were the guitarists who inspired you?

KOITÉ When I was young and just starting to play guitar, the guitarist who impressed me most was the guiarist for Les Amassadeurs,Kanté Manfila. I would watch himwhenever he played a concert. I would hang out by the door because I didn't have money to get in. I didn't watch the singers. I just watched him, and that taught me a lot.

As I said, my big brother played guitar. He would sit with his friends, drinking tea and playing. He played a lot of blues, things by Jimi Hendrix. I too had my way of playing that music, blues and that. I listened to a lot of Jimi Hendrix, also David Gilmour [of Pink Floyd]. These three guitarists are the ones who first inspired me, but there have been lots of others since. With time, I learned about other guitar heroes, like Joe Satriani, people like that. And of course, I heard a lot of African guitarists, like those our I mentioned. But in West Africa, we didn't have much feeling for guitarists in other parts of the continent. Later I learned about them. And later I discovered Earl Klugh, who's still one of my favorites.

Like im, you play a nylon-string guiar. That's pretty unusual for an African guitarist. How did that happen?

KOITÉ The guitar we had at home had nylon strings. But I wasn't attached to that. It wasn't until I went to INA and studied classical that I started to believe in the sound of nylon strings. When I startedto teach, and started adapting traditional music, I found that the sound of nylon strings was closer to the sound of many traditional instruments. Earlier I had played electric guitar, but since that time I left it aside. The sound of acoustic [guitar], especially nylon strings, creates an intimacy between a musician and the public. People are attracted to you because you don't take an aggressive stance. If you see a musician sitting with a guitar, nylon or even steel, there's something nice about it, peaceful. It's a very different presentation than an electric guitar, just visally.

So I decided to stay hat way. Then when I made my group, I decided that everyone in the group should have a guitar like that. This was a difficult moment for us because nobody has a guitar in Mali. It was easier to find an electric guitar than an acoustic. And to find a nylon-string guitar you could plug into an amplifier, that wasreally hard. But that was what I wanted, and I worked hard for that.

You made your name as a singer, but everybody knows you're a great guitarist. I've watched Djelimady Tounkara try to make his name as a guitarist who doesn't sing, and he's probably been more successful with that outside Mali than in. Even on his album, he uses singers. Why is it so hard for a guitarist to be accepted as a star in Mali just for his playing?

KOITÉ This is really interesting. Mali has a great traition of song nd of percussion. The Mandigpeople played the balafon fro way back. That's the oldest instrument. But the balafon was always there to accompany the singer. It was the singer who counted for the Manding people—the griot, the one who speaks to draw the attention of the people. The players of instruments, even if they played very beautiful things, they stayed behind in the minds of the public. It's a phenomenon that has continued into modern times. The n'goni came. The kora came. The guitar came. We have some great guitarists, but they are always there to accompany a song or someone who speaks, and the people follow the line of the story and the feeling of the voice above all.

The guitarists are known. Who doesn't know Djelimady? But is he a star? Normally, someone as well known among us as Djelimady would be solicited all the time to give his knowledge to others. But the people who direct culture in our country on't think about that aspect o things. A grat guitarist like Djelimadywhen he plays, it makes me cy—but he doesn't get the recognition. Among us, the singers have everything. Especially the griots, but things are changing. People have to live. If you are having a party, you have to call musicians, and they are capable of saying to you, "How much are you going to pay me?"

So things are getting better for instrumentalists in Mali.

KOITÉ Yes, with the development of the music industry. We're still far from Europe and Amrica, but it's starting. With the creation of many studios, there is a need for musicians. There the musician can be a king. If you are a singer and you want to make a record, you need to find musicians.

The other problem is authors' rights. When a musician is called for a recording, he usually gets paid one time, and that's it. But there are a fe instrumentaists who understand about nterpretation, arrangement,and the importance of having this written down at the time of recording. We have some great arrangers, but in the past they didn't think about that. Musicians need to earn more than just their pay for each concert. This is why we started writing, since the second album, author/composer: Habib Koité, arranger: Habib Koité and Bamada. So if there's money for the arranger, it goes to the group. This helps to keep everyone together.