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Music Review
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Pittsburgh City Paper, Music Review >>
By: JUSTIN HOPPER
In his home of Mali, Boubacar Traoré is known as Kar Kar -- from the fans' cries in their native Bambara of "Kari, kari," or "dribble, dribble," that accompanied his once formidable soccer career. That was around the late '50s, yet the nickname has stuck, and it seems aptly so: Traoré's guitar playing is so confidently controlled, so propulsive, that its frequent catalytic flickers and twists seem as natural as its straight lines. If the best blues is about, amongst other things, subtly extracting newness from an age-old, ubiquitous pattern, then Traoré's status as bluesman is hardly a question.
Famed in the early '60s for his "Mali Twist," the dance tune that
awoke an entire generation of West Africans on local radio each morning, Traoré is best known in the U.S. as part of the Malian blues explosion of the late '80s and '90s. At that time, particularly after Ry Cooder's album with Ali Farka Toure, Malian guitarists were in vogue and Traoré was seen as a rival to Toure for the West's affections. (Never mind that Toure had once been Traoré's accompanist. In fact, when Lieve Joris first encountered the two while working on her book Mali Blues, Toure carried Traoré's guitar case as a sign of respect.)
Perhaps it's Traoré's pervasive melancholy that kept him from
reflecting the full glow of the limelight -- we never have liked our
bluesmen to be too bluesy. On Kongo Magni, the singer-guitarist's new album, Traoré's singing is a hard-won prize, standing proud one moment and cracking the next on songs such as "Dounia Tabolo," about his wife who died suddenly just as his star was rising again. Even on the ostensibly joyful Malian independence celebration "Indépendance," Traoré lends the song a beautiful but mournful quality. Success, independence, freedom -- they all come at a cost that the bluesman is there to remind us of. And, in that way, Traoré is
no longer "Malian bluesman" or "griot bluesman" but simply the blues.
Boubacar Traoré. 7p.m. Tue., Sept. 20. Club Café, 56 S. 12th St.,
South Side. $20. ($22 day of show.) 412-431-4950 09/15/05 >> go there
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