He's producer of Vieux Farka Touré
Legend's son hit of Womex gathering

Oct. 30, 2006. 05:54 AM

JOHN GODDARD

Toronto Star STAFF REPORTER

SEVILLE, SPAIN—A Toronto producer fresh out of music school has created the biggest buzz of this year's Womex festival, the premier gathering of the world-music industry.

For five days straight, Eric Herman, 23, has been popping up everywhere at the golden-domed conference centre in Seville, Spain, proffering a CD that hundreds of delegates from around the world have been happily snapping up.

The album is called Vieux Farka Touré. It marks the recording debut of the son of one of Africa's greatest and best loved musicians, Ali Farka Touré, who died in March.

"I was welling up with tears," Herman recalls of the day almost exactly one year ago when he brought son and father together for two tracks and the father's final recording session.

"It was such a watershed moment ... for the history of that musical tradition," he says.

"Vieux went from hiding his guitar from his father (and playing in secret) to receiving, in the final months, his father's blessing. It was the passing of the torch."

Herman grew up near Spadina and St. Clair Aves. in Toronto and left five years ago to study music at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

There he deepened a long-held interest in African music.

In 2003, for his research project abroad, he picked the West African country of Mali with the fantasy, he says, of tracking down Farka Touré and jamming with him.

Within a short time, the great man invited the visitor to his home in the Malian capital of Bamako.

Soon afterward Herman met Vieux, the second son, now 25.

"I met him at the Arts Institute where he was studying," Herman said in a weekend interview along a noisy corridor of the 14th annual congress, which this year attracted a record 2,500 delegates from 97 countries.

"Early on, Ali had forbidden Vieux from pursuing a musical path. His eldest son is a farmer. Ali basically said, `It's a cruel world out there,' but Vieux was persistent and practised the guitar in hiding.

"By the time I met him, he was a virtuoso," Herman said.

"He could imitate his father's playing brilliantly and knew his whole repertoire."

Vieux was also teaching African guitar to a visiting student in Herman's program. Herman introduced himself, started playing with Vieux regularly and the two became friends.

"The idea of cutting an album with him crossed my mind even then," Herman says.

But he was a college student. He returned home to continue at Wesleyan and, on the side, he and classmate Jesse Brenner started their own record label, Modiba.

To begin, they released a compilation CD of Nigerian Afrobeat music to raise money for victims of the Darfur civil war in Sudan.

Called the Afrobeat Sudan Project, an album funded by Ben Cohen of Ben&Jerry's Ice Cream raised $140,000 (U.S.).

In the spring of 2005, Herman graduated and returned to Mali. His intention was to produce an original Malian compilation CD to raise money for malaria prevention.

He reconnected with Vieux, who by then was playing guitar for Toumani Diabate, acknowledged master of the 21-string West African kora. Both musicians agreed to contribute tracks, as did father Ali Farka Touré.

But attention quickly shifted to Vieux.

"He was ready, he had the material and he certainly had the ambition and the talent," Herman says.

They would make Vieux's debut album instead. Herman returned to the United States to arrange business details, then was urgently called back.

"Toumani called and said, `You better get over here soon. Ali is on his way to Paris,'" Herman recalls.

"We all knew that he was very gravely ill at the time (diagnosed with bone cancer in early 2005). He was on his way to a hospital in Paris (for emergency treatment), but if I came he would stick around for a couple of more days."

Herman returned immediately. The next day, late last October, he brought Ali Farka Touré for the first and last time into the studio with his son.

"I never saw him again, but I spoke to him a few more times," Herman says. "He was very pleased with how things were going with the album. I was talking with (Ali's producer) Nick Gold today, who told me that Ali was playing (the recordings) a lot and with a lot of pride."

Elsewhere at the conference, Ali Farka Touré reminders surfaced repeatedly.

A number of his former musicians played a showcase Thursday night as members of Alkibar, now the band of Ali Farka Touré protégé Afel Bocoum.

Gold hosted a two-hour session that included three films showing "the master of Malian desert blues" in his last extensive recording sessions of 2005 and at a Paris concert.

Two acclaimed albums came out of those sessions: In the Heart of the Moon with Diabate and the intense, bluesy Savane.

Ali's former road manager Deborah Cohen announced that the Malian government has established a foundation to help continue the guitarist's legacy.

Its first major project, she said, will be to hold a three-day music festival in his honour in March, with a special trip for participants to Ali's native village of Niafunke, on the Niger River near Timbuktu.

The album Vieux Farka Touré is to be released in February, said Herman, who is based in Brooklyn. At the conference, he was talking with a number of Toronto concert presenters with a view to bringing the artist to Toronto as early as April.