Within the first few songs of the sold-out Malian music double bill, Vieux Farka Touré called a Town Hall audience out of the pews and onto the dance floor. When the floor became full, dancers clogged the aisles.
The son of legendary Ali Farka Touré, Vieux opened the show Wednesday with a set of West African jam-rock. His songs, like his father's, are vehicles for the counterpoint between his lyrical electric guitar playing and his wailing Mississippi Delta blues vocalizations.
Clad in multicolored dashikis, Touré and his backing rock band played to a surprisingly uncostumed Halloween audience -- limited to one guy in a bee costume and a couple of mimes.
Despite being the show's opener and a new artist -- his first album was released just last year -- he was received as a true legacy, an artist worthy of the highest respect. He received a standing encore, in which he announced: "Rock 'n' roll African, not American."
In the never-ending lines at the bathroom during intermission, middle-age men could be heard saying, "He can really jam, man."
Tinariwen, the band that single-handedly brought the sound of the Sahara to the world, took the stage a bit later than expected -- about 10:30. Though both of the night's bands come from Mali and use a similar rock-band format, Tinariwen's hybrid brew of Western and African styles is entirely different from Touré's.
Coming from a culture of nomadic people called the Tuareg, Tinariwen has a singing style that reflects North Africa's strained, ornamented melodies and the songwriting of their traditional desert folk music. The band's songs are superficially more exotic and less instantly comfortable, but they are built on the sort of hypnotic djembe drum grooves that keep dancers on their feet. Tuareg bass lines recall the calming pace of trance music; vocal melodies hold the satisfying hook of pop songs; lyrics evoke the band's revolutionary status against their own government.
While Touré seemed to neatly fit into the space at Town Hall, like a smiling world-beat bandleader, Tinariwen's conspicuous flowing robes and face-covering headscarves brought their itinerant counterculture into the spotlight. They existed both as anthropological anomalies and rock stars. Grown adults reached out to touch the band between songs, and even though they had a 5 a.m. wakeup call, the members of Tinariwen stuck around after their set to shake the hands of their Seattle fans.
By: Ross Simonini
11/01/07 >> 
