Ali Farka Touré won this year's Grammy Award for world music with In the Heart of the Moon, a collection of charming duets with kora player Toumani Diabate.

This month he is also hitting best-of-2006 lists all over Europe and North America with his final solo CD Savane, released in June. It picked up a Grammy nomination last week.

A second collaboration with Diabate is not yet out, but at his final studio session late last year Farka Touré played on two tracks of his son's self-titled debut album, Vieux Farka Touré.

The Toronto launch of that recording takes place Feb. 10 when the younger Farka Touré appears at Harbourfront Centre, site of his father's last concert of his final North American tour six years ago.

And so the torch is passed.

But more than that, Farka Touré's death and his son's stepping into the spotlight marks a generational shift underway in world music.

Farka Touré's producer spoke of that shift two months ago while he attended the annual World Music Expo, or WOMEX, conference in Seville, Spain.

A generation has passed since Farka Touré first gained fame in Europe during the first African music craze, said Nick Gold of U.K.-based World Circuit Records, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year.

A French label released the guitarist's first cassettes in France in the mid-1980s and Gold began recording him in 1987.

"There was massive, burgeoning interest and excitement about African music," Gold recalled of the time. "It was a strange new thing that people were experiencing."

Many of the stars, he also pointed out, were among the first players to transpose their music from rural African instruments onto Western ones, particularly the six-string guitar.

Farka Touré counted among the innovators. He was born in the West African country of Mali sometime in 1939, on the Niger River Bend at Niafunké, not far from Timbuktu.

While still a child, around 1950, he started playing the njurkel, a kind of one-string guitar, and the njarka fiddle, a tiny gourd fitted with a foot-long neck and played with a bow. Throughout his life Farka Touré continued to play both instruments, usually bringing out the fiddle at least once every concert.

But in 1956 he also discovered the guitar, and on it began to transpose his warm, bluesy, desert music onto an instrument that let him carry it to the rest of the world.

"We have been witnesses to this transformation," Gold told the WOMEX crowd.

Farka Touré often remained aloof from recording and touring, famously preferring to farm his rice fields and tend his fruit orchards in Niafunké.
Gold in turn became known for the tenacious pursuit of his star, at one point transporting studio equipment all the way to the Niger River to record the 1999 album Niafunké in an abandoned building.

That album would have been Farka Touré's last except for the recent gush.

"After a long period of not recording, he sent me some demos," Gold recalled in an interview in Spain, "which he has never done -- Ali doesn't do demos...

"(They) were very raw and traditional, basically just him playing guitar with an ngoni player, a traditional guitarist from the north, with hardly any vocals, just sort of grooves really."

More than on any previous disc, Gold said, Farka Touré became intensely engaged in the recording of Savane, as though determined to leave a testament for future generations.

"He was starting to become aware that he was getting sick," the producer said. "Everything he did he always did with incredible conviction -- every note he made on the guitar, every decision he made in his life.

"I just got the impression that this record even more so, especially the singing. It's like he wasn't holding anything back. He really went for it -- with a force, a power."

Farka Touré never wished for any of his children to become musicians. Vieux, 25, took up the guitar in private, only two or three years ago letting his father in on the secret.

Judging from an advance copy of his album and video clips of him on YouTube, he has mastered the old man's repertoire and made it his own.

He also incorporates stylistic flourishes from other sources and looks poised to take the music in new directions.