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Sample Track 1:
"Ana" from Vieux Farka Touré
Sample Track 2:
"Ma Hine Cocore" from Vieux Farka Touré
Layer 2
CD Review

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Clearly Viuex Farke Toure has the hoodoo gene. With it, the Malian groove weaver can spiderwalk guitar strings, spilling out notes in wispy smoke trails or unspooling them like barbed wire. Such ability is a family gift, inherited from his famous father, Ali Farke Toure, whose distinctive approach could be interpreted as part-John Lee Hooker, part-Junior Kimborough, part-thunderhead. Yet totally African. So last year's bad news of the senior Toure's death is now buoyed by the good news realized in the junior Toure's eponymous debut: the memeric Saharan Desert spell will continue unbroken. "Tabara" was that direct handoff; ironically the first, and final, chance for their serpentine lines to trance in and out on successive cycles together. It becomes a dark, beckoning cavern, you enter it and it enters you. The sublime takes other forms, too.

Like the accoustic duets with elder Toumani Diabate, the country's virtuoso on the harp-like kora. Their instrumental dialogue over "Diabate" materializes out of thin air, levitates for nine minutes, and vaporizes back into the ether just as softly as it came. It's while levitating that the kora's twenty-some strings etch the vast, black silence with crystalline shards which assemble into a sonic latticework, exquisitely, magically. All the while, Toure secures the base, circling around and round the perimeter, cutting of escape routes. Once again, you're enveloped.

Arrangements can swell in size, taking on bass or even clavinet, in addition to more frequent regional sounds from the screeching njarka, talking drums, and Guinea flute. Besides knowing how to get guitars to chant and his voice to follow along, Vieux is also percussively fluent in calabash, a dried gourd that, in knowing hands, speaks profusely in clickety-clacks. He's and explorer too, testing new dimensions in tradition. "Ana," for instance, surfs the chop of a riddim that has reggae's fingerprints smudged all over it. Think Niafunke-meets-Trenchtown.

"Courage," on the other hand, taps the grandness of rock. Inoocently enough, the banjo's great, great, great grandaddy, a ngoni, scrapes away at the hand-slapped rhythm until breaking open a pinhole through which the band emerges out into a full-blown whirl. And, in doing so, provides early insight into what all the fuss will be about for subsequent years to come. Because Mali has a new guitar god, and his name is Vieux Farke Toure. 

 03/01/07
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