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Guitar Player, Feature >>
VIEUX FARKA TOURE
- By Banning Eyre
VIEUX FARKA TOURE INHERITED A LOT
from his father, legendary Malian guitarist and singer Aii Farka Toure. First, there's the nickname "Farka," which means donkey in Sonrai, and once described his father's stubbornness and strength as a boy. Today, the sobriquet distinguishes 26-year-old Vieux from the many other Toures in West African music. Then there's that mysterious black solidbody with a non-functioning speaker built into its body. This world-weary ax appears in some of Ali's earliest publicity photos, and it was heard at most of his mesmerizing live concerts. Now, it gives Vieux the ability to perfectly mimic the unique sting of Ali's electric tone. Also inherited was Ali's profound, fanatical love for the once-neglected folklore of Mali's north desert. But all these gifts would mean little, had not this fortunate son inherited one more thing from his father, a stunning facility with the guitar.
It turns out Aii did not bequeath his musical powers readily. Vieux grew up with his uncle in a village remote from Ali's farm in Niafunke, on the Niger River banks south of Timbuktu. When Vieux moved to Niafunke at age 11, he went to school and became a respected drummer, but Aii didn't foresee a music career for Vieux. He wanted his son to join the army—like his grandfather and namesake. Instead, Vieux went to work on the farm of a family friend in another town, and it was these benefactors who recognized his musical talent and helped him enroll at the National Institute of Arts in Bamako.
"Aii was not really angry," recalls Vieux, who still wasn't getting moral support from his father after two years in music school. "I told him I really needed a guitar. He didn't want to say 'yes,' but he couldn't reject me, so he got me a nylon-string guitar."
At NIA, Vieux studied theory, arranging, and music business. He also began learning his father's style. During visits to Niafunke, he got pointers from Ali's longtime accompanist, Afel Bocoum, as well as from Mamadou Kelly, the young man who played second guitar in Ali's group near the end of his life. Finally, he won the respect of his father, and in 2003, Aii took Vieux on a tour of France as his accompanist. There, Aii bought Vieux the Yamaha acoustic that he still uses on stage today.
Perhaps the surest sign of Ali's conversion was his request that griot and kora master Toumani Diabate supervise his son's musical education. "I had no say in it," says Vieux, who refers to Toumani as his godfather. As Diabate and his father were winning a 2006 Grammy Award for their In the Heart ofthe Moon album, Vieux was sitting in with Diabate 's Symmetric Orchestra and receiving an education in the music ofthe Mande griots—its stately cadences and heptatonic scales in sharp contrast to the restless and bluesy pentatonic music ofthe north. Like most fingerstyle guitarists in Mali, Vieux uses the thumb-and-forefinger picking technique, flicking his forefinger back and forth across the strings to create rolling melodic trills filled out by quick puUoffs and hammer-ons. But where most Malian players use a fingernail, Vieux uses a plastic fingerpick.
All the strands of Vieux's musical education come through on his debut CD, Vieux Farka Toure [World Village]. The ten tracks range from acoustic duos with Diabate to full out electric jams, including two featuring AU, who was dying of cancer at the time.
"I had my own style, and I had Ali's style," says Vieux. "On the CD, I try to balance the two."
Vieux's compositions range from the keening swagger of "Sangare" to the lilting lyricism of "Dounia" to the melodious reggae of "Ana" and the blazing 12/8 pump of "Ma Hine Cocore." Ali's echoes are everywhere, and yet nothing feels imitated. On the duos with Diabate— especially the lengthy closer "Diabate"— Vieux shows himself to be even more agile in the realm of Mande music than his father. But perhaps the most deeply riveting passage on the CD is Ali's smoldering solo on "Diallo."
"It's a signature he put on my work," says Vieux of the last session Aii would ever record. "That day, we had to hold him so he could walk. But he had to do it. He had to play. And when he came home to the house that night, he lay down and never got up again."
There are things Vieux did not inherit from his father; the perplexing aphorisms and wily turns of phrase that forever confounded interviewers, the mystic vibe, and, of course, that profound ambivalence about the career of music. For these reasons, Vieux seems better suited to the life of an international musician, and very likely to achieve his goal to "continue and increase the power of what Aii did."
Toure performing with drummer TitTt Keiper and bassist Eric Herman.
06/01/07
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