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"Ana" from Vieux Farka Touré
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"Ma Hine Cocore" from Vieux Farka Touré
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Vieux Farka Touré takes West African music to new frontiers with The Festival in the Desert

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by Matthew Everett

Vieux Farka Touré's voice is barely audible, and it's in French. He's riding with his American manager, Deborah Cohen, in the back of a van on a highway somewhere in continental Europe. Cohen is fielding questions over the telephone in English, repeating them to Touré in French, and then translating his answers back to English.

As the Malian singer and guitarist describes his anticipation for his fourth trip to the United States, Cohen reminds him that his Festival in the Desert tour with the band Tinariwen will soon be stopping in Knoxville, just a couple of hours away from Bristol, Tenn., where he played the Mountain Stage radio show a few years ago. Two words of English jump out from Touré's far-away response: "fried" and "chicken."

"He said, 'Oh my God, do you think we can get some more of that fried chicken?' " Cohen says. "When we were in Bristol for Mountain Stage, they took really good care of us. We had chicken from McClellan-something there in Bristol. Chicken-Sellin' Fred McClellan. That's it!"

This polyglot exchange--an African musician's French conversation on a freeway in Europe about fried chicken in Bristol--seems like an appropriate introduction to Touré, whose songs combine traditional West African music with rock and Western pop, Caribbean and Middle Eastern music, and American blues. Touré's father, Ali Farka Touré, was largely responsible for the introduction of West African music into the world music lexicon in the 1980s. Now the younger Touré--who struggled with his father about pursuing music as a profession--is taking his father's hybrid of traditional and Western music into even more progressive territory.

Vieux Farka Touré's father, Ali Farka Touré, had been making music for years when, in the late 1980s and early '90s, he released a string of albums that introduced him to American and European audiences and helped invent the concept of "world music." His 1994 record, Talking Timbuktu, produced by Ry Cooder and featuring Cooder, jazz bassist John Patitucci, and blues guitarist Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown, is a touchstone of the genre (and typical in the way it departs from traditional ethnic and regional music and adds significant Western influence). The elder Touré's sparse, generally unaccompanied guitar arrangements, droning picking technique, and deep baritone voice earned him comparisons to John Lee Hooker.

For all his success, though, Ali Farka Touré did not want his son to pursue a career in music. His own family had discouraged his decision to be a professional musician and he had struggled to make a career in Mali before finding an audience outside of Africa. And after some early contracts left him feeling cheated, he never trusted the machinery of the music industry. When Vieux, who was born in 1981, first started playing percussion instruments as a teenager, his father resisted. Later, Vieux took up the guitar, like his father, but practiced in secret.

His father eventually recognized that Vieux was both talented and determined. Under the supervision of his father's friend Toumani Diabaté, a Malian musician from the generation that had followed Ali Farka Touré, Vieux enrolled in a national Malian academy for music in 1999.

"My father was somebody who would act reasonably," Vieux says. "He fought my decision for a number of years, but once he realized it was what I wanted to do he supported me. He always said if I wanted to do something he would support me, and finally he said, 'It's OK.' He realized I was willing to undertake it and could see I was applied to make it a reality."

Vieux served an apprenticeship with Diabaté and his band and occasionally performed in concert with his father. In 2005, he started working on a solo album. Both Diabaté and Ali Farka Touré were involved in the sessions, even though Touré was by that time suffering from cancer. He died in March of 2006; his performances on his son's album were the last he ever made.

"Getting my father's blessing on my album and getting him to play on it was like a benediction," Vieux says. "It has allowed me to move forward with much more energy, force, desire, and will to make it."

Vieux Farka Touré doesn't sound like his father. Their guitar styles share a lyricism and fluidity, but Vieux's sound is far removed from his father's desert blues. His self-titled debut album, which was released in February, is full and rich, where his father's records were often uncompromisingly stark. The credits list an orchestra of Western instruments--guitar, bass, drums, shakers, tambourine, organ, glockenspiel, clavinet, trumpet--and African ones--kora, djembe, tama.

The cultural-exchange-education inherent to Touré's music doesn't do justice to just how much fun Vieux Farka Touré is. It's a buoyant record, with a foundation of eminently danceable rhythms and lively, complex instrumental interplay on top. There are moments of moody, epic beauty--the entirety of the nine-minute closing track, "Diabaté," and the minor-key acoustic dirge "Sangare", but its tone is largely celebratory. Touré's smooth, tenor voice is utterly unlike his father's, and the big-band setting is different from most of his father's work. The comparisons with American blues that shadowed the elder Touré don't apply to his son's debut at all. Touré's guitar-playing dominates the disc, though. As distinctive, historically significant, and profound as his father's playing could be, the younger Touré has already exceeded him in technical proficiency. His fingers are light and quick: on "Courage" he picks a clean, quick catchy lick on top of a crunching rock riff; on "Touré de Niafunke" he plays a long, rolling line on acoustic guitar that serves, at different times in the song, as both rhythm and lead.

Touré laughs when he describes his music's mix of tradition and innovation.

"It's kind of like a birthday cake," he says. "Everybody can find something they like, either the layers of cake or the icing. Or it's like a tree. There's a base in the traditional Malian music. That's the trunk of the tree. In the upper branches are reggae, rock, reggaeton, Arabic influence. I like to mix it up. Sometimes people like the trunk, sometimes they like the branches at the top. But everybody should find something they like in it."

What: Festival in the Desert featuring Vieux Farka Touré and Tinariwen

Where: Bijou Theatre

When: Wednesday, Nov. 7, at 8 p.m.

How Much: $26

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