When newly successful rock bands make follow-up albums which 'aim to capture the excitement of our live shows’, that all too often means that they’ve found themselves unable to come up with any new tunes, and have had to fall back on a kind of over-amped chunter in lieu of any fresh inspiration. However, in the case of Malian ngoni virtuoso Bassekou Kouyate – who states that time-honoured intention to me through an interpreter, while waiting to record a live radio session at the BBC – the record in question actually achieves its goal.
In a year dominated by female-fronted electropop and breakthrough urban crossover acts, the propulsive pleasures of rock ’n’ roll have been a little hard to come by. But the momentum generated in the course of I Speak Fula (the marvellously propulsive second album by Kouyate’s seven-strong ensemble, Ngoni Ba, which includes three other ngoni players, two percussionists and his wife, the powerful singer Amy Sacko) locates the group closer to the hallowed hard rock terrain of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Freebird than the earthenware ghetto for which the world music circuit is sometimes mistaken.
The ngoni, Kouyate’s musical weapon of choice, is a hollowed-out piece of wood, covered in dried cowhide, with four strings running up a fretless neck. It looks like a kayak paddle or a small cricket bat, and creates (in the right hands) the thrillingly kinetic ripple of a more versatile banjo. As well as teaching the ngoni at his own academy in the Malian capital Bamako, rising interest in these increasingly fashionable instruments drives Kouyate to export them to Europe.
His campaign to restore the ngoni to its historic position at the forefront of Malian music began as a jobbing live performer in the mid-Eighties. 'Previously, the ngoni was only played while sitting,’ this soft-spoken 43 year-old remembers. 'When guitar players saw me attaching a strap to the back so I could wear it over my shoulder and play standing up like they did, they said “What on earth are you going to do with that?” But I told them “Just you wait”, and now everyone plays that way – in many ways it’s easier, because your arms are free.’
After years of distinguished service in the backing band of (sadly now deceased) Malian guitar hero Ali Farka Toure, Kouyate finally took centre-stage on Ngoni Ba’s 2007 debut album Segu Blue, which won him two well-deserved BBC Radio 3 Music Awards (for Best Album and Best African Artist). I Speak Fula picks up the pace a bit from its exquisite but stately predecessor. And Kouyate insists that his band’s increasingly upbeat approach was arrived at 'entirely on purpose’.
'With the first album,’ he explains, 'I knew I had to introduce people to this instrument, which was unknown to many of them. But now I’ve seen how much audiences like dancing to it, I felt able to give that aspect of the music more emphasis.’
Those who have yet to experience the undiluted joy of Kouyate’s equatorial hoedowns are strongly advised to hitch a ride on the ngoni bandwagon before it leaves town.
