Artist: Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba
CD: I Speak Fula Label: Sub Pop
As a longtime lover of African music, I rejoice at the global emergence of Bassekou Kouyate. It is hard to remember that in the 1980s, the idea that the blues originated in West Africa was still a "theory." Similarly, for the past decade or so, the race back to the start has been retracing the origins of the banjo.
Today, this theory has yielded to the obvious, and the ngoni is being touted as the banjo's ancestor, with the music of Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba providing the fait accompli. But Kouyate is not sitting in a dusty hut plucking away. From his beginnings as a young performer with the renowned Rail Band in the 1980s, he has transformed Malian music. In a now legendary moment, Kouyate stepped forward to take a solo and slung his ngoni over his shoulder like an electric guitar, stunning the crowd. Furious debates ensued, but the vision that Kouyate pursued blazed new directions for the music.
And now it reaches us: glorious rhythms variously driving and loping, edgy quarter-tone blues harmonies and blistering string solos. Ngoni Ba takes us HOME, infusing the genius of the ancestors with the flowing electricity of these living masters.
Host of World Spinning on CKUA
SUNDAY AFTERNOONS, 4-6 P.M.
Lark Clark 's love of African music has taken her to sing with Juba in Zimbabwe, to volunteer in a Zulu village in South Africa, to get spirit-possessed in Cuba and to just generally get down in the Baptist church
