The singing salt magnate from Timbuktu

Published On Fri Sep 03 2010

Indentured miners still carve salt from beneath the Sahara Desert and load it on to camels bound for Timbuktu.

The trek south takes up to 30 days and at the end of it lives Khaira Arby in a mud-walled compound at the edge of town.

Like her father before her, she is a salt trader. Several dozen camels at a time arrive at her door, each loaded with four great salt slabs tied to the animal’s sides with rope.

Arby buys the salt, warehouses it in her yard in the desert air and resells it to merchants distributing it throughout Mali and to the neighbouring West African countries of Burkino Faso and Niger.

At least, that is her day job.

She also sings. All her life Arby has longed to be a star, known in Paris and New York. Now her big break has arrived — the international release of the CD Timbuktu Tarab and the start of her first North American tour.

At 51, she is to play more than 20 dates, including the Harbourfront Centre next Sunday.

Most of the concerts involve her own eight-piece band but Toronto is an exception. As if her background were not exotic enough, the Muslim vocalist is to sing with the Brooklyn-based band the Sway Machinery, a group specializing in Jewish cantorial music.

“This is so important for me,” she says almost bursting with enthusiasm over the phone recently from New York. “I am coming to the United States and to Canada. This is my dream.”

Launching a music career is always tough. Doing so from Timbuktu is tougher.

In its heyday 600 years ago, the city was an international hub for Saharan caravans arriving from the north and south with salt and gold. At times, the two traded at par, an ounce of one worth an ounce of the other.

Those prosperous days are long gone. Timbuktu has dwindled to a sleepy mud-brick town of 32,000 people, where the occasional Western scholar might come to examine rotting library texts or a tourist might wander the mythic dunes.

I visited 10 years ago. I was travelling to interview musicians and on a boat north to Timbuktu on the Niger River, where it arcs into the Sahara, I asked who the town’s best singer was.

“Khaira Arby,” one passenger said, and everybody nodded. When I called on her, she invited me that night for dinner.

I approached her compound at dusk. Outside, men in blue turbans loaded food bags onto moaning camels. Against her inside perimeter wall, 50-kilogram salt tablets leaned like old tombstones.

Arby met me at the door of a canvas foyer. She wore stage clothes — black embroidered gown, elaborate necklaces, bangles in her hair — and invited me inside to eat with her on the floor from a shared bowl of rice, vegetables and goat meat.

“I am the only one in my family who is a musician,” she began in French. “But since I was a little girl I loved music more than schoolwork.”

She learned to play the hand drum and one-stringed violin, and at the age of 12 placed third in singing contest. Later, while balancing business duties, marriage and eventually six children, she ventured out of town as often as possible to sing.

In the 1990s, she performed in Niger, Mauritania, Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso. She sang at a Francophonie event in Paris.

She released two cassettes and, a week before I met her, recorded a third album in Dakar called Ya Rassoul, released the following year on cassette and CD.

Over the years, European labels sometimes picked her tracks for compilation CDs and Arby seemed perpetually on the verge of being discovered.

“I am ready,” she said during my visit. “I want to find a serious producer. I want to travel. I want to tour Europe and the United States. I want to go all the way.”

On the first full moon of the new millennium, in January 2000, the French group Lo’Jo and Tuareg band Tinariwen co-produced the first annual Festival in the Desert in northern Mali.

Briefly, they turned Timbuktu into an international hub again — at least for music — attracting thousands of Tuareg desert people and hundreds of world-music tourists.

Every year since, Arby has taken a star turn. She has shared the spotlight with former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant, established Malian singers such as Oumou Sangare and Ali Farka Toure, and such intrepid world-music bands as Ottawa’s Indian-influenced Galitcha.

The festivals seem to have influenced her style.

Although she long ago introduces an electric guitar and bass into a lineup of local acoustic instruments, audiences increasingly have found her music more accessible.

With her bluesy desert incantations and natural joy for living, she went from playing music-of-the-world to performing world music — a sometimes subtle distinction that can make the difference between obscurity and fame.

“She updated her sound,” tour manager Chris Nolan says. “She picked up the tempo. She altered the arrangements. To me, it’s much more driving, much more rock and roll (than 10 years ago). As somebody wrote, ‘It’s not trance music, it’s wakeup music.’ ”

In Mali last year, French producer Boris Persikoff helped Arby record Timbuktu Tarab, opening the way for her debut North American tour. In January, at the Festival in the Desert, the Sway Machinery also sought her out.

“I’ve always been inspired by Malian culture,” band leader Jeremiah Lockwood said from Brooklyn, “how secular musicians call upon the religious traditions in their music and how wonderful things come of this.”

The night the band arrived, they jammed with Arby on a rooftop. After the festival they recorded an album together to be released next year.

For now, Arby is keeping her day job.

“But I am ready,” she says, repeating her phrase from 10 years earlier. “Je suis prête.”

Khaira Arby appears with The Sway Machinery at the Ashkenaz Festival next Sunday (Sept. 5) from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. in the Brigantine Room, York Quay Centre, 235 Queens Quay W. Admission is free.