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Music Review
Mixing Electric Funk With Joyful Malian Wails
By JON PARELES
Published: March 6, 2011
Regal in a blue-and-gold robe, with a golden tiara headdress, one of Africa’s greatest singers performed on Saturday night at the Bell House in Brooklyn. The Malian singer Khaira Arby, from Timbuktu, has long been recognized at home, where Ali Farka Touré was a mentor; she was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mali in 2006. Her 2010 album, “Timbuktu Tarab” (Clermont Music), was one of the decade’s best African albums, and onstage her music was even more electrifying.
Ms. Arby sings what world-music marketers have misleadingly tagged “desert blues” for the spiky riffs (now played on electric guitar) and pentatonic melodies that found their way from West Africa to Delta blues. But she and her band reach much further. To underline sentiments about Malian unity, she sings in multiple languages — Songhai, Arabic, Tamashek — while her band draws on rhythms from various regions of Mali, fusing them with funk, psychedelia and reggae as well as electric blues.
She has a high, forceful voice that leaps above her band and grabs each melody, whether it’s a long-lined, griotlike exhortation or a terse call and response. On “Timbuktu Tarab” the arrangements mix traditional Malian fiddle and lute with an electric band. But her current touring lineup is simply a four-piece rock band — two guitars, bass and drums — to which Ms. Arby sometimes adds her own percussion on hand drum or calabash.
Onstage many of the songs emerged from a slow, improvisatory introduction, a tangle of guitars that would soon snap into a pattern with a hopping, stuttering, trilling guitar line moving crosswise against a brisk rhythm tapped on hi-hat cymbals. Against the rest of the band’s pointillistic precision the lead guitarist wrapped his lines in reverb, slyly ambling behind the beat before spiraling rapidly through it, turning its complexities inside out again and again.
Like many West African singers Ms. Arby puts praises and social and spiritual concerns in her lyrics. She praised Allah in “Salou,” lamented the toll of war on women in “Waidio” and sympathized with the hard labor of salt miners in “Youba.” A song from 2010, “Cinquantenaire” (“50th Anniversary”), celebrated the 50th anniversary of Malian independence (in 1960) by itemizing the achievements of each of its presidents. Her encore, “Leliyoro,” was about Fulani cattle herders who travel great distances with the seasons. It began slowly as Ms. Arby sang about carefully fording a crocodile-infested river, then galloped on safer ground, moving at breakneck speed behind her joyful wails. Rooted in age-old African daily life, the music was exultantly global.
Ms. Arby also joined her opening act, the Sway Machinery, which collaborated with her and other African musicians on an album they recorded on a trip to Mali, “The House of Friendly Ghosts, Vol. 1” (JDub). A New York City band, the Sway Machinery mingled cantorial singing (in Hebrew), Balkan tunes, funk, rock and now Malian music in its own punchy, eccentric songs. Backing Ms. Arby for a few of hers, the band proved that its members were first-rate students.
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