Khaira Arby’s big break

Mike Doherty, Special to National Post

For many Westerners, the word “Timbuktu” conjures up the height of exoticism: “la fin du monde,” as Khaira Arby puts it. The singer, known as the Nightingale of the North, snickers when she says this; she was born in that very Malian city and still lives there now. And though it’s certainly far from the Toronto club where she sits today, serenely chatting before a show, she insists it’s never far from her heart.

Timbuktu, she says, is “a cosmopolitan city full of mysteries,” and she laments the fact that an Islamic-fundamentalist faction, Ansar Dine, has taken it over, stepping into the power vacuum created by a military coup in the south.

It’s difficult even to leave the country now: Arby and her desert-blues quartet drove along dirt roads and flew out of Senegal in order to play their current North American tour. In March, closed land borders and airports forced them to cancel gigs in France. The current situation, she says, is “very hard for me and for everyone.” But nonetheless, despite Ansar Dine’s burning of shrines and calls for women to wear veils, she says, most of the city’s inhabitants reject the faction’s close-minded values. “We hope for peace. We’ll return to Timbuktu and sing there as we have before. All of this will pass.”

Arby’s singing can be keening and urgent, but she speaks — in laconic but eloquent French — with the calm of someone who has overcome cultural opposition for most of her life. She was only 11 when, in 1970, she gave her first public performance; the crowd’s eager applause made her shyness evaporate (“I thought I had become a star!”). Her father had other ideas. By the time she was 16 and had given up her studies in order to play with a dance band, he arranged a marriage to curtail her ambitions.

“It wasn’t acceptable for a woman to sing,” she says, “especially when she wasn’t a griot [a traditional storytelling singer].” Arby assented to her father’s wishes and became a wife and homemaker. She had two sons, and then a daughter, whose baptism triggered a fight with her south-Malian husband’s family. They wanted the child to be circumcised, and she refused, spiriting her away and then divorcing her husband. Nowadays, she rails against the practice of excision on the coiled song Feriene, from her latest album, Timbuktu Tarab.

Arby started training a troupe of young musicians after her divorce, and just before their first concert, in a fateful echo of her past, the lead vocalist’s father forbade her to sing. Having written the songs, Arby took the girl’s place.

“It was the most beautiful night of my life,” she recalls, smiling beatifically. “I asserted myself, and no one could believe it. From there, it all took off.” Even her father accepted what she calls “her destiny,” and she began to perform once again in earnest, sometimes with her cousin, guitar legend Ali Farka Touré. But where Touré, and other compatriots such as Oumou Sangaré and Amadou & Mariam, toured the world and became famous, Arby desisted — “I didn’t like to travel,” she says with a shrug — and it would take decades to become an overnight sensation outside her home country.

In 2010, her children having grown up, and with her family in need of the money Western shows could bring in, she played in North America for the first time. Her sound, which melds the spidery Tamashek blues of a band such as Tinariwen with elements of reggae and blistering rock, rapidly made converts, including acclaimed indie rockers Animal Collective, who hired her to play at a festival they curated in 2011.

“She killed there,” says her manager, Christopher Nolan. Before working with her, Nolan, the North American liaison for Mali’s world-renowned Festival of the Desert (which has attracted the likes of Bono and Robert Plant), would watch her perform over the years and ask himself, “ ‘Why are other people being taken out [of the country to perform] but not her?’ In my evaluation, she’s better than all of them. The band is unbelievable.”

At Toronto’s Lula Lounge after our interview, Arby and her band kick up a sandstorm. The concert is a family affair, and in this case, nepotism pays dividends: the rhythm guitarist (her son) and the drummer (a nephew) generate intricate, hard-hitting grooves as the lead guitarist (another nephew) plays face-melting solos; the nimble bassist (a cousin) himself alternates on impressively dexterous lead guitar. Arby modulates between a soulful lower register and an intense, vibrato-free upper range, delivering songs that she’s penned in a number of Malian languages so that no one back home need feel left out.

Over the years, it has become more electric and forceful, as heard on the forthcoming EP, Chini Chini. Clearly her bandmates are having an influence: “You have to move with the times,” she says, “to do what the new generation wants.”

Arby thinks back to the girl whom she replaced on the night her career was resurrected. “She was younger than I am, but today, she’s older than I am. She can do nothing but have children; she doesn’t work. She does whatever her husband tells her. I’m younger than she, because I can dance onstage — I’m free.”

Today, Arby says, it’s easier for women to become musicians in Mali, and she encourages those who come to her for advice. But in Timbuktu, now, this freedom is in danger. Arby is reluctant to talk specifics — she says she doesn’t believe music itself should be political. She does, however, sing in support of peace, as in a track called Le Monde Pour La Paix, recently recorded in the Malian capital, Bamako, with Vieux Farka Touré (Ali’s son) and American blues singer Joe Conte.

Not everyone in Mali has the chance to go to political meetings or even follow events on television, she says, so she has given people “the chance to listen to music and pay attention to peace with their ears. … There will be change. Even if I don’t sing about it myself, others will, Insha’Allah.”

Chini Chini by Khaira Arby will be released digitally on May 22.