The country of Mali in west Africa is the home of Habib Koite, a lifetime student of his country's traditional music.

Koite is an African descendent of an 800-year-old noble line of Khassonk griots, storytellers who preserve the history of a village and/or family through oral tradition.

I caught up with him by phone, during his current tour, which includes tonight's performance at Laxson Auditorium, courtesy of Chico Performances.

Koite said his passion for music developed from listening to his grandfather play the kamale n'goni, a four-stringed instrument associated with hunters from the Wassolou region of Mali.

He listened to American soul and British rock as a youngster, learning to sing and play guitar while also practicing every style of music in his country.

He enrolled at Mali's National Institute of Arts, where he continued to explore his native music along with studying classical guitar.

"The classical way was new for me," he said, "putting the pick down and developing the ability to play with my hand, picking with thumb and fingers. I got used to the sound and feeling of nylon strings."

After graduating, he became a guitar teacher at the school, performing jazz and rock on the side at local clubs. Later, he formed Bamada, his legendary rhythm section that began touring extensively throughout Mali, before heading to the Perpignan Voxpole Festival in France in 1991, where they took first prize.

That accomplishment brought with it, the chance to record a couple of songs, one of which, scored Koite a West African hit, the anti-smoking anthem "Cigarette Abana."

His first album, "Muso Ko," released in 1993, which topped the European World Music charts, followed. His first two American releases, 1999's "MaYa" and 2001's "Baro," established him as a rising star in world music, bringing him to the attention of Bonnie Raitt, who collaborated with Koite on her 2001 "Silver Lining" CD.

Playing guitar and harmonica as well as lead vocals, he bases a lot of his compositions on the "danssa," a popular rhythm from his native country. He combines this with a danceable version of "doso", a hunter's music, which belongs to one of Mali's most ancient musical traditions.

Since Ry Cooder won a Grammy for his session with Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure, American blues performers have been traveling to Mali to collaborate and check out the ancestral links between Mali and the old Mississippi Delta blues music.

Koite says the connections between American blues and West Africa are traced through the institution of slavery, a tragic and forcible introduction of African culture to the shores of America.

"The connection with blues music and some of our music is that we have a lot of string instrument players who sing and play alone, like the blues," he said. "The old blues man plays his guitar alone. The musical scale is similar in some songs.We feel the same when we hear blues music. The people from the U.S. know blues music and when they hear West African music, they can hear the similarity. But people in my country don't usually know the meaning of blues."

Still based in Bamako, Mali, Koite enjoys a growing worldwide audience for the music he makes with his band, made up of Kltigui Diabat (violin, balafon), Abdoul Wahab Berth (bass), Boubacar Sidib (guitar, harmonica), Souleyamane Ann (drums) and Mahamadou Kon (percussion).

"I try to play all the ethnic music's of Mali in my way," he said. "I was not born and raised in a village; I'm from the big city and I've received lots of ethnic and musical messages. But I can understand and change things. And I let myself try anything, to show all that I know about Malian culture, right to the limit of my abilities. I think with music, it always evolves."

All instruments and musicians evolve. Material and sounds change. Guitarists may come from the same country or culture but they don't end up with the same style. The reason is that they did not come to the guitar by the same road, and this is why they don't have the same sound. So the songs that brought me to the guitar determined my style of playing, how I will play and what I add to my sound."

-Phil Reser