Ali Farka Toure with Ry Cooder
Talking Timbuktu

A blues at the end of the world. From the heart of the earth.

For some people, when you say “Timbuktu” it is like the end of the world, but it is not true. I am from Timbuktu, and I can tell you are right at the heart of the world.
AFT

Surely I won’t have been the only one who, placing the second, self-titled album of Ali Farka Toure on the player, was amazed by the encounter.
From a musician I knew nothing about, except that he came from Mali, I did not expect that strange form of blues, generated by an unlikely acoustic instrumentation.
The subsequent The River (1990), where he electrified his personal version of music that we were used to considering an exclusive heritage from the other side of the world (and which also featured some members of the Chieftains), only increased the interest towards him.
Another album (The Source) and four years passed before his name, thanks to the collaboration with Cooder, was projected into a more illuminated and visible area of the vast music market.
In 1994, in fact, "Talking Timbuktu" emerged. And it won a Grammy Award ('95)

Santa Monica, Mali
In Santa Monica, Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure, who had met a couple of years earlier, gathered around them a band of trusted musicians, immersed in the proverbial atmosphere that the American is able to create.
An atmosphere that allows every single sound, the timbre of any instrument, to breathe. In a combination of rare balance that appears magically natural, but is quite rare. Like many seemingly simple things.
And it is the atmosphere that we too slip into, slowly, during the listening of this album.

Souvenirs? No, thank you.
Composed of ten tracks, all written by Toure and sung in four languages (Songhai, Bambara, Peul, and Tamasheck), it represents an enlightening example of the mixture called world music. But it is definitively distant from the more or less successful attempts to combine "modern" techniques and attitudes with fragments of other musical cultures, often with the sole intent of proposing exotic soundscapes for lazy tourists. As we happen to be, consuming so much of everything, music included.
Distant from "world" souvenirs for the attitude of the American musician, demonstrated over the years, to get in tune with the spirit of the material he manipulates.
For the ground on which the exchange occurs. That "blues," tinted with other melancholies, generated by other spaces, played with other instruments, which however easily crosses oceans, truly speaking a language immediately understandable.

The songs of the griot
The album opens, on the notes of Ali Farka's guitar, with the track "Bonde".

And the unmistakable voice of the griot unwinds on the sinuous carpet unrolled by the congas of the faithful Oumar Toure, which follow the circular repetition that will be one of the hallmarks of the album.
By the second track, "Soukura," also introduced by a few notes from Ali Farka's guitar, by the percussion, and by a choir that, as soft as an echo of the solo voice, will run through the entire track, we succumb to the sensation of being in a welcoming place where it feels natural to surrender to the hypnotic power of music.
Which will offer us moments characterized by more "ethnic" sounds, entrusted to the three African musicians (Sega, Sanga) flanked by Cooder's discrete and fluid presence (Gomni, Keito) or laid on the wavering rhythm of a dance (Lasidan). And others where the blues soul will be more explicit, like in "Amandrai" or in "Al Du," the latter embellished by Clarence Brown's viola, which adds another flavor to the tapestry also woven by John Patitucci's bass and Cooder's slide, who also unveils an unexpected mandolin in this track.
With "Diaraby," a traditional arranged by Ali Farka Toure, Cooder bids farewell to his guests and remains alone with the three African musicians to close a simply perfect album in style.

An endless sea
The first time I reached the end of the small almost motionless journey that listening to "Talking Timbuktu" represents, I went to consult the atlas to check the position of Mali on the map.
Because something aching and sweet runs through the album, a sensation of expanded, liquid, and suspended spaces, a cyclicity that seems borrowed from the movement of waves...
I remembered well: Mali is surrounded by the land of Africa and has no sea outlets.
But, in the end, it was just one of the possible magic that this simple music is capable of generating.
Music coming from a place at the end of the world.
But with roots sunk right at the center of its heart.

Talking Timbuktu
World Circuit 1994

Ali Farka Toure: vocals, acoustic and electric guitar, njarka
Ry Cooder: acoustic and electric guitar (slide and vox), cumbus, electric mando-guitar, acoustic toy guitar, mbira, tamboura, mandolin, bass guitar, marimba, accordion sample
Hamma Sankare: calabash, chorus vocals
Oumar Toure: congas, chorus vocals, bongos
John Patitucci: acoustic bass, bass guitar
Jim Keltner: drums
Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown: electric guitar, viola

I have avoided mentioning the iconography that usually accompanies the figure of Ali Farka Toure, who built his first instrument (a kind of one-stringed lute) from a sardine tin. However, I recommend reading a short interview from 2001, which you find in "more info," with additional information that also allows a better understanding of the context in which this music originates. And listening to his last album, "In the Heart of the Moon," released in 2005, almost entirely instrumental, made in the company of another great Malian musician, the kora master Toumani Diabate (recommended album “Djelika” – Hannibal 1995)