Jeff Hemmings: Music

Songhoy Blues – Another brilliant band from war-torn Mali

Malian music has enjoyed a tremendously fruitful last few years belying its relatively small population size of 14.5 million. Kora maestro Tourmani Diabate, roots and blues guitarists the late Ali Farka Toure, and Rokia Traore, Tuareg bands Tinariwen and Tamikrest, and singers Salif Keita, Amadou et Mariam and Oumou Sangare, have all achieved international recognition, all loosely marrying western influences with the traditional sounds of their country. You can now add Songhoy Blues to that esteemed list.
Via an interpreter, African Express co-director and band manager Marc-Antoine Moreau, the French speaking Malians told their story. “The problems happened in the north of my country in 2012, when jihadists tried to take over from the (anti-government) rebels and install Sharia Law. I had to flee Dire (a town upstream from Timbuktu). They banned all music. On the radio all you could hear was praying. Nobody was allowed to play or listen to music,” says guitarist Garba Toure.

Not surprisingly he left for the capital, Bamako, even though it too was experiencing strife and conflict. As fate would have it he met up again with fellow musicians, guitarist Oumar Toure and singer Aliou Toure. All three belong to the Songhoy people, one of the main ethnicities in the north, hence the band’s name, which is married to the idea of both the desert blues of Northern Africa, and of America. “I was invited to a wedding party, and I asked the others to join me for a performance. It went well, and we got a drummer (Nathanael Dembele) and started playing bars and clubs”. It seems that their raucous guitar-based songs, that aim to bring peace and reconciliation to the country, helped to bring together the different ethnicities of Mali.
When they learnt that Africa Express (initially set up in 2005 with the idea of promoting artistic collaboration between African and western musicians) were visiting Bamako in 2013, the band arranged for themselves to audition, which led to a collaboration with the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick Zinner on a track that ended up on Damian Albarn’s African Express project album, Maison des Jeunes. They then released their debut album, Music In Exile, earlier this year.
So, how does Mali do it? “In Malian culture, music is very important, and it’s everywhere. Everything culturally is related to music.”
Concorde 2, Tues 3 Nov, 7.30pm, £12