NEW ALBUMS
SONGHOY BLUES
Héritage TRANSGRESSIVE
Gathering an epic cast: (l-r) Oumar, Aliou and Garba Touré
8/10
Mali’s exhilarating desert-blues exiles find an acoustic home. By Nick Hasted
WHEN Tinariwen popularised the idea of desert blues in the west, bandmembers’ earlier participation in Tuareg rebel warfare lent their music heroic romance, conjuring images of nomad players as comfortable with a machine gun as a guitar, and finally manifesting The Clash’s fanciful notion of combat rock. The blues’ feedback loop from West Africa through American slavery to Hendrix seemed satisfyingly complete in their dusty grooves.
Songhoy Blues followed broadly in this musical tradition, but are from a different time and place, and tell a significantly different tale. The Songhoy people originate from the region around the River Niger in Northern Mali which was conquered first by Tuareg rebels and then music-loathing Islamists. Guitarist Garba Touré escaped to the capital Bamako in 2012, forming the descriptively named Songhoy Blues with exiled compatriots. Touré was steeped in Hendrix, and (unlike Tinariwen, initially) John Lee Hooker and BB King’s US blues, alongside hip-hop and a multiplicity of Malian styles, forming the basis of the band’s crowd-rousing electric attack. As their participation in the brutal documentary First They’ll Have To Kill Us demonstrates, there is little romance in their background. Instead, this is blues in its fundamental sense: refugee music, played with redemptive joy, but suffused with inconsolable longing.
Songhoy Blues’ three previous albums and thrilling live shows have majored in electric Malian R&B, born out of the steamy Bamako clubs where they started. Héritage is a handbrake turn to acoustic music, with Garba Touré’s trademark electric playing mostly absent. “When we started the group, all of our songs were composed around a calabash and an acoustic guitar,” Touré explains. “But when we started playing in clubs things started changing very quickly for us – especially with Africa Express, where we were accelerated even further…[but] we always kept in mind the idea of acoustic Songhoy Blues music.”