Songhoy Blues: “[We] like to make people dance… but our social concerns are the reason for the music”

Songhoy Blues are back with a glorious and unexpected new album that’s a plea for unity in their battered homeland, Mali. They may be known for their rousing blend of desert blues, rock and funk, but Héritage takes a very different approach. They are still a guitar band but now concentrate on acoustic rather than electric styles. And they are joined by distinguished Malian guests, including Afel Bocoum (who worked for many years with the great guitarist Ali Farka Touré), kora virtuoso Madou Diabaté, and other exponents of traditional instruments such as balafon, soku fiddle, peul flute, kubur lute and various types of ngoni.

Oumar Touré, their bass player, says the album is a result of COVID-19 and the continuing crisis in the country. “Since we started the band, Malian musical heritage has been ingrained in what we do, and we have written acoustic songs that we were never able to release. But during COVID, we spent a lot of time at home, playing with different artists and taking part in cultural activities. These experiences enabled us to make Héritage in a more reflective, acoustic style.”

As for the situation within Mali, where armed Islamic groups continue to make it dangerous to travel across much of the country, “the social climate is very tense and ethnic conflict is threatening the country. It was against this backdrop that we decided it would be a good idea to put together an album featuring a host of Malian musicians to reflect the diversity, but also the similarities within Malian music, and to call on people not to give in to division”.

Oumar says the band “like to make people dance… but our social concerns are the reason for the music”. Their new songs deal with the need for security and peace, along with topics ranging from the exploitation of street children to river pollution, as on the R&B-influenced ‘Issa’. “It’s the only song that has a global, environmental theme,” he explains, “so we left ourselves open to influences outside our own circle with that one.”

Then there are new versions of songs by their favourite artists, including the opener ‘Toukambela’, described by guitarist Garba Touré as “a mythical song first played by the regional orchestra of Timbuktu, called Mister Diaz, then taken up by the Orchestre Kanaga de Mopti. The melody left a deep impression on us, so we wanted to play it again but give it a new touch. The Kanaga have been among the best Malian groups since my childhood. They gave me the love of making music.”

Another cover is ‘Woyhenna’, a re-working of ‘Mariama’ by the late Ibraham Dicko, “a singer from Gao with a golden voice who didn’t get the chance to have an international career. He composed extraordinary songs and is still a source of inspiration for many young artists today. Our take on the song is full of energy – the Songhoy Blues touch!”, enthuses Garba.

It’s the latest development in what has already been a remarkable story. Aliou Touré, Garba Touré and Oumar Touré are not directly related, but all come from the Songhoy (or Songhai) region in northern Mali, which has its own language and culture, and was once the centre of the Songhai empire. They were forced to flee when radical Islamists of Ansar Al-Dine over-ran the area, imposing sharia law and declaring that music was forbidden. In 2012, they arrived as displaced young men in the capital, Bamako.

They were all well-educated: Garba, the lead guitarist, has a degree in molecular biology – but also studied with that great guitarist Ali Farka Touré, with whom his father played percussion, Oumar has a degree in town planning, while lead singer Aliou studied law. But their passion was music. Oumar and Aliou, both from Gao, had worked together in a band, Lassaliz, and met Garba when they played in his hometown, Diré. Getting together in Bamako, they started playing in bars popular with other exiled northerners.

Together with drummer Nathanael Dembélé, they began to develop their own style and write their own songs. Traditional Songhoy material was one influence, of course – it’s key in Malian desert blues – but to this, they added a range of influences that they heard in Bamako, from rock and funk to African R&B. In October 2013, Africa Express rolled into town looking for interesting new artists to record. Damon Albarn was there, along with the likes of Brian Eno, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Nick Zinner, Idris Elba and Ghostpoet. One of Songhoy Blues’ fans was a sound engineer called Barou Diallo, who had once played bass for Ali Farka Touré, and he suggested that someone from Africa Express check out the band.

Their lives were transformed within a few weeks. They recorded their song ‘Soubour’ in a temporary studio that had been set up in a Bamako youth club, with Nick Zinner and Albarn collaborator Remi Kabaka as the producers, and it appeared on the album Africa Express Presents: Maison des Jeunes, released at the end of 2013. Songhoy Blues were invited to play an album launch in London, and they were offered a recording contract; in April 2014, Zinner was back in Mali, recording another ten tracks for their debut album, Music in Exile.

Early the next year, they were back in London promoting the album and celebrating their signing to a major US label, Atlantic. When they played at The Barfly in Camden in February 2015, Aliou announced, “This is dedicated to our father, Ali Farka Touré”, as they launched into a song that began like a sped-up desert blues before spiralling off into a furious improvisation. The band looked like neatly dressed graduates, with only Oumar sporting desert headgear like Tinariwen, and the set included everything from Songhoy traditional styles to furious R&B with echoes of blues bands like Canned Heat. They were impressive, charming and had clearly put a lot of effort into learning English. “If you like us, say so on Facebook”, they instructed. As I wrote at the time, they had “all the makings of African-rock crossover heroes.”

And they achieved just that. When their second album, Résistance, was released in 2017, they were established as Africa’s new young celebrities. Desert blues was now transformed by tight attacking riffs, jangling funk guitar and the addition of brass and keyboards, while their guests included London grime MC Elf Kid and even Iggy Pop, who growled about ‘going to the Sahara, baby’ on their song ‘Sahara’. Their third album, Optimisme (2020), featured a new drummer, Drissa Kone, who plays calabash on Héritage.

The new album was recorded in Bamako, partly in Salif Keita’s studio, so how did the band feel about Salif’s concerns (in Songlines #199) that young Malian musicians rely too much on sampling rather than learning traditional instruments? It’s an issue that concerns them; Garba has started a foundation teaching people to play, make and maintain traditional instruments. “To lose this richness is to lose part of our history”, says Oumar.

But life is not easy for Malian musicians, thanks to the security situation, though there are still a few festivals around Bamako and Kayes. “Artists are going through a hard time,” says Garba. “It’s a case of survival.” When the band want to visit their parents in the north, they have to go in disguise and only stay for a few days. Travelling by bus or riverboat can be dangerous, so “risk and fear” are still part of their daily lives. Could they be forced to leave? “If it becomes impossible to continue our activities in Bamako, we haven’t ruled out the possibility of moving elsewhere.”

They spend much of the time on the road, of course, and Oumar says that when they promote the new album (probably in the summer, with dates to be announced), “we’ll be touring with traditional instrumentalists, for sure, to represent the Héritage album live.”

I suspect this could well become one of the albums of the year, but they won’t be staying acoustic for long. The next album, already in preparation, “will be with electric instruments but in another direction that people won’t be expecting. The important thing for us is to keep evolving…”