Vieux Farka Touré interview: “It’s difficult to be the child of someone who has gone to the top of the mountain”

Vieux Farka Touré smiles as his long-time manager, producer and friend Eric Herman remembers the first time he heard him play the guitar. “It was 2003 and I was a university student studying in Bamako, keen to learn more about Malian music and the culture. I had an intense passion for Ali Farka Touré’s music and one day I went over to their house and heard a guitar blaring out. I thought it was Ali and ran into the room. It turned out it was Vieux.”

It was the first Herman – or anyone else, for that matter – knew that the then 21-year-old Vieux had a hidden talent on the guitar. At the time he was known only as a percussionist at Mali’s Institut National des Arts and had kept his guitar skills a secret, “apprehensive about letting people know because of the weight of Ali’s stature and such big shoes to fill,” Herman explains.

Vieux confirms Herman’s story by nodding animatedly. “I didn’t want people to know, especially my father,” he recalls. “He wanted me to be a soldier because his own father was in Mali’s National Guard and he said it would guarantee me a stable future.” When Vieux refused a military career, it caused a rift between father and son that took a long time to heal. That they were reconciled before Ali’s death from cancer in 2006 took the intervention of Toumani Diabaté, whom Vieux regards as his godfather. “My father took some persuading that I should become a professional musician and in the end it took Toumani to pave the way,” he says. It resulted in Ali making a guest appearance alongside Toumani on Vieux’s 2007 self-titled debut album, which Herman produced, although his father sadly died before it was released.

It would be unfair to say that Vieux has spent the 15 years since running away from the weight of expectation that comes with the family name. Yet he very deliberately set about establishing a style of his own that swerved paternal comparisons. “It’s difficult to be the child of someone who has gone to the top of the mountain. The name follows you around and it means you have twice as much work to do to establish yourself,” he says. “Early in my career people asked why wasn’t I just following my father. That would have been an easy course to take, but if I had trod in his footsteps people would have criticised me for copying him. So I knew I had to establish my own identity. It was the only way people were going to listen and not just say ‘he’ll never be as good as his father’.”

In order to forge his own path, Vieux set about recording a series of solo albums that expanded boldly on the desert blues template associated with Ali and earned him the soubriquet ‘the Hendrix of the Sahara.’ He performed alongside Shakira and Alicia Keys at the opening ceremony of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa and embarked on a series of audacious cross-cultural collaborations with the likes of Dave Matthews and the jazz guitarist John Scofield. Along the way there has also been an album with the American singer-songwriter Julia Easterlin and two records with the Israeli singer-songwriter Idan Raichel as The Touré-Raichel Collective.

After stretching the boundaries with such a diverse body of work, it is only now at the age of 40 that Vieux has finally found the confidence to turn full circle with Les Racines, an album that goes back to the traditional Songhai music of northern Mali that has come to be known by the catch-all term ‘desert blues’ and of which Ali was the ultimate exponent. “I’ve had a desire to do a more traditional album for a long, long time. It’s important to me and to Malian people that we stay connected to our roots and our history,” Vieux reasons.

On one level Les Racines is a son’s tribute to a late and much-loved parent, but it is also far more than that. “Yes, the record is a homage to my father. But it is also a tribute to the values he stood for and what he represented. Now people know what I can do, I can return to those roots with pride and I hope a certain authority.” In short, Vieux has paid his dues and has earned the right to be judged on his own terms.

Les Racines is his sixth solo album and the follow-up to 2017’s Samba, which was recorded before a live audience as part of the Woodstock Sessions and earned him a nomination for Best Artist in the Songlines Music Awards 2018.

He began planning Les Racines in 2019 in between touring the world. Then COVID-19 intervened. “As I was stuck at home I turned lockdown to advantage and used the time to get the album finished,” he explains. Recorded in Bamako in Vieux’s home studio – named Studio Ali Farka Touré in his father’s honour – those accompanying him include Toumani Diabaté’s younger brother Madou Sidiki Diabaté on kora and guitarist Amadou Bagayoko from the Malian duo Amadou & Mariam.

A return to the roots it may be, but the energy of his approach and the urgency of the messages in the songs lend a contemporary relevance, too. “We are nothing if we abandon respect for the past and what I do comes from there and how I grew up,” he says. “But we can also marry modernity with the strength of our traditions.” The ten original compositions address a range of topics. “In Mali many people are illiterate and music is the main way of transmitting information and knowledge,” he explains. “My father fought for peace and as artists we have an obligation to educate about the problems facing our country and to rally people and shepherd them towards reason.”

Songs such as ‘Ngala Kaourene’, ‘Be Together’ and ‘Tinnondirene’ are calls for understanding and unity in a conflicted world. Others, such as ‘Lahidou’ and ‘Gabou Ni Tie’, praise traditional values such as fidelity and loyalty. Family looms large, too. ‘Adou’ is named after one of Vieux’s four children and got its title because he began recording it on his son’s birthday. He also namechecks his father on the album’s closing track, ‘Ndjehene Direne’.

Les Racines is Vieux’s debut on World Circuit, the label for which Ali recorded from 1988 until his death. “It was my dream for a very long time to be on the same label as my father,” he says. Ali’s World Circuit recordings won two Grammy awards and it would be fitting if Les Racines follows suit. He’s too modest to talk about winning prizes, but it certainly seems that this is his time. The American film director Ian Campbell recently made a full-length documentary celebrating his life and music titled Vieux de Niafunké, which is available for streaming on Vimeo.

“Returning to the roots of this music is a new departure for me and I’ve never spent so long or worked so hard on an album,” he says. “I took a lot of time to reflect on how to do it and put it together. To do justice to my father’s memory I knew the music had to be deep and durable and powerful.”

Read the review of Vieux Farka Touré’s Les Racines

This interview originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today