Ali

This is the second album Vieux Farka Touré has released as a tribute to his father Ali Farka Touré in three months and the two records could hardly sound more different. Ali was mostly recorded before Les Racines (reviewed in July 2022, #179) in Houston in 2019 with hip Texan trio Khruangbin during a break in touring to promote the trio’s breakthrough album Con Todo el Mundo (2018). It’s a very different record from the traditional sound of Les Racines, Vieux’s African guitar tropes floating over Khruangbin’s spacey atmospherics and churning funk-R&B soundscapes with his vocals echoing with heavy reverb in the mix.

All eight tunes come from Ali’s songbook and if the idea was to present the great man’s music in a new and different context, it works admirably. The opener ‘Savanne’ from Ali’s posthumous album of the same name, is reworked as a dub reggae exercise. ‘Diarabi’, which Ali recorded with Ry Cooder on the Grammy-winning Talking Timbuktu, is slowed down to sound almost like a romantic soul ballad with some jazzy chording from Khurangbin guitarist Mark Speer. On ‘Mahine Me’, from Ali’s 1992 album The Source, the Louisiana accordionist Ruben Moreno adds to the gumbo, creating a thrilling desert blues/zydeco hybrid. When Khruangbin returned to the tracks in 2021 intending to finesse what were largely first-takes, they realised that there was very little to be done for the spontaneity of the original recordings is pretty much perfect.