Live in New York 2010

The great Malian singer Khaira Arby died in 2018, so archive recordings have now become even more valuable. This 2010 performance provides a superior illustration of her charismatic abilities before a crowd, recorded at Bard College, New York. She was working with a band whose members all possessed a vibrant sound, traditional at root, but not averse to a frazzled rock vocabulary, relationships in flux, stretching into dynamic shapes. The show was well-recorded, although the very onstage closeness of the sound excludes the crowd’s enthusiasm; a close-up shekere gourd seems to be shaking right next to our ears.

The first few songs highlight the conversation between ngoni and lead electric guitar, courtesy of Abellow Yattara and Dramane Touré respectively, steadily developing from gentle swaying, sensitive interweaving. Yattara has a bristling, metallic sound, his dexterity sharply delineated, while Touré is quite restrained. There’s an excellent marriage of strings, along with rhythm and bass guitars, and the line-up is completed by percussion and co-vocalists. The intensity inches upwards, Touré increasing his drive throughout the third track, and fully mushrooming for ‘Delya’, the fourth, by which time the soloing is totally fried, his guitar wilder and more distorted, razoring up a steep incline and coupled by ngoni. This is surely the song where the crowd were completely grabbed. Arby pulls out the passion, flanked by exuberantly insistent clapping rhythms. Dipping for a couple of numbers, she resumes the ascension by track seven, remaining up in the heavens until the finish.