Rainy Season Blues

The last session the Malian guitarist Lobi Traoré recorded before his death in June this year at the age of 49 proves to have been a quite extraordinary one. In August 2009, American indie rocker Chris Eckman was in Bamako to produce an album for the Touareg band Tamikrest. While there he found a free morning to spend in the studio with Lobi and in the course of an unbroken four-hour solo session they recorded this acoustic album. Of all the so-called African bluesmen, Lobi was perhaps the closest to the spirit of the Delta practitioners, and the stark sound of his final session emphasises this more than ever before. Eckman's empathetic but hands-off production allows us to hear not only the music but offers us a fly-on-the-wall insight into what was happening in the studio as we hear Lobi's fingers sliding skilfully over the frets of his acoustic guitar and the snap of each string. The opener ‘Moko ti y Lamban Don’ is as raw and earthy an example of the unadulterated Bambara blues as you could find – as haunting in its way as the acoustic work of John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters. And so it continues over an intense performance – there were no overdubs – which finds Lobi deep in the zone and oblivious to his external surroundings. After the session, they broke for lunch and Eckman suggested they spent the afternoon recording some alternative takes. Lobi announced that he had no time, as he had to leave to play at a wedding. Which was just fine, because it's hard to imagine how they could have improved on what we have here.