Sahel Folk

Sidi Touré’s first album, Hoga, appeared 14 years ago on Stern’s and it is an indication of how the global influence of Malian music has grown since then that his long-delayed second album now appears on an ineffably hip Chicago-based indie-rock label, best known for releasing recordings by the likes of the Fiery Furnaces and Mouse On Mars. Sahel Folk is an earthy, all-acoustic essay in the Songhai blues and was recorded in Gao – a dusty town on the River Niger by the edge of an ocean of sand which will be familiar to the more intrepid world music fans as the last staging-post en route to the Festival in the Desert. Fortunately, the label has not attempted to dress up the music for an indie-rock audience (apart from a daft line in the press release which gratuitously tells us that in his youth Sidi used to rock around the desert in a leather jacket and sunglasses listening to JJ Cale).

The nine songs are presented in a live field-recording style, exactly as they should be, the guitars (including local variants the kutigui and kurbu), voices and hand-clapping unadorned by studio trickery. It’s more than enough, and Sidi’s five local accompanists, each of whom duets with him on different tracks, lends an impressive diversity. Tracks such as the traditional ‘Taray Kongo’, recorded with Jambala Maiga playing monochord, are hewn from the same deep seam of desert blues that Ali Farka Touré worked. The loping gait of ‘Haallah’ and ‘Artiatanat’ (the latter sung in Tamasheq rather than Songhai and featuring Jiba Touré, who died shortly after the album was recorded) evokes an unplugged Tinariwen.