Vieux Farka Touré and Khruangbin confront a musical legacy in Ali —album review

Vieux Farka Touré’s father never wanted him to be a musician. This was not surprising given that his father was a middle-class West African farmer and local politician, but more surprising given that he was also Ali Farka Touré, the pioneering desert blues guitarist who became one of Mali’s prime musical exports. His son spent years playing anything but his father’s music; now, in 2022, nearly two decades after Ali’s death, Vieux has released two albums that confront his legacy head on.

The first, Les Racines, was a musically conservative dive into Ali Farka Touré’s world and his lyrical preoccupations, made with other West Africans. This second, simply titled Ali, is a set of the older Touré’s songs, recorded in collaboration with the Texan rock band Khruangbin.

In his lifetime, Ali Farka Touré worked on his own terms: ornamentation was in the service of his songs, not the other way round. Here, Khruangbin get a bit more leeway, but the core of the songs, from their lyrics in French, Peul, Bambara and, chiefly, Songhai to their slow Saharan tempi, remains the same.

The album works backwards in time, opening with “Savane” (styled here as “Savanne”), the title track of Ali’s final solo album, recorded in Bamako’s Hôtel Mandé in 2004 as his health started to decline. Vieux begins with a guitar vamp like a fanfare over a mournful mist of synthesiser from Mark Speer — and then the song’s reflections of exile and the diaspora unwind over Laura Lee Ochoa’s bass and Donald Johnson’s drums, all drenched in deep dub echo. Taken from 1990’s The River, “Lobo” (here “Lobbo”) has a lazy back-and-forth sway, with bird calls and gentle organ stabs.

The stark riff of “Diarabi” — a West African classic about an arranged marriage also famous from versions by Toumani Diabaté and Orchestra Baobab — is disrupted here by broken arpeggios from Speer. Dub effects are intrusive rather than moody apart from the eerie melodica motif. “Tamalla” is a slightly strangulated praise song, Touré’s and Speer’s guitars duelling across the sonic spectrum.

Its accelerated close has a similar energy to the end of “Mahine Me”, from 1992’s The Source, whose bluesy rattle is amped up by Johnson’s vigorous drumming and washboard and some fizzing Zydeco accordion from Ruben Moreno. The brief closing instrumental, “Alakarra”, is a duet for guitars over skittering drums, Lee Ochoa whispering “Ali” just at the threshold of audibility.

★★★★☆

‘Ali’ is released by Dead Oceans