Ali Farka Touré - Niafunke 1999

Ali Farka Touré - Niafunke 1999
Label: Hannibal

Blues

NIAFUNKE was nominated for the 2000 Grammy Award for Best World Music Album.

Ali Farka Toure is a guitarist from Mali whose style draws almost equally upon the folk music of his homeland and American blues, particularly the dark and minimal repetitive-trance style of John Lee Hooker and acoustic country blues guitarists such as Mississippi John Hurt. In the past, his (uniformly fine) albums have featured guest shots and collaborations with Ry Cooder and members of the Irish trad-folk group the Chieftans, but here it's back to the roots.

Recorded in a Toure's home village in Mali, with a small group of singers and players, NIAFUNKE is delightfully low-key and captivating. Beautifully picked acoustic guitar combines with shimmering electric guitar percussion, voices, and violin to weave the spacious, circular melodies that explore the common ground shared by the blues and African folk music. "Tulumba" glimmers like a desert mirage, and "Pieter Botha" sounds like a Delta blues tune played by a wandering musician while traveling through Spain and England in the Middle Ages.
From CD Universe.
**
Ali Farka Toure's first album since his 1994 collaboration with Ry Cooder, Talking Timbuktu, makes a convincing argument for the adage that home is where the art is. Recorded in an abandoned brick edifice located between Toure's extensive rice fields and the Sahara-bordering village of Niafunké, Mali, this is the guitarist's most purely African album yet. Local percussionists, a sensuous village chorus, and a lonely one-stringed njarka violin accompany Toure here, replacing the Western guests who've tended to stilt his prior records. More relaxed and less gratuitously ornamental than before (especially when he plays acoustically), Toure digs deeply into spare, loping pentatonic grooves that extend beyond the usual John Lee Hooker blues comparisons into territory older, richer, and more folkloric (and Islamic) than earlier records have approached.
By Richard Gehr.
**
Ali Ibrahim “Farka” Touré (October 31, 1939 – March 6, 2006) was a Malian singer and guitarist, and one of the African continent’s most internationally renowned musicians. His music is widely regarded as representing a point of intersection of traditional Malian music and its North American cousin, the blues. The belief that the latter is historically derived from the former is reflected in Martin Scorsese’s often quoted characterization of Touré’s tradition as constituting "the DNA of the blues". Touré was ranked number 76 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time."
**
Ali Farka Toure's "Niafunke" is one great album, showcasing the West African approach to the guitar, and proving that Toure is getting better with each passing year. It was genius to avoid the homogenization of "world" music by recording this CD in Mali, near home, with local musicians. The music can be described as a sort of "Sahara blues", a mix of North and West African traditional music and American blues, but there's much more to it than that. Play this CD, be taken away by it, listen to the voices and instruments (African drums and strings), and you'll agree with Toure, who says that "Timbuktu [is] right at the heart of the world."
By  Ed Gibbon.
**
Ali Farke Toure- (Vocals, Acoustic & Electric Guitars, Njarka Violin, Percussion);
Affel Bocoum- (Vocals, Acoustic Guitar);
Voro Cisse- (Njurkle traditional Guitar);
Guidado Diallo- (Njarka Violin);
Oumar Toure- (Congas, background Vocals);
Hammer Sankare- (Calabash, Background Vocals);
Souleye Kane- (Djembe);
Djeneba Doukoure, Fatoumata Traore, Hamidou Sare- (Background Vocals).
**
01. Ali's Here
02. Allah Uya
03. Mali Dje
04. Saukare
05. Hilly Yoro
06. Tulumba
07. Instrumental
08. ASCO
09. Jangali Famata
10. Howkouna
11. Cousins
12. Pieter Botha
**
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