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     There is at first glance nothing about Bamako to suggest that it is one of the hottest music spots on the planet. Bamako is the  capital of Mali, the parched,  land-locked West African country, two thirds of  which is in the Sahara desert, which was just ranked by the U.N. Development’s Human Development Agency as the 184th worst country to be living in out of 187,  on the basis of its  annual per capita  income ($350),    the mean education level (fourth grade) and  average lifespan (49) of its citizens, and the infant mortality rate (119 per 1000). 

     Bamako has to be one of the world’s most unprepossessing capitals, more like a big village, really, an anarchic collection of bougous, or neighborhoods. During the past decade of severe drought, its population has doubled to a million as villagers have streamed in from the dessicating countryside, and the city has grown swiftly and chaotically. 

        The bulk  of  Bamako sprawls up from the right bank of the Niger River to a  tiara of tall red cliffs atop which sits  the presidential palace. The president, General Amadou Toumani Touré, known as ATT, is widely perceived as someone who is not out for himself and has the best interests of Mali at heart. He led a coup of junior officers that ended the bloody, despotic 23-year rule of General Mousse Traore in l991, and then retired. He didn’t want to be president and only ran eleven years later because the people were clamoring for him, it is said, and won by a landslide, 64% of the vote. As Howard French points out in his new book on Africa, the democratization of Mali is one of the positive recent developments on the entire continent. 

       Most of Bamako’s structures are single-story, with courtyards where the women cook food on charcoal braziers. There are six main ethnic groups in Mali, with many sub-groups and the Bamana live with the Bamana, the Sangha with the Sangha, the Peulh with the Peulh,  in large extended families and clans that take over entire blocks.   The toubab,  or whites (also known as ferenji),   have their own bougous, too-- the nicest ones, of course--  with bougainvillea dripping over their walled, guarded compounds.   

        I am staying in a new luxury hotel called the Kampinski El Farouk. The  glassy green Niger slides past my window, on its way up to Timbuctu. The downtown is a five-minute walk, so I set out to find the money-changers. Within a hundred and fifty yards blaring Cuban son, Jamaican rap, and  bluesy-sounding ballads in Bambara (the language of the Bamana, Mali’s largest ethnic group), are competing for my ears. No music evolves in isolation any more, I reflect. Fusion is happening all the time.  The music of Africa and the Americas  has crossed and back-crossed and hybridized so many times  that is no longer possible to identify what exactly comes from where. But there is a widespread perception  that the music known as the blues, which emerged in the Afro-American South in the l890’s and fathered jazz and rock n’roll, and is so infectious and cathartic that it is the world’s dominant popular music form,   originated here,  in Mali. This perception  has been reinforced by a recent seven-part PBS series on the blues, which begins in Mali; and by such cross-cultural collaborations as Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Toure’s Talking Timbuctu and Taj Mahal and Toumani Diabete’s Kulanjan, and  the anthology album, From Memphis to Mali. Whatever the truth of it is, there is a lot of great music in Mali that has little or nothing to do with the blues, as I soon find out, entering the labyrinthine central market, which takes up most of the downtown, flowing out of buildings, across streets, spilling into alleys and courtyards. Every few yards a different blaster is playing a different cd or cassette, the stars of whatever part of Mali  the person manning the next stall is from. The haunting melodies and intricate rhythms of  Wassoulou, Mandinke, bogolon, and a host of other styles mingle with the steady low hum, punctuated with periodic eruptions of laughter,  of people bartering with each other in mutually unintelligible languages. The visual assault is no less riotous : the thirty kinds of mango that that are grown in Mali are on display with  the  protocubist wood sculptures of the Dogon cliffdwellers, who live along a 100-mile-long escarpment upcountry; the dazzling,  boldly patterned tissus  that the women wrap themselves in;  the sumptuous turquoise or green or yellow boubous, or  frocks,   that the men wear. My head is swimming in the joyous hullabaloo.  Is this one of the world’s poorest countries, I wonder, or one of the richest?  Perhaps the fact that there is so little for anyone to make off with is a blessing in disguise.

      It is certainly one of the calmest and safest countries in Africa, or anywhere, and one of the few  where Americans are still liked. This is  because many families have a member living in Queens or some other Malian enclave in the States who is sending home money, and because the French, whose heavy-handed colonization is not remembered fondly, are so hated. With the national unemployment rate at 60%, there’s a huge pool of people who don’t have to get to work in morning, so they party in the city’s numerous clubs, which are hopping till three a.m. most days of the week and have names like the Bozo Club and the Bla-Bla Club (named not for empty chatter, but a town in the interior) and are like juke-joints in the American South in the twenties. Bonnie Rait, who made the blues pilgrimage to Mali in 1999, compared them to Texas roadhouses. 
 

        THE CHAIN OF EVENTS   that has brought me here begins in l961,  when I was fifteen and incarcerated in an exclusive all-boys  prep school in New Hampshire (St. Paul’s—the same one John Kerry went to). We were allowed to go into town on Wednesday afternoon, and on one of these trips I bought a record  of a black country blues singer from North Carolina  called Pink Anderson. There was a photo of him  on the cover, an old black man with a strong, kindly face, standing with his guitar in bib overalls  on the porch of his shack.

       I connected immediately with Anderson’s raw, lacerated voice and  his throbbing, searing guitar-picking.  As the sixties progressed, a lot of other white middle-class American kids  had  similarly powerful reactions to the blues, perhaps because we, too, were culturally eviscerated.  As Alan Lomax writes in The Land Where the Blues Began,  his l992 book about the recordings he made for the Library of Congress in the Mississippi Delta during the thirties and forties : “All of us…  are beginning to experience the melancholy dissatisfaction that weighed upon the hearts of the black people of the Delta… feelings of anomie and alienation, of orphaning and rootlessness, the sense of being a commodity rather than a person; the loss of loved ones and of family and of place—this modern syndrome was the norm for the cotton farmers and the transient laborers of the Deep South a hundred years ago… Rage and anxiety pervade the emotions and the actions of both the haves and the have-nots. And the sound of the worried blues of the old Delta is heard in back alleys and palaces, alike.”

           I decided I had to learn how to play this music, and the next time I was in New York City, I went to Manny’s, the  musical-instrument emporium on 48th street and bought myself an eighty-dollar, bottom-of-the-line   Epiphone steel-string guitar. Then went I down to the  Folkore Center in Greenwich Village, a one-room operation presided over by a man named Izzy Young, where Bob Zimmerman, soon to become Bob Dylan, and other unknown musicians were hanging out and trading licks. I asked Young who could teach me how to play the country blues guitar, and Young sent me up to Harlem, to a blind old man named the Reverend Gary Davis,  who was living with his wife in a shack behind a row of condemned buildings [see my Rolling Stone profile of him in the Music From Many Lands section of Past Dispatches]. Davis was one of the legendary masters of country blues, ragtime, and gospel fingerpicking. He had made some amazing “race” records in the thirties (the artists were paid with a bottle of whiskey), but these were long forgotten, and he was  playing in the street and in the numerous storefront revival churches in the neighorhood.  Soon he would be rediscovered. Peter, Paul, and Mary sang one of his songs, followed by the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, and Hot Tuna,  and he and Annie were able to buy a little house in Jamaica, Queens, where I visited them every chance I could until his death in l973.

           Davis became my guitar teacher, and one of the three or four most influential people in my life. The first tune he taught me was not a blues, but a haunting spiritual that was from a much older tradition. As in much of his music, you can hear echoes of Africa.  42 years later, I’m still trying to play the tunes he taught me, and lately, in Montreal,  I’ve been doing them with a saxophonist  named Jody Golick. Jody has a  fabulous collection of Malian music;  he spent two months in Bamako in l994. Every once in a while, when he plays me a cut from one of his cassettes or c.d.’s,  I’ll hear a lick or a riff that is strongly reminiscent of Gary Davis. This is not surprising. Lomax recorded polyphonic fife and drum bands in the Deep South that were completely African (even though they were playing popular numbers from  the Twenties like “After the Dance is Over”), and he discovered that “black African nonverbal performance traditions had survived virtually intact in African America.” Davis was one of the last living links to these traditions. So I decided to go to Mali and see how his music went over with the local musicians.

       January and February were some of the most bitter cold months Montreal had had in years, and Jody and I got through it by jamming and listening to Malian music and jazz in the afternoons. I would send him e-mails like :
 

Can we say that Africa music is polyphonic, the same chord of melodic sequence is played over and over again hypnotically, joined by other instruments and voices chorically, antiphonally, syncopatically, until a dense polyphonic loop is created, while Western music is monophonic, following a single melody line that is more complex and follows a progression of chords and harmonies ?
 

 To which he answered :
 
 

African polyphony works through a collection of rhythmic and melodic interlocking sequences or loops (called by theorists ‘ostinati,’ singular ‘ostinato’). Loops can be of different metres and lengths but all are based on a strict, often unstated, underlying rhythmic pulse. The resulting polyphony can be extremely complex and sophisticated and very difficult for the uninitiated listener to parse. For a Western musician the challenge is not learning a part, which may be fairly straightforward, but learning where to come in, which can be incredibly tricky and counterintuitive. Patterns seem to move in and out as they shift against each other, sort of like the famous Necker cube. When African music moves from traditional context to popular context it sheds complexity. 

      (In my opinion) there are two uniquely African contributions to Western music. 1) the polyphonic approach to organization which gave us the modern pop rhythm sound with bass and drums and especially backbeat. Also  the 12/8, three-against-four metres that run through American music (e.g. the shuffle, the hiphop beat). 2) the metronomic approach to rhythmic pulse which made it swing. 
       
 
 

       It was mid-March when I got to Bamako. The weather was perfect, 80 degrees and bone-dry during the day, and the night cooled down to just the right temperature for sleeping. In a few months the ground temperature would hit 110. 

        Having swapped some greenbacks for Central African francs, I flagged a cab to Mali Cassette in Quizimbougou, where I loaded  up on  cassettes of Habib Koite (a fabulous Mande singer/guitarist who comes from a  family of griots ),  Salif Keita (an albino from a noble Mande family who broke taboos and became a professional musician and Bamako’s most progressive, out-of-the-box artist), and my new discovery but a veteran of the scene,  Boubacar Traoré. On the counter was a weekly broadsheet listing who was playing where. Whatever you want to call it, the music of Mali is some of the most beautiful on earth. I am listening now (in Montreal, a year later) to Mali, a cd of singer/kora player Seckou Keita. Music doesn’t get any sweeter. Habib Koite came to Montreal this winter and heated up the place for a few nights at Kola Note, a club on the Avenue du Parc. If you ever get the chance to hear him live, don’t miss it. 
 
        That evening I went to the Hogan Club, where  Toumani Diabete, a master of the kora (the twenty-one-stringed harp with a calabash for a sounding box), plays regularly, but that night some college students had commandeered it for a disco dance. They invited me to join them, but I was looking for Toumani and found him at a large open-air club called   the Espace Bouna, which cost three dollars to get into. This was too steep for  most Malians, and the audience was comprised of  the elite, with a smattering of expats. 

      Toumani comes from a family of Bamana griots, or djele, as they are called--  the oral historians and praise-singers of West Africa like the one in the Gambia from whom Alex Haley learned about his ancestor, Kunta Kinte. He says he is the 71th generation of kora players in his family. His father, Sidaki Diabaté, who died in l994, was known as the King of the kora; his grandfather taught the instrument at the University of Washington; and his twelve-year-old son is already spending so much time on his kora that he is neglecting his studies. I understood the fascination, how mastering this instrument  becomes your life, when Toumani started playing, his two first fingers weaving delicate, ethereal, incredibly rapid and intricate arpeggios and tremolos on the two rows of strings, while his thumbs plucked alternating base lines. The kora is typically tuned diatonically (the white keys of the piano), to C major, but there is a mode of playing C major Toumani kept slipping into called the Dorian pentatonic (you leave out the fourth so that it can be played in either major and minor modes)  that can give it a bluesy feel, if you want it to.

        After the show I introduced myself to Toumani and gave him news and fond greetings from Jody Golick and Banning Eyre,  PBS’s Afropop correspondant and the author of In Griot Time : An American Guitarist in Mali, the essential text for anyone interested in the music and the music scene. I told him that I had played with Taj Majal (we had a great jam for three hours in a music store in Berekley in l970. I walked in and he was playing some fantastic old-time country blues number, and we started playing and played all afternoon, then I left and I only then did I realize it was Taj.)  Toumani is a very generous man, and a few minutes into our conversation he said, “What are you staying in a hotel for ? Come to my place.” So I moved to a room on the second floor of his house in the laid-back bougou of  Bajala 3, sharing the hall with a dreadlocked percussionist from the Gambia  living in Denmark (this was his first time back to Africa in seven years and he was “so glad to get out of that bomboclat place”); a young guitarist from Birmingham (this was his first time away from home and his loneliness was compounded by malaria); and a music writer from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, who had a deep appreciation and understanding of West African music and her Senegalese fiancé. Toumani is a big man in Bamako, and the bigger you are in Africa, the bigger your entourage. Several dozen Malians, young and old, related and not, were also living in the house. Most of them spent the day sitting in chairs out on street, moving from one side to other, depending on where the sun was. In the evening koras  were brought out, and I jammed with them on my little traveling guitar until it came time to watch the Brazilian telenovela that everyone was immersed in and a television was set up on the sidewalk.  
 
 
 
 
 

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