My Country. That’s the translated title of Vieux Farka Touré’s latest album. It refers to his homeland, Mali, and it is a more pointed and political title than it first appears to be. Since early 2012, Mali has been embroiled in a complex series of political crises and internal wars; briefly, an independence movement in the country’s vast northeast briefly succeeded and the government in Bamako was deposed in a coup. The northeastern independence movement faltered when Islamist fighters turned on the movement they’d supported, and ultimately foreign troops launched an offensive to drive them out.
If the Islamists had been allowed to consolidate power, one of their policies would have been to ban music. It’s hard to imagine Mali without its music, from the internationalist pop of Amadou & Mariam to the majestic dance band music of Rail Band and Les Ambassadeurs to the desert rock of Tartit and Tinariwen to the guitar music of Touré’s father, Ali Farka Toure, to the dozens of traditional sounds found across the country, music is the face Mali presents most prominently to the world. To lose it, even in a part of the country, would be to lose a hugely important piece of the place’s identity.
Touré, who is a moderate Muslim, has openly decried the invaders who've hijacked his religion, and Mon Pays seems a conscious effort to wrap his arms around Mali and its many sounds to show how they can come together to make something coherent. His most important collaborator is kora player Sidiki Diabáte, son of Toumani Diabáte; their fathers made two excellent records together before Ali Farka Touré passed away, and it’s neat to hear the collaboration passed down to a new generation.
Where Touré’s records in the past have been electric and expansively international in their sound, this one is more focused on acoustic instrumentation outside of the electric bass, and traditional instruments such as kora and ngoni make appearances alongside his guitar. It all gives the recording an earthy, elemental feel that nicely supports Touré’s weary, weathered vocals.
The whole album is compulsively listenable, but in its final third, it reaches a height of intense beauty that the rest only hints at. This is highlighted by a pair of guitar/kora duets with Diabáte that sound as though they’ve existed for a million years and we’re just now having the privilege of hearing. It leads up to the haunting “Ay Bakoy”, which features Israeli pianist Idan Raichel; Raichel’s piano alternately flutters a bit like a kora and provides a heavy anchor in the left hand that no other song on the album quite has. The two artists have worked together before as the Touré-Raichel Collective; but the presence of an Israeli pianist on this album can’t help but feel like a bit of a finger in the eye of the fundamentalists whose attempt to rule the place of his birth was so narrowly averted.
How smoothly his homeland returns to peace remains to be seen, but if Mon Pays can be taken as evidence, Mali is in no danger of slipping from its perch in the global culture. Touré is well on his way to carving his own path out of the shadow of his father. His vision of how to build bridges between his own music and the music others is already his own, and Mon Pays puts it on brilliant display.
