Garba Touré and his guitar were a familiar sight on the streets of
Diré, a dusty town on the banks on the Niger River, upstream from
Timbuktu. But when armed jihadists took control of northern Mali in the
spring of 2012, he knew it was time to leave.
“The first rebel group to arrive were the MNLA, but they weren’t
against music, so there was no bad feeling between them and the
population,” he tells me over the phone from the Malian capital Bamako.
“But then Ansar Dine [‘Followers of the Faith’ – a local armed Islamist
group] came and chased them out. They ordered people to stop smoking
cigarettes, drinking alcohol and playing music. Even though I don’t
smoke or drink, I love the guitar, so I thought, ‘this isn’t the moment
to hang around. I have to go south.’”
Like many other thousands of refugees, Garba grabbed a bag, his
guitar and boarded a bus to Bamako. His father, Oumar Toure, a famous
musician who had played congas for Mali’s guitar legend, Ali Farka
Toure, stayed behind with the family. The hard line Islamist gunmen
drove music underground. The penalties for playing or even just
listening to it on your mobile were a public whipping, a stint in an
overcrowded jail or worse.
“When I arrived in Bamako the mood wasn’t great,” Garba remembers,
“Different army factions were fighting each other. There were guns
everywhere. All we heard was the scream of weapons. We weren’t used to
that.”
Garba and some other musician friends from the north decided they
couldn’t succumb to the feeling that their lives had been shipwrecked by
the crisis. They had to form a band, if for no other reason than to
boost the morale of other refugees like them. “We wanted to recreate
that lost ambiance of the north and make all the refugees relive those
northern songs.”
That’s how Songhoy Blues was born. ‘Songhoy’ because Garba Toure,
lead vocalist Aliou Toure and second guitarist Oumar Toure, although
unrelated to each other – ‘Toure’ is the equivalent of ‘Smith’ or
‘Jones’ northern Mali – all belong to the Songhoy people, one of the
main ethnicities in the north. And ‘Blues’, not only because northern
Mali is the cradle of the blues and its music is often referred to as
‘the desert blues’, but also because Garba and his mates are obsessed by
that distant American cousin of their own blues. “My father used to
make me listen to Jimi Hendrix. He’s one of my idols. But I also listen
BB King and John Lee Hooker a lot.”
After signing up drummer Nathanael Dembélé from the local conservatoire, Songhoy Blues hit the Bamako club and maquis
(a kind of local spit ‘n’ grit bar restaurant) circuit with their
raucous guitar anthems dedicated to peace and reconciliation. People
flocked to see them, not only fellow Songhoy, but also Touareg and other
northern ethnicities. Even southerners came.
Anybody familiar with the enmity between the Songhoy and Touareg
peoples left behind by Mali’s recent civil war will appreciate the how
inspiring it must have been to see Touareg and Songhoy youth wigging out
together in a Bamako bar.
Last September, an uncle told Garba that a group of European and
American musicians and producers were coming to town under the banner of
Africa Express. Garba called Marc-Antoine Moreau, one of the Africa
Express organisers and, after passing an informal audition, Songhoy
Blues were introduced to Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, whose
surname Garba pronounces Zeiner.
“Marco told us that Nick was a big American guitarist and asked us to
collaborate with him. So the next day we went into the studio and did
some takes with Nick. Everything went well, no problem. He’s a very
simple person; a great guitarist but really modest.” The word simple
is just about the greatest compliment a Malian can pay to another
person. In the Malian French patois it means honest, down-to-earth and
solid as a rock.
“We just walked into the studio not knowing what to expect,” Zinner
recalls. “There was just one amp between all of us, so it was like ‘What
are we gonna do here?’ But then they showed up, sat down, said ‘hi’,
and thirty seconds later they were playing music, amazing music.”
One result of these sessions a track called ‘Soubour’ which means
‘patience’. “We’re asking the refugees to have patience,” Garba
explains. “Without patience, nothing is possible.” A video of ‘Sobour’
featuring Zinner and friends has now gone viral. Is the rawest, spikiest
and most electrifying dollop of desert r’n’b you’re likely to hear this
year or next, but it remains proudly Malian and African.
Working with musicians who had just seen music outlawed in their
homeland was humbling experience for Zinner. “It’s impossible for a
westerner like myself to imagine it,” he says. “Like, truly
unfathomable. And knowing the reasons why a lot of the musicians that we
were working and hanging out with had come to Bamako really added
another dimension to the whole experience. Like…a real intensity.”
Like the great majority of Malian Muslims, Garba has no truck with
hard line Salafist attitudes to music. “The world without music? It
would be like a prison, right?,” he says. “Music causes no harm and
what’s more you can educate an entire population using music. Maybe in
previous generations, music could have been condemned by religion, but
not now.”
Africa Express has invited Songhoy Blues to London to appear at the launch of Maison des Jeunes
(Transgressive), the album of recordings made last October during the
Bamako trip. Songhoy Blues and other emerging Malian talents, like the
seraphim-voiced Kankou Kouyate, who is also appearing at the launch,
feature alongside Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Ghostpoet, Nick Zinner and an
eclectic mix of other artists and producers. To Garba and his fellow
band-members, the whole experience has been like a dream that dropped
out of a deep blue African sky.
“There we were living in the north,” he says. “We were told that if
we played music we could get our hands chopped off. Then we arrived in
Bamako, in a state of emergency. We had to go to the Ministry of the
Interior to ask for permission to play. But then, by the grace of God,
the atmosphere returned. Africa Express came and we were invited to play
in London. Really and truly, it’s an explosive joy for us, an explosive
joy! We can’t even begin to explain that joy.”
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