Ali Ibrahim (Farka) Toure, 1939-2006

This is one of two long posts of remembrance for today. Gordon Parks also died on March 7.

Updated 7:30 p.m., March 8:

"World Circuit Records, his label, said Toure had just completed work on a new solo album.


"More than anything else, Ali Farka Toure wanted to show me his farm. At first I did not understand why."

My memories of Ali Farka Toure
By Joan Baxter
BBC News Online

I had come to his home to find out why he had turned his back on the glamour and luxury that was his for the taking after he won his first Grammy award and the world "discovered" the Malian Blues man.

I wanted to know why he had moved back to his native village, Niafunke, about 80km (50 miles) upstream from the fabled ancient city of Timbuktu on the Niger River.

Instead of answering my questions, Ali Farka insisted we take a trip in his river canoe to see what he was cultivating in the dry and sandy soils of northern Mali.

To me, his farm did not look all that promising. I had trouble keeping up with him as he strode across the barren, windswept fields where he said he would produce irrigated rice.

The desert winds had killed his banana plants and 1,500 fruit trees in a would-be orchard. The potatoes he dug up with his bare hands had been devoured by termites.

None of this seemed to dampen his enthusiasm for his 40-hectare (99-acre) farm, which he said would transform the area into a food basket, and feed his extended family and dozens of other people in Niafunke.

Although he did not tell me himself, I had learned he had also spent his own money grading the roads, putting in sewer canals and fuelling a generator that provided the impoverished town with electricity.

He told me his money was "all gone". He did not seem particularly worried about it.

It was not until we were on our way back across the river that I began to understand what Ali Farka had been trying to tell me during the trip to his farm.

We were coasting towards the shore, the sun was glinting off the sand dunes that lined the river, and the hot wind was whipping up ripples in the green water lapping at the canoe.

Sitting on a wooden strut, staring out at the river, Ali Farka picked up his guitar and began to play.

nstantly his face lit up with a huge and irrepressible smile. The tune was Hawa Dolo, from his album The Source.

He said all his music came from the depths of the Niger, from the river spirit he called Jimbala.

Then he finally used words to explain why he had come home to stay.

"This life is better," he said. "That other life was a bit like dried dung; it didn't stick to my shoes. Whatever I produce it stays here.

"If God gives me big buildings in the United States or Canada or Japan or Sydney or Germany, can I put them in my pocket and bring them back? No, it's impossible."

He said he was working to improve the life of his family and to live in solidarity with others.

"If I eat, they eat. What I drink, they drink. What I wear, they wear. And I live with the river all the time," he said.

Still picking out haunting melodies on his guitar, he added: "Without the river spirit I would be deaf and have no voice. I would cease to be."

The world has lost a great voice and a generous spirit.


Ali Farka Touré: Brilliant African guitarist who won international fame and influence without ever losing touch with his roots
The Times Online (UK)

Whenever Ali Farka Touré was asked to state his profession, his preferred response was that he was a farmer. He owned and cultivated extensive lands in Mali in the semi-desert region of Niafunké, where in later years he was also the mayor. But he also happened to be arguably the finest guitarist Africa has ever produced.

A virtuoso on both the acoustic and electric instruments, he won a Grammy award in 1994 for Talking Timbuktu, his collaborative album with the American guitarist Ry Cooder, and he had just won another with Toumani Diabaté, for their In the Heart of the Moon. Touré’s intricate, fluid playing was acclaimed by such Western rock guitar legends as Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, who were often seen in the audience at his concerts.

He was in his late forties before he found himself lionised by a Western audience and began performing in some of the world’s most prestigious concert halls. Yet even after his international success, he retained not only his African dress but also his ancient tribal beliefs and customs. Whatever his Western managers, agents and record company executives proposed, they knew that he would consult the spirits of his ancestors before he accepted their more earthbound advice.


Born Ali Ibrahim in 1939 in the village of Kanau on the banks of the River Niger in northwest Mali, he never knew his exact date of birth. The tenth son born to parents who claimed noble descent, he was the first to survive infancy and as a child acquired the nickname Farka, meaning donkey and indicating not slow-wittedness but strength and tenacity. When he was still a boy his father died while serving in the French Army and he moved with his mother further south along the river to Niafunk é, the village that, apart from a few years spent in the capital, Bamako, in the 1970s, was his home for the rest of his life.

Brought up as a devout Muslim, he had no formal schooling and spent his childhood farming. But in Mali Islam co-exists with an older belief system that holds that under the waters of the River Niger there is a world of spirits called ghimbala or djinns who control both the spiritual and temporal world.

At a young age he became mesmerised by the music played at spirit ceremonies in the villages along the banks of the Niger. Through the power of music it is believed that the spirits can possess those present and those who have the gift to communicate with the djinns are called “children of the river”. Influenced by a grandmother who was a famous priestess in the region, Ali was deemed to be such a child and his interest in the music of the spirits led him at the age of 12 to fashion his first instrument, a single-string traditional West African guitar known as a djerkel, which many years later he presented to Cooder.

For a time he planned on becoming a priest, not in his Islamic faith but in the local djinn-based religion, before he eventually decided the powers of the spirit world were too dangerous to meddle with. “These spirits can be good or bad to you, so I decided just to sing about them,” he explained many years later. “But it’s our culture, so we can’t pass it by.” As a teenager he worked variously as an apprentice to a tailor, a taxi driver, car mechanic and a pilot on the river, while continuing to play music in ceremonies and for pleasure, mastering a number of traditional instruments.

At the age of 17 he saw a performance by the touring National Ballet of Guinea, whose orchestra featured a Western guitar. The experience left a lasting impression and he was soon learning to play on a borrowed guitar. When Mali gained independence from its French colonial rulers in 1960, the new Government established professional arts troupes in each of Mali’s administrative regions and two years later Touré joined the Niafunké district troupe, singing and playing guitar in a huge group of musicians and dancers that numbered more than 100. Yet it was not until 1968 that he was able to buy his own guitar, when he travelled to Bulgaria to represent Mali at an international arts festival and purchased a cheap Soviet model.

In 1970 he moved to Bamako, taking a job at the national radio station as an engineer and playing in the Radio Mali orchestra. His guitar playing on the airwaves brought him attention and acclaim across Mali and, encouraged by the response, he sent recordings of the broadcasts to a record company in Paris. It led to the release of his first album and six more followed between 1974 and 1979, each of which was recorded in Mali and the tapes then sent to Paris.


His tradition-based music also began to reflect subtle elements of outside influences, including the American soul of singers such as James Brown and Otis Redding, the jazz of Jimmy Smith and the blues of John Lee Hooker. It was not so much that he imitated any of them, more that he claimed to recognise African roots in all three forms and derived confidence and affirmation of his own art from the fact. In 1980 he returned to Niafunké to work on his land and did not travel again for another seven years. By then the reputation of his 1970s albums and the mid-1980s “world music” boom had made him a cult figure among European audiences and, in 1987, the British promoter Ann Hunt travelled to Bamako to find him. She eventually tracked him down in Niafunké after Radio Mali broadcast an appeal for him to get in touch with her, and his first tour of Britain and Europe followed. It was only the second time in his life that he had left Mali and his guitar mastery and charismatic presence made him an instant success everywhere he played.

That same year the London-based World Circuit label issued his first self-titled recording made outside Africa. The River — a reference to the spirit world beneath the River Niger — followed in 1990 and three years later came The Source, which included guest appearances by the American bluesman Taj Mahal and the British-Asian fusionist, Nitin Sawhney. These records established him as one of the biggest African names on the European and American world music scene, but even better was to come when, in 1993, he travelled to Los Angeles to record an album of guitar duets with Ry Cooder. Their collaboration proved to be inspired and on its release the following year the resulting album, Talking Timbuktu, won a Grammy award and established Ali not merely as a great African artist but one of the world’s foremost guitarists in any genre.

Ironically, at almost exactly the same time as Talking Timbuktu was making him an international star, he developed an increasing reluctance to leave his farm. As a result he did not make another album for five years, when the World Circuit owner Nick Gold, who had despaired of ever getting him back into a Western studio, travelled to Niafunké with a mobile recording unit. Sessions, in an abandoned school, were fitted in between the demands of tending his crops and the resulting album, Niafunké, was released to more rave reviews in 1999. Four years later he appeared in Martin Scorsese’s documentary film Feel Like Going Home, which traced the history of the blues from the Mississippi Delta back to the banks of the Niger. Once again, the film director was forced to travel to Mali to find him.

In 2005 he released his first recordings in six years on In the Heart of the Moon, a wonderful album of guitar and kora duets, recorded in Bamako with Toumani Diabaté, widely regarded as the finest player of the West African harp-like instrument. The same year he also played his first European concerts in five years and began work on a new solo album, by which time he had been elected mayor of the Niafunké region as a representative of the URD party (Union for the Republic and Democracy).


Malian Guitarist Was Hailed
in U.S. as the 'Desert Bluesman'
By Jocelyn Y. Stewart
The Los Angeles Times

Before the blues arrived in the Mississippi Delta, it lived in the desert of Mali, West Africa, and was known by a different name.

The sound of Ali Farka Toure was like the DNA that proved the paternity of the music, a link between the people and places that claimed it as their own.

"I've stayed in the tradition, and they've evolved in exile," he said of African American bluesmen who observers wrongly assumed had influenced his playing. "It's very important that these musicians go back to Africa to see where the music comes from, because in that way they'll find the origins, the roots of their music."

Toure, the two time-Grammy Award winner, the musician dubbed "the desert bluesman" and hailed by many as Africa's finest guitarist, died in his sleep Tuesday of bone cancer at his home in Mali. Though Toure did not know the exact date of his birth, he believed his age to be 67.

"It's impossible to calculate the importance of John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and now Ali Farka Toure," Bonnie Raitt, who played with Toure, told The Times on Tuesday. "He's a giant."

News of his death came as friend and executive producer Nick Gold was set to travel to Mali to deliver a Grammy Award that Toure and fellow musician Toumani Diabate won last month for "In the Heart of the Moon," said Dave McGuire, spokesman for World Circuit Records, Toure's London-based label.

The death of Mali's beloved son — a farmer turned musician and cultural ambassador, who was later appointed mayor of his village — was the cause for mourning: Radio and television stations played his music.

The Malian president was expected to participate in a tribute to Toure at the musician's house, McGuire said. Toure is survived by a wife and many children.

Guitarist Ry Cooder, who collaborated with Toure on a Grammy-Award winning CD "Talking Timbuktu," said Toure carried a sense of connection with the past, one that guided rather than limited his music.

He played an instrument known as a djerkel, a one-string guitar, and played traditional music on an electric guitar.

He was "highly conscious of the presence of the ancestors," Cooder said. "I asked him one time … 'Especially when you're playing music, where are they?' He said, 'They're just behind me and above my head.' I said, 'How many?' He said, 'A thousand years of ancestors.' "

Ali Ibrahim Toure was born in 1939, in the village of Kanau in northwest Mali, the 10th son of his mother but the first to survive infancy. For his strength and tenacity, for surviving, the family nicknamed him "Farka," which means donkey.

If Toure had abided strictly by tradition and culture, he might have never touched an instrument. Born into a noble family, he was expected to become a farmer or an artisan. As a boy he farmed and was an apprentice to a tailor, but music was his calling; the spirit ceremonies in villages along the banks of the Niger River, the sound of the instruments, mesmerized him.

When he was 12, he made a djerkel and taught himself to play. It was the spirits, he later said, who gave him the gift of his talent. Years later, a performance by Guinean guitarist Keita Fodeba changed his life: "That's when I swore I would become a guitarist. I didn't know his guitar, but I liked it a lot. I felt I had as much music as him and that I could translate it."

Under a government program to promote national culture, Toure worked with an art troupe, composing, playing guitar and singing. He earned a reputation as a traditional musician in the 1960s, playing the flute and n'goni, a traditional instrument, on Radio Mali, and later guitar. Eventually he sent his recordings to the Son Afric record company in Paris.

By the late 1980s, Toure was playing for European and U.S. audiences — and though his repertoire included much more than the music that earned him the moniker "desert bluesman," it was that sound that startled listeners and drew comparisons to the likes of John Lee Hooker.

"He was the first guy to really give us sort of the African take on the blues and give us a glimpse of where the blues comes from," said Tom Schnabel, producer of Cafe L.A. on KCRW-FM (89.9) and program director for World Music for the L.A. Philharmonic.

Though a fan of blues and soul music, he was not, he said, influenced by the music; he did, however, recognize the sound as belonging to Mali.

"I just was knocked over by the obvious roots of the blues," Raitt said.

The sound that usually is associated with sadness, longing and grief, in Toure's hands is "very soul-connecting. It's erotic and spiritual at the same time," Raitt said.

For Toure, the substance of the music was "more important than the formation of the song, the melody or the rhythm."

"My music is an education, a history, a legend, an autobiography. It tells a valuable story of something true," he told The Times in 1993.

His 1994 collaboration with Cooder, "Talking Timbuktu," helped expand the U.S. public's awareness of Toure's music, Raitt said. It earned a Grammy Award.

The unique sound was a result of his willingness to take traditional music and push it forward, layering his own personality.

With his success, Toure could have left Mali and lived well in Paris, said Nnamdi Moweta, host of Radio Afrodicia on KPFK-FM (90.7).

Instead, his fame helped him help others. He took care of many people in his village and was deeply proud of and concerned about his nation.

"People looked at him like a peacemaker," during a 1999 conflict in Mali, Moweta said. "He was singing in all the people's languages: Songhai, Fulani and Tamashek. He used the music as a weapon to bring peace. People listened, and at that time that was what was needed, for people to listen."


Ali Farka Touré, Grammy-Winning Musician of West Africa, Dies
By Jon Pareles
The New York Times

Ali Farka Touré, the self-taught Malian guitarist and songwriter who merged West African traditions with the blues and carried his music to a worldwide audience, winning two Grammy Awards, died in his sleep on Monday at his farm in the village of Niafunke in northwestern Mali, the Ministry of Culture of Mali announced.

He was either 66 or 67; he was born in 1939 but he did not know his birth date. His record company, World Circuit Records, said he had suffered from bone cancer.

Mr. Touré's deep grounding in Malian traditions made him one of African music's most profound innovators. "Mali is first and foremost a library of the history of African music," he said in a 2005 interview with the world-music magazine Fly. "It is also the sharing of history, legend, biography of Africa."

In Mali he was considered a national hero. At the news of his death, government radio stations there suspended regular programming to play his music.

Mr. Touré collaborated widely, winning Grammys for albums he made with the American guitarist Ry Cooder ("Talking Timbuktu" in 1994) and with the Malian griot Toumani Diabaté ("In the Heart of the Moon," 2005). He also recorded with the American bluesman Taj Mahal.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Cooder said: "It's important for a traditional performer to be coming from a place and tradition, and most people who are like that tend to be part of their scene rather than transcendent of their scene. That's what their calling is all about. But Ali was a seeker. There was powerful psychology there. He was not governed by anything. He was free to move about in his mind."

Mr. Touré forged connections between the hypnotic modal riffs of Malian songs and the driving one-chord boogie of American bluesmen like John Lee Hooker; he mingled the plucked patterns of traditional songs with the aggressive lead-guitar lines of rock. He sang in various West African languages — his own Sonrai as well as Songhai, Bambara, Peul, Tamasheck and others — reflecting the traditional foundations of the songs he wrote. His lyrics, in West African style, represented the conscience of a community, urging listeners to work hard, honor the past and act virtuously.

Mr. Touré was his family's 10th child, and the first to survive infancy. "Farka," a nickname, means "donkey," an animal praised for its tenacity. No information was available on his immediate survivors.

Unlike many West African musicians, Mr. Touré was not born into a musical dynasty; rather, he was drawn to music despite the wishes of his family. Hearing the music of spirit ceremonies, he taught himself to play the njurkle, a one-stringed West African lute, in 1950, then the n'jarka, a one-stringed fiddle, and later the n'goni, a four-stringed lute.

When he was about 13, after an encounter with a snake, he suffered attacks he believed to have been caused by contact with the spirit world. Sent away for a year to be cured, he returned as someone who was recognized for the ability to communicate with spirits. "I have all the spirits," he wrote in liner notes to the collection "Radio Mali" (World Circuit/Nonesuch). "I work the spirits and I work with the spirits."

After seeing the Guinean guitarist Keita Fodeba, he took up the guitar in the mid-1950's and joined a local band. Mali became independent of France in 1960, and in 1962 Mr. Touré became the leader of the Niafunke village cultural troupe, dedicated to preserving local culture. At the same time, he was listening to American soul, blues and funk, which he heard as rooted in the music of West Africa.

In 1970 Mr. Touré moved to Bamako, the nation's capital, where he became an engineer at Radio Mali and a frequent performer on the air. Six albums of music recorded at Radio Mali were released in France in the 1970's. In 1980, he returned to his hometown, Niafunke, and established a farm that he tended between musical engagements. He toured Africa widely, establishing a reputation across West Africa.

In 1987 he performed in Britain and began recording for international release with "Ali Farka Touré" (World Circuit/Nonesuch). The stark propulsion of his music, and its hints of electric blues, made him a star on the world-music circuit, and he toured the United States, Europe and Japan.

Around 2000 he retired from touring to return to his farm. He often said that he considered himself a farmer above all, and in 2004 he was elected mayor of the 53 villages of the Niafunke region. He established the Ali Farka Touré Foundation, nurturing younger Malian musicians, and he continued to perform in Mali. But he still made occasional international forays; his final concert was last year at a festival in Nice, France.


Ali Farka Toure; Musician From Mali
By Matt Schudel
The Washington Post

Ali Farka Toure, a guitarist and singer from Mali whose music had strong parallels with American blues, died of bone cancer March 7 at his home in the Malian capital of Bamako. He was believed to be 66 or 67.

Mr. Toure, who considered himself primarily a farmer, won two Grammy Awards for his haunting and spirited recordings of the music of his West African homeland. Wearing brightly printed robes and sandals, he took his country's culture to Europe, Japan and the United States in tours during the past 20 years. He mixed native and western instruments and left audiences across the world marveling at the subtle power of his music.

With its stuttering guitar rhythms repeated over a single chord, half-spoken vocals and lively bursts of energy, his music reminded some of the Mississippi blues styles of John Lee Hooker and R.L. Burnside. In fact, when Mr. Toure first heard a Hooker recording in the 1960s, he thought he was hearing a form of Malian music. He once performed with Hooker in concert but always took pains to point out the differences between his music and that of his American counterparts.

"I am the root," he said. "They are the branches."

Mr. Toure spent most of his life in the remote Malian town of Niafunke, a 20-hour drive across the desert from the capital. He worked as a chauffeur, taxi driver, mechanic, riverboat pilot and sound engineer over the years but eventually became a farmer, raising cattle and growing rice and fruit. He became a prominent citizen and in 2004 was appointed mayor of his home town.

He often said he was retiring from music to devote himself to farm life, but he always returned to the stage and the studio. His most recent recording, "In the Heart of the Moon" (2005), won a Grammy last month for traditional world music album of the year.

"Music is not just for amusement," he said in 1995. "It should be used for spiritual purposes and to educate. In this way, I have many responsibilities to my family, to my village and to society."

The precise year of Ali Ibrahim Toure's birth is not known. In a 1993 interview, he said he was 55. At a concert at New York's Town Hall in 2000, he said he was 61.

In any case, he was born near Timbuktu, Mali, and was his parents' 10th child but the first to survive childhood. For that reason he acquired the nickname Farka, or donkey, for his stubbornness.

He was not a member of the traditional griot class of musicians and storytellers but nonetheless taught himself to play the gurkel , a single-string guitar, and the n'jarka , a single-string fiddle. Later, after hearing the Guinean musician Keita Fodeba, he learned to play guitar.

After Mali declared its independence from France in 1960, Mr. Toure became part of a state-sponsored musical group, Troupe 117, that was popular throughout the country. In the late 1960s, he began to listen in earnest to American artists, including Hooker, Otis Redding and Ray Charles, and found an affinity with the style if not always with the substance of their music.

"In what you call the blues, I have heard people singing of their hardships," Mr. Toure said, "but to me this is a very small thing to tell people of; it has no great significance."

His own songs tended to be about love, spiritual life and the land and rivers of Mali. He sang in nine African languages, always keeping the musical idioms of each style distinct.

"My music is an education, a history, a legend, an autobiography -- it all tells a valuable story of something true," he said. "Different songs are inspired by different ethnic groups. . . . Often if you try and sing a song in a different language, it will not work."

Mr. Toure recorded for French labels and began to perform in Europe in the 1980s. He reached the U.S. market in 1989 with a self-titled album. In 1992, he made a recording with American musicians Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, "The Source," which was No. 1 on Billboard's world music chart for 11 weeks. Mr. Toure teamed with Cooder on another album, "Talking Timbuktu," which won a Grammy award in 1995.

In recent years, when Mr. Toure grew reluctant to travel, he recorded in a mobile studio in Mali. Once, while driving to a recording session, Mr. Toure paused to shoot rabbits "for dinner," he said. He continued to perform in Africa and France until last year.

Survivors include three wives, 11 children and many grandchildren.

"Everyone has a responsibility to the community," Mr. Toure said. "As a musician, I have received a gift from God. It is my obligation to share this gift. We have a saying in Mali: Honey does not taste good in one mouth alone."


Star Ali Farka Toure to be buried
BBC News Online

One of Africa's best known musicians, Ali Farka Toure, is to be buried in his home town of Niafunke in northern Mali, after he died of cancer on Tuesday.

Earlier, a ceremony is to be held to pay respects to one of the pioneers of "Mali Blues" at the airport in the capital, Bamako.

Toure, who was in his late 60s, won two Grammy awards for his work.

In 2004, he was elected mayor of Niafunke and helped build roads and develop farms in the desert region.

Mali's president, prime minister and figures in the music industry have been paying their respects to Toure.

"A monument has fallen. With the death of Ali Farka Toure, Mali is losing one of it's greatest ambassadors," television producer Mbaye Boubacar Diarra told the AP news agency.

Although he has worked with several US blues guitarists, the "Bluesman of Africa" always insisted that the music had its roots in the traditional sounds of northern Mali, rather than the southern United States.

Malian journalist Sadio Kante says Toure was better known abroad than in his home country.

Toure won one of his Grammys just weeks before his death for his album in collaboration with another famous Malian musician, Toumani Diabate, In the Heart of the Moon.

He won the other in 1994 with US guitarist Ry Cooder for the widely acclaimed Talking Timbuktu.

His record label, World Circuit, said he had just finished work on a new solo album.

He was born in Timbuktu in 1939 but the exact date of his birth is not known.

"For some people, Timbuktu is a place at the end of nowhere," he was once quoted as saying.

"But that's not true, I'm from Timbuktu, and I can tell you that it's right in the centre of the world."