Ali Farka Toure: Ai Bine

Ali Farka Toure’s 1990 release The River. Springsteen isn’t the only artist with an album so titled.

You can listen to the music of Mali’s Ali Farka Toure almost anywhere in the world you are reading this. Except in much of his home country.

If you’re looking, you can find Mali on the map in northwest Africa. But if you were there, you couldn’t find much music to listen to — at least not openly.

Mali is in conflict. That’s no different than much of Africa — Mugabe still rules Zimbabwe by force of fear, the Central African Republic is in rebellion, in Congo when someone mentions civil war, they wonder which one.

Most of us probably couldn’t name a half dozen countries in Africa — and South Africa is a gimmee — let alone know what’s going on in them. But if you’re a music lover in general, or the blues specifically, Mali cries out for our attention as if Toure, the king of the desert blues, were singing the words.

Northern Mali — including Timbuktu — has been overtaken by religious fanatics intent on instituting a Sharia Law so strictly interpreted they banned music, according to a BBC story posted on Toure’s Facebook page. If you’re wearing headphones in Mali, you’d better be hearing verses of the Koran.

From an October story in the Guardian: “Culture is our petrol,” said Toumani Diabaté, a Malian kora player. “Music is our mineral wealth. There isn’t a single major music prize in the world today that hasn’t been won by a Malian artist.”

None is better known than Toure, a devout Muslim according to Lucy Doran’s biography at worldcircuit.com. Toure won a Grammy with Ry Cooder and was celebrated in filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s Feel Like Going Home — Scorsese said Toure’s music contained “the DNA of the blues.” (When Toure first heard the blues, according to Doran, he thought “this music has been taken from here.” By here, he didn’t mean Mississippi.)

“. . . According to (Toure) Mali was first and foremost a library of the history of African music and perhaps also the heart of the musical world itself,” according to a story in sephisemagazine.com. “Ali’s love for his country was clear. He owed her a huge debt, as he researched and mastered the wealth of the country’s musical traditions.”

Toure traveled the world, but made his home and farmed the land in Niafunke, the village he came of age in. He was its mayor, and helped bring it electricity.

Toure was 66 when he died nearly seven years ago. Perhaps it’s a blessing he can’t see what’s being done to the culture he contributed to; perhaps it’s a greater loss he’s not there to help fight for it.

(“Farka,” means “donkey”, according to Doran’s biography. “Let me make one thing clear,” Toure said. “I’m the donkey that nobody climbs on!”)

Musicians enjoy no reprieve in northern Mali today. Singer Khaira Arby, according to the Washington Post and BBC, said militants threatened to cut out her tongue. She moved south and can’t go safely home, whether she feels like it or not.

One of the members of the band Tinariwen wasn’t home when militiamen came: “If you speak to him,” they told his sister, according to guardian.co.uk, ”tell him that if he ever shows his face in this town again, we’ll cut off all the fingers he uses to play his guitar with.”

Imagine a world without music, without concerts, without song at religious occasions or weddings or parties. That’s northern Mali today. “There’s no music up there any more,” said Toure’s son Vieux Farka Touré, according to the Guardian. “You can’t switch on a radio or a TV, even at home.”

Malian musician Rokia Traore, also according to the guardian.co.uk: “If I couldn’t go up on stage anymore, I would cease to exist. And without music, Mali will cease to exist.”

I’m not sure it will help, or whether it’s a useless gesture. But today’s a good day to listen to the late Ali Farka Toure. So is tomorrow. So is the day after. There may not be music in Mali. But there’s still Mali’s music.

Below is a link to Ai Bine, the first cut of Ali Farka Toure’s 1990 album The River. If you’re new to him, don’t expect to understand the words unless you know African dialects.

Sources: worldcircuit.com, the culturetrip.com, sephisemagazine.org, bbc.co.uk, washingtonpost.com, guardian.co.uk

Grateful Dead: Box of Rain

The back side of the Grateful Dead’s 1970 release American Beauty. Jason Ankeny of allmusic.com: “American Beauty remains the Dead’s studio masterpiece — never again would they be so musically focused or so emotionally direct.”

Look into any eyes
you find by you, you can see
clear to another day
Maybe been seen before
through other eyes on other days
while going home -
What do you want me to do,
to do for you to see you through?
It’s all a dream we dreamed
one afternoon long ago

The first time I ever heard the Grateful Dead’s Box of Rain it was wafting from the speakers in my brother’s room. He was home from prep school; when I heard it, I wondered what the place had done to him.

I liked the song from the first note, the way the smell tells you what’s cooking will taste good. It was new, almost mystical (hey, I was 15) — I had no idea there was a world of music beyond AM radio (WFIL and WIBG in my case) — and I certainly wasn’t going to admit that to my older brother. He already had all the advantages of seniority. I sure wasn’t conceding a note to musical taste or knowledge (my first 45 was Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston’s It Takes Two; his was Georgy Girl. Nothing against the Seekers, but they can take their dowdy feathers and fly).

I’m thinking of Box of Rain today as I often do when I think of my brother, because he celebrates another birthday, if not like he used to. I don’t want to reveal how old he is, but we can say Keith Richards isn’t feeling threatened. Yet.

I listened to American Beauty with him that day long ago — and in my adolescent mind, he was the coolest guy I knew (in my adult mind, he’s not, except if you’re playing cards against him. When he starts twirling his hair between his fingers as if it were the guitar strings between Garcia’s, you might as well put your cards on the table, because he can see them in his mind as clearly as you can with your eyes).

Years went by. I got my own copy of American Beauty and his speakers. We went to two Dead concerts together, where I learned why many of the most devoted fans were called Deadheads — they really were dead in the head, if chemically induced. Many of them walked as if they had vertigo; I once couldn’t avoid a collision with an oncoming Deadhead, which wouldn’t have been unusual except I was seated. “Sorry, dude,” he said, and wobbled away. I think he meant it.

Like many fans, my brother started collecting Dead concert tapes. San Francisco ’72. Copenhagen ’74. BFE ’75. BF deal I thought — they all sounded the same to me (and a pox on any tape where Friend of the Devil is played at the pace the aforementioned Deadhead was walking). It was about then that I retracted the idea of his hipness. I liked The Dead without becoming a Deadhead. Some groups, like AARP, you don’t want to join, even if you’re eligible.

Not much has changed in my brother’s musical taste since. If you asked him today to name his 10 favorite bands, more than half would be The Dead and/or Dead spinoffs. If you asked him about new bands, he’d probably mention Dire Straits. If you walked into his room today, Box of Rain might still be playing. And it would sound just as good.

As any Deadhead could tell you, Phil Lesh wrote the music to Box of Rain for his father, who was dying. Any Deadhead could tell you Robert Hunter wrote the words, and that Hunter used Box of Rain because Ball of Rain didn’t sound right. “The lyrics that (Hunter) produced were so apt,” said Lesh, “so perfect, it was very moving. Very moving to me to experience that during the period of my dad’s passing.”

And any Deadhead can tell you it was the last song The Dead ever played in concert, 25 years after it was released, the final encore of a 1995 show in Chicago, a month before the death of Jerry Garcia.

It’s a reminder of the truth in the last lines of the song: “Such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there.”

Which brings me to the point of this post. Happy birthday, bro. Sometimes you’re still the coolest guy I know.

Randy Newman and the Hall of Fame

Randy Newman’s 2008 album harps and angels

Randy Newman was named last week as one of the 2013 inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in a class with Heart, Donna Summer and Rush. Which begets the question: What did he ever do to deserve such musical company?

It’s not enough that one generation knows Newman as the sappy old guy who wrote Toy Story, and another generation of basketball fans knows him through Lakers’ playoff games as the guy who wrote the annoying, endlessly playing paean to perfect Los Angeles, I Love L.A.

Now, yet another will know him through his Hall of Fame class (the induction ceremony in Cleveland should be a perfect time for Newman to perform Burn On: ‘Cause the Cuyahoga River goes smoking through my dreams). I don’t want to say I’m not impressed, but I’m thinking of a word to describe Newman’s aforementioned classmates that rhymes with fame but isn’t; if lame is too strong, try tame (I’m excusing Public Enemy, which made the first and perhaps only rap album I’ve owned, and Albert King, whose music I like but name I don’t only because it’s the same as a Nets forward who helped eliminate a good 76ers team from the 1984 NBA playoffs).

“I’m glad I didn’t have to die to get in,” Newman said. “. . . The (Rock and Roll) Hall of Fame has other resonance, like the Baseball Hall of Fame has a tremendous kind of historical reverence to it.”

Funny he should mention the Baseball Hall of Fame. If Heart was a baseball player, it would be Brady Anderson: Heart had a good song or two — Crazy on You was Anderson’s 50-homer season — but an ordinary career in all; the late Donna Summer would be Rabbit Maranville, a star from another era; Rush would be Kiki Cuyler, who did a little of everything although nothing much better than his contemporaries and was put in by the Veterans Committee.

There’s an irony in there Newman can appreciate more than most. Here’s another: the artist who wore glasses almost as big as goggles for much of his career could see deeper into topics often lightly examined: race, sex and Americana.

Newman’s songs are filled with odd characters — often lustful, insecure or obese — and doused with satire; they often don’t say what listeners think they do.

All those Lakers fans who think I Love L.A. completely celebrates the city? Then why the mention of “that bum over there, man He’s down on his knees?” All the smug Yankees who think Rednecks is an indictment of Southern racists? Listen to the last verse and the litany of Northern ghettos. All the tall people looking down, literally and figuratively, at short people? “Short people are just the same as you and I.”

Often, the objects of Newman’s derision are the last to know. If they ever do. His 2008 album harps and angels included a song Laugh and Be Happy; you’re correct if you assume Newman never morphed into Bobby McFerrin.

The bigger the target, the sharper the verse. Newman slays organized religion more than once (“You all must be crazy to put your faith in me, That’s why I love mankind”), and American exceptionalism (“America, America, God shed his grace on thee, you have whipped the Filipino, now you rule the Western sea”) again and again.

Newman assuredly isn’t for the easily offended. He’s an acquired taste, but he should be a required one.

“A lot of my stuff makes me a little nervous because I don’t like controversy,” Newman said in a 1995 interview at performingsongwriter.com, “but I can’t help the way I write.”

Amen for that. “His songs can be frightening or funny, absurd or heartfelt,” wrote Lydia Hutchinson on performingsongwriter.com. “But his characters always present some flash of surprising, lucid insight.”

Ten of my favorite Newman insights, in no particular order:

“They say that money
can’t buy love in this world
But it’ll get you a half-pound of cocaine
And a sixteen-year-old girl
And a great big long limousine
On a hot September night
Now that may not be love
But it is all right”
It’s Money That I Love

“He said, ‘You Can’t Fool The Fat Man
No, you can’t fool me
You’re just a two-bit grifter
And that’s all you’ll ever be.’ ”
You Can’t Fool The Fat Man

“In America you’ll get food to eat
Won’t have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You’ll just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It’s great to be an American”
Sail Away

“She will laugh at my Mighty Sword
Why must everybody laugh at my Mighty Sword.”
A Wedding in Cherokee County

“I burn down your cities — how blind you must be
I take from you your children and you say how blessed are we
You all must be crazy to put your faith in me
That’s why I love mankind”
God’s Song

“And college men from LSU
Went in dumb. Come out dumb too.”
Rednecks

“Americans dream of gypsy knives and gypsy thighs
That pound and pound and pound and pound
And African appendages that almost reach the ground
And little boys playing baseball in the rain.”
Sigmund Freud’s Impersonation of Albert Einstein in America

“Birmingham, Birmingham
The greatest city in Alabam’
You can travel ‘cross this entire land
But there ain’t no place like Birmingham.”
Birmingham

“I never drink in the afternoon
I never drink alone
But I sure do like a drink or two
When I get home.”
Rollin’

“King Leopold of Belgium, that’s right
Everyone thinks he’s so quiet
Well he owned the Congo and he tore it up too
He took the diamonds
He took the silver
He took the gold
You know what he left them with?
Malaria”
A Few Words in Defense of Our Country

sources: performingsongwriter.com