Malian musicians take on jihadis to keep their music alive

22 May 2016 - 02:01 By Niren Tolsi
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Aliou Touré of Songhoy Blues at the Somerset House Summer Series in London Picture.
Aliou Touré of Songhoy Blues at the Somerset House Summer Series in London Picture.
Image: GALLO/GETTY

Mali's jihadist insurgents destroyed monuments and beat women. Then they came for the music. But Mali’s Songhoy Blues are taking a stand, writes Niren Tolsi

When Ansar Dine took control of northern Mali in 2012, it did so with the ferocity of a desert storm.

In Timbuktu, the jihadis destroyed the 15th century mausoleums of Sufi Muslim saints with pickaxes and iron bars. Ancient manuscripts documenting periods of Islamic enlightenment and scientific discovery were burned. There, and in northeastern cities such as Gao and Kidal, Sharia law was enforced and women were flogged for wearing skirts or not covering their faces completely, men for drinking alcohol.

The mujahideen cut off the hands of petty criminals and threatened to do the same to musicians. Music was banned, radio stations destroyed and Western musical instruments were broken or doused with petrol and set alight.

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The attack on music was an attempt to create a cowed populace that was compliant to the Islamo-fascist's rule, says Songhoy Blues vocalist Aliou Touré.

"In Mali, music is the soul of the country," he says over the phone from Morocco, where the band are touring. "We don't have anything, we only have our music.

We don't have petrol [to generate income for the state], we don't have anything, that is why music is so important. It's not going to be possible to live without this music, they will have to kill us first."

Touré emphasises that for an impoverished country such as Mali - with its pantheon of musical greats including guitarist Ali Farka Touré (no relation to any of the Tourés in the band), singer Oumou Sangaré, kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté and the Taureg rockers Tinariwen - music has stood in place of education, television, newspapers and the internet as a source of information, social awakening and celebration across language and ethnicity.

"In Mali we speak 13 languages and many people don't go to school, many people don't have the money to have a TV or a radio and many people are very, very poor ... A lot of people understand the world through the artists and the lyrics. Sometimes the lyrics are more important than the political disco," says Touré.

A Mali without music is a country more susceptible to the jihadis, says Touré, who calls this a "bullshit" situation. But he also notes that without Ansar Dine's insurgency, which was finally suppressed by a French-led intervention in January 2013, Songhoy Blues "would not have been born" in Bamako in 2012.

Touré was friendly with the band's guitarist, Garba Touré (the son of Ali Farka Touré's percussionist), in Gao where they both grew up, but they had not played together until fleeing to Mali's capital following the threats to musicians.

block_quotes_start I am not Muslim for someone else, even for my mum and dad. I am Muslim for my relation between me and my God  block_quotes_end

Guitar in hand, Garba was accosted by the jihadis in Gao one day, says Aliou, but released unscathed because one of them knew his father. They warned him that if he was found with a guitar again it would be taken away. Two days later Garba left Gao for Bamako. His guitar, wrapped and hidden under a bus seat, made it through the roadblocks and checkpoints undetected.

Garba was friendly with bassist Oumar Touré, who had also fled to Bamako, and when Aliou's relatives asked him to play at a family wedding, they formed a pick-up band for the celebrations. Drummer Nathanael Dembélé, who was studying at Bamako's Conservatoire des Arts, later replaced the first sticksman.

Soon, Songhoy Blues were burning up Bamako's feverish nightclubs with their mix of punky blues-rock guitar riffs and relentlessly addictive grooves.

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There is a poignant scene in the documentary They Will Have To Kill Us First: Malian Musicians in Exile, where the band members are sitting on the banks of the Niger river in Bamako, composing songs and riffing off each other: their displacement from their homes a potent leitmotif as they test lyrics and joke about.

Aliou says it's "very important for us to talk about this political situation first in our music" and for Songhoy Blues "to keep playing music to show to the younger generations, to everyone, that we don't have to be fearful. If we are fearful, we can't keep living."

While songs such as Desert Melodie are a political critique of the extremists who deem them not to be good Muslims (all three Tourés are Muslim; Dembélé is Christian), Songhoy Blues's politics does not exclude music that is also upbeat and infectiously danceable.

Sometimes the guitar genealogy that links them to Ali Farka Touré, Tinariwen and Jimi Hendrix is overt, at other times, as on Soubour, a mega-hit in the West, the band's singularity emerges with audacity.

Soubour, crunchy and hip-shakingly groovy, recognises that Mali, with the jihadis still perpetrating attacks in the north, where 10000 UN peacekeeping troops are stationed, needs time to reconstruct itself. It pleads for patience from the Malian populace. In an earlier interview Aliou said this was based on the Malian proverb "Do what you need to do and desire will come by itself".

A perspective that is easily applied to what would become a fairytale for the Songhai exiles. In 2013 Blur's Damon Albarn was in Bamako with several Western musicians and producers, including Brian Eno and Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for an African Express project.

Out to find the new voices of Mali, the project followed up on previous excursions into the continent by Albarn, which had yielded the album Mali Music (2002), a collaboration with artists including Afel Bocoum and Toumani Diabaté, and 2011's Kinshasa One Two album recorded in the Democratic Republic of Congo over a week.

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At the Maison des Jeunes nightclub more than 50 local bands auditioned in what Zinner described to Mojo magazine as "a bit like an American Idol thing".

Aliou says their biggest challenge at the gig was "to be recognised". They were, and Soubour, produced by Zinner, emerged as the anthemic track for Western audiences off the Maison des Jeunes album. Songhoy Blues featured alongside Adama Koita, the Lobi Traoré Band and several others on the 11-track album released that year.

Aliou describes working with Albarn and Zinner, who would go on to produce the band's debut album, Music in Exile, as "very, very easy".

According to Aliou, the recording process of Soubour for the Maison album went something like this: "Nick says 'Yeah, I want to do something with these guys, I like their music'. We say 'OK, it's fine.' And the next day he brings us to Ali Farka Touré's [old] studio in Bamako and we recorded our first track called Soubour with Nick Zinner and the guitar player of Damon. We tried first time and the second time we recorded straight away, live! Nick says: 'Yeah. That is good.'"

block_quotes_start I am not Muslim for someone else, even for my mum and dad. I am not a Muslim for some tribe, I am Muslim for my relation between me and my God block_quotes_end

Aliou says the band were never fearful of musical appropriation when working with Zinner and Albarn, describing them as "generous" musicians: "Nick is a very simple person. When we started working together in the studio, they just asked us to play what we want, and we played something and they take a guitar and they play with us. They never asked us to do this or that, they just asked us to play what we want and they played with us."

After the Africa Express project, Songhoy Blues returned to Bamako's nightclub scene, lifting spirits on the dance floor, questioning the political situation and pining for home. Then Albarn called in 2014, inviting them to support him at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Aliou admits that the band didn't know that Albarn was "this amazing rock star" until they got chatting to a commuter on the London Underground who marvelled at a photograph of the group with him.

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Or that they were about to be catapulted towards their own international stardom. After London, the band went on to tour internationally, supporting the Alabama Shakes on their US tour, gigging through the European summer festivals and releasing Music in Exile.

Their mission, according to Aliou, remains conscientising Malians and international audiences about what is happening in their country. But it is also about bringing a "smile, light and life" to people.

And as for religion and conflict, Aliou says often people "confuse the war between culture and the war between religion. A lot of the time these wars are not wars between religions at all. It's a political war, a cultural war, it's not about religion.

"Religion is the most private thing for people. It's for yourself," he says. "I am not Muslim for someone else, even for my mum and dad. I am not a Muslim for some tribe, I am Muslim for my relation between me and my God. I don't give a shit about jihad or anything else because I don't want to talk about someone else ...

"Difference is what makes the world beautiful. It's like the salt and the different spices that you put to make a good sauce. For me religion is very private and everyone has a choice to practise the religion that you want. My religion is private because no one can talk between someone and God. Only you, yourself, know your relation with your God."

Songhoy Blues perform alongside Oliver Mtukudzi, Nakhane Touré, Maya Kamati and others at the Africa Day festival at Johannesburg's Mary Fitzgerald Square in Newtown on May 28. Tickets R210 from Ticket Pro. They also perform at the Zafiko festival in Durban on May 27 and Bushfire festival in Swaziland on May 29

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