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Bassekou Kouyaté
© Thomas Dorn

Segu Blue


Segu Blue

Recorded in July 2006, “Segu Blue” is a remarkably dense debut album by one of Mali’s foremost ngoni players. Kouyaté has elevated a string instrument that dates back to the 13th century by creating the country’s first-ever ngoni quartet. The result is as seductive live as it is on this compelling CD. The Bamana artist wields a potent sound here. One of the photographs in the sleeve-notes sums up it all up: Kouyaté takes aim at the photographer (the excellent Thomas Dorn) and uses the neck of his ngoni as a gun’s barrel. There is a foxy smile on his handsome face and his 800-year-old instrument contrasts with the brand-new watch on his wrist.

His confidence is born of a rich and variegated career that has seen him impress or collaborate with the likes of Taj Mahal, Fatboy Slim, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ry Cooder and Bono. It is also the inevitable result of Kouyaté’s heritage. His grandfather was the great blind ngoni player Banzoumana Sissoko who, as producer Lucy Duran reminds us in the thorough sleeve-notes, continues to be played on national radio and is performed on every major occasion. Kouyaté’s mother was a well-known griot singer whilst his father and brothers were excellent ngoni players.

None, however, had the brilliant idea of putting together four ngonis that go from the four-string bass version to a high-pitched seven-string instrument that reminds some of a kora. And the Ngoni ba group works as compellingly live as on record. Especially if you have the honour of seeing them play on a stage atop of the Niger river, just 60 kilometres from Garana, the village where Kouyaté stroked his first chords. “This river has bathed my music from my first days,” he told me after one of the most outstanding concerts of Segu’s Festival on the Niger. “It’s not hard to understand why the blues is the descendant of our music. It must have something to do with rivers. They have the Mississippi, our heartbeat is the Niger.”

“Segu Blue” articulates a haunting mixture of modern blues, fables from the dawn of time, and moralising in the griot tradition. At times it is meditative (“Banani”, featuring the excellent guitarist Lobi Traoré), at others sparingly bluesy (“Segu Tonjon”) or softly reverential (the beautiful homage to one of Kouyaté’s mentor’s, “Lament for Ali Farka”). Yet there are so many changes of pace, style and rhythm that it would be too long to list them all.

Kouyaté has plunged into the folklore and history of his Bamana people and the Kingdom they built and defended ferociously between 1712 and 1861. Another touching photograph shows him sitting next to a tombstone with his ngoni pointing to a plaque inscribed with “Biton Mamary Coulibaly – fondateur du Royaume Bamabara (Bamana) de Ségou”. Most of these compositions are homages to these bygone ages. One, “Mbowdi”, recounts the unusual practice of inviting the opposing army to party together on the eve of doing battle. Another is the key song “Segu Blue (Poyi)” which is infused by the blues because, explains Kouyaté, as the warriors listened to the song, “they would wonder if they would ever come back alive to their homes and family.”

Yet, Kouyaté is under no illusion about the harshness of the “glory days” of the past. The amenable executive producer Jay Rutledge recounts how the artist was asked if he wished he had lived in the time of the Bamani Empire. He answered: “(No), those were violent times, people weren’t free, life was a lot harder.” And, so, the softness of the fourteen songs on “Segu Blue” does nothing to mask the harsh uncertainties of Segu’s past. They are embellished by the presence of guests Kassemady Diabate, Lassana Diabate, Zouman Tereta and especially the lush voice of Amy Sacko. The wife of Kouyaté, Sacko has an achingly gentle voice that takes the songs “Bassekou” and “Lament for Ali Farka” into another realm. It would perhaps be an appropriate soundtrack for the 1984-85 novels on Segu by the Guadeloupean author Maryse Condé. They explore the roots of a traditional African society and its sense of community. The seamless musical exchange and understanding between this tight-knit band and its charismatic leader could reflect Condé’s fiction.


Daniel Brown




  

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