Vieux Farka Toure

Once upon a time, I owned no CDs. And this wasn't when I was 10 or 15 or even 20, but closer to 30, and I don't mean I decided to get rid of my CDs, or that I decided to, you know, Torrent the stuff. No, not me.

My first CD was the soundtrack to Episode 1 by John Williams. My second CD was From Senegal to Setestal, a collaboration of a Norwegian folk singer and two Western African singers (I should locate it, because I loved that album).

Rather than jump into the current pop music of the time (this was the late 90s--what was even big then?), I decided to get more African music, or more precisely, Afropop. It doesn't take long before you discover Mali's Ali Farka Toure. Toure has been called Mali's John Lee Hooker, a bluesman I was unfamiliar with, but I much prefer his style of "blues" to real blues.

Toure passed away in early 2006. Little did I know, he had a song, Vieux. Despite Ali's expertise as a musician, he did not encourage his son to be a musician, and wanted him to be a soldier. Vieux's passion to be like his old man could not be denied, and he practiced in secret.

Well, it's as if Sean Lennon or Julian Lennon could crank out hits just like dear old dad, as if you couldn't believe it wasn't John that was writing that music. To be fair, Ali Farka's many albums tend to run into another, each sounding a lot like the next, although of uniformly good quality. Toure never seemed to feel the need to try new styles and do different music than what he was good at.

The younger Toure has picked up many of the riffs that Dad played, and really, you can almost not tell it isn't the elder playing. There are occasional songs that try something just a touch different that bring you to realize it's not exactly his dad. I can only hope that, over time, he will explore other ideas, and see where it leads him. If he does that, the Toure legacy will fare quite a bit better through his son than the Lennon legacy has through his sons.