In the frenetic, competitive
world of Malian popular music, Habib Koité has always played
by his own rules. Most singers stick with a particular ethnic tradition—the
musical oratory of the Mande griots (praise historians); the pentatonic
boogie of the Bambara people; the funky, hunter-inspired music of the
Wassoulou region; or the desert blues popularized worldwide by Ali Farka
Toure. Koité plays all these genres and more, sometimes combining
them to create entirely new sounds. Most of Mali's popular singers do
not play an instrument onstage, but Koité is a versatile and
accomplished guitarist. What's more, he fronts his band, Bamada, with
an acoustic nylon-string guitar, something unheard—of even among
the few singer/guitarists on the scene.
These days, many of Mali's
big-name singers constantly change backing musicians, but Bamada is
one of the few Malian bands that has kept its personnel relatively intact.
In the capital city of Bamako, the era of guitar-driven dance bands—like
the legendary Super Rail Band—mostly ended in the 1980s when singers
found they could program a drum machine and hire a few studio players
to get their songs on the bustling cassette market. But from the moment
Koité formed Bamada in the early '90s, he insisted on band loyalty,
daily rehearsals, and hard work to develop a unique, personal sound,
and Bamada's lineup has undergone few changes since. Koité's
new double live album, Fôly! Live Around the World (World
Village), testifies to the wisdom of these choices. It is the work of
a gifted songwriter and one-of-a-kind guitarist at the helm of one of
the tightest and most powerful bands in African music.
As he began his 2004 US
tour, I spoke to Koité about the live album and his place in
the pantheon of Malian guitarists.
Let's start by talking
about Fôly!, a great set of live recordings made at concerts
in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands in 2001 and 2002. Were
you recording all that time with the intention of making a live album?
Or did the recordings come first and the album idea later?
KOITÉ
We decided to do it first, and then we recorded. We decided to make
a live album because people often asked us to do that: "You must
make a live album!" People who know the group well had seen an
evolution in the music. There are no new songs on the record. It's the
old songs. But as we've been playing them over and over, they have really
evolved. Each musician has added things to the parts he plays. So we
said, we'll record that.
I really needed a rest,
so a live album made sense. That would give me a break, rather than
having to record a new album. So we took the gear with us to make multitrack
recordings. Then afterward, we kept choosing, choosing, until we found
the best version of each one.
All over this record,
you've extended what were five-minute songs to seven, eight, ten minutes.
Much of what is added is great jamming with the band. How did these
songs evolve?
KOITÉ
This is a group that plays a lot, touring everywhere, all the time.
When you play the same songs all the time, that happens. We have about
35, 36 songs. But that's not a lot if you want to change the repertoire
a lot. You end up playing all 36 songs, year after year. Because of
that, the musicians feel obliged to improve what they know, to do it
better, to put something new in front of the people who see us play
a lot. We play the old songs but add details to make it new. It's an
interaction between the musicians and the public.
How much of any given
performance is improvised?
KOITÉ
Improvisation gives the music an atmosphere of adventure and helps people
playing the same songs keep their enthusiasm up. Most of the improvising
comes from the percussionist, the balafon, and me on the guitar. I don't
improvise a lot, just a little each time. There is a structure, and
that is respected. There is an arrangement, signals for things when
they start or when they end. But between the two signals people have
some freedom to improvise. Of course, that freedom is controlled too.
There is a special role for those who take care of the groove: the drums
and bass. They are in a different situation. They have to be together,
straight-ahead, but they can do a break together and come back if it
works with the song. Then we who improvise listen to that, adjust to
that. If it's good, we accept it. It becomes a new signal in the song.
How did you get started
with the guitar?
KOITÉ
It was in the family, at the house. My two grandfathers played the n'goni
[spike-lute], the small traditional instrument. My father decided
to play the guitar. He liked to get his friends over and play. We had
a big family—my father had 17 children. I was in the middle, and
my older brothers grew up playing guitar with my father. I too, in my
time, played guitar around the house, a little. I didn't think about
it. I didn't study. I just touched it like a child who was serious.
But it evolved from there. By the time I was about 15, I had gained
some confidence. I could play this song, that song. I could invite a
friend over and say, "Play that and I'll play this." Later
I went to music school, learned all this different music, played with
lots of people and kept evolving, right up to today.
You play traditional
Malian music, but you don't play in the typical ways of a Malian guitarist.
You don't do the two-finger griot style like Djelimady Tounkara and
other Mande guitarists, and you don't play the flatpick pentatonic style
of Zani Diabaté and his many followers. What made you want to
figure out your own ways to play Malian music on guitar?
KOITÉ
It wasn't on purpose. I didn't start playing this way to avoid the way
any other guitarist played. My way of playing came out of my experiences
with the guitar and the way I approached the traditional music of my
country. When I was young, playing with friends, what did I play? Rock
music, a little jazz, a little varieté [established pop songs],
black American soul music. I listened to cassettes and tried to play
things on guitar. So I grew up doing that, but at the same time we grew
up with traditional music. We heard it on the radio, in the street,
live. We lived with that. It was in our bodies.
From the age of 11, 12,
13, I played in clubs and restaurants. I would go to a restaurant, maybe
where a lot of Europeans came and Malians too, and I'd play guitar for
people's pleasure. I was just doing it for fun. I wasn't trying to play
traditional music. People might ask for anything. I had many kinds of
music in my repertoire, the hits of that year—English, French,
American. That experience made me familiar with the structures used
in a lot of different kinds of music. It also helped me evolve my technique.
But then I went to study at the National Institute of Arts (INA) to
learn music. I studied classical guitar. I learned new positions for
the back, the hands, the fingers—the classical way. That was a
new beginning for me, putting the pick down and developing the ability
to play with my hand, picking with thumb and fingers, playing arpeggios.
That was very important in developing my approach to the guitar, especially
the acoustic guitar, the classical guitar. I got used to the sound and
feeling of nylon strings.
When I finished my studies,
they asked me to become a guitar teacher. Unfortunately my own teacher
died, and they asked me to replace him. Now I had the responsibility
to give courses, just as my professor had done. My professor had studied
in Cuba at the conservatory. He had really achieved a high level. So
this was a big responsibility. If I was going to teach things to my
students, I needed to have them clear in my head, step-by-step, so I
would know how to teach. That gave me confidence and made me very precise
in what I do with the guitar. It was no longer the school of the street.
I had to write things down.
Still, I was not a professor
who had studied at conservatory; I also had to teach my students the
things I learned in the streets, things you don't find in books. This
was the point when I started trying to play traditional music, the music
of stringed instruments such as the kamalé n'goni—a harp,
usually pentatonic, with six strings, played by young people in Wassoulou,
in the southern part of Mali—and the donso n'goni, the hunters'
harp, the ancestor of the kamalé n'goni. Hunters' harps are generally
pentatonic also. Then I learned some of the music of the kora [21-string
harp]. That's a Manding instrument, heptatonic, so you can play in a
lot of other scales. I tried to learn songs like that to teach my students.
I thought about the movement of notes in the music of kamalé
n'goni and donso n'goni. There are always open strings, fixed notes.
So I asked: "Can I do that on the guitar, an instrument where you
have to put a finger on a fret to change the notes?" I can't say
I wanted to do exactly what these instruments did. I just wanted to
get close to that movement of notes.
Did you change the tuning
of the guitar to do that?
KOITÉ
Yes. There are a lot of guitarists in Mali, in Africa, who change the
tuning of the guitar to do a particular thing. I can give you two examples.
There's a kind of hunters' music I play in G. To play it the way I like,
so that it resembles the original, I raise the high E string to F. Then
if I reach my thumb around to play a G on the lowest string and put
another finger on the third fret of the second string to get D, and
I don't touch any of the others, I get the notes I need. There are two
songs on Fôly that use that tuning, "Ma Ya"
and "Fatma."
The second example also
comes from hunters' music, but Malinke hunters. They play an instrument
called the simbi, which often plays in a minor pentatonic mode. For
that, I tune the high E string to F and the B string to C. That sets
me up to play in the style of the Malinke hunters. The song where I
use that is "Woulaba," [from the album Baro]. It's
not a song I play live very much, because in the studio, I added a lot
of guitar parts myself.
From my time in Mali,
I have the impression that a few distinct approaches to the guitar have
developed. But what you do is different, whether or not you planned
it that way. There's a theory among people who have studied African
guitar music that the really great innovations happen during the first
few generations, when new styles are being developed. After that, everybody
follows the set road, and the innovation seems to stop. What do you
think about that?
KOITÉ
Me, I think things always evolve. I'm not a musical historian. I can't
tell you about things that happened 50, 100 years ago. But I am convinced
that things change a lot. All the instruments evolve, and the musicians
who play them evolve. The material changes, and the sound changes. There's
a melodic base that stays the same–that's the ethnic culture that
goes with each instrument. That stays, but the players' way of playing
changes with every new generation. Look at Djelimady Tounkara, Sekou
Bembeya Diabaté, Kanté Manfila, and then, a little younger,
Ousmane Kouyaté. These are four of the biggest Manding guitarists.
But they don't have the same style, even though they have the same culture
and come from the same world of the guitar. They did not come to the
guitar by the same road, and this is why they don't have the same sound.
So I think the songs that brought me to the guitar determined my style
of playing: how I will play, what I will add.
Who were the guitarists
who inspired you?
KOITÉ
When I was young and just starting to play guitar, the guitarist who
impressed me most was the guitarist for Les Ambassadeurs, Kanté
Manfila. I would watch him whenever he played a concert. I would hang
out by the door because I didn't have money to get in. I didn't watch
the singers. I just watched him, and that taught me a lot.
As I said, my big brother
played guitar. He would sit with his friends, drinking tea and playing.
He played a lot of blues, things by Jimi Hendrix. I too had my way of
playing that music, blues and that. I listened to a lot of Jimi Hendrix,
also David Gilmour [of Pink Floyd]. These three guitarists are the ones
who first inspired me, but there have been lots of others since. With
time, I learned about other guitar heroes, like Joe Satriani, people
like that. And of course, I heard a lot of African guitarists, like
those four I mentioned. But in West Africa, we didn't have much feeling
for guitarists in other parts of the continent. Later I learned about
them. And later I discovered Earl Klugh, who's still one of my favorites.
Like him, you play
a nylon-string guitar. That's pretty unusual for an African guitarist.
How did that happen?
KOITÉ
The guitar we had at home had nylon strings. But I wasn't attached to
that. It wasn't until I went to INA and studied classical that I started
to believe in the sound of nylon strings. When I started to teach, and
started adapting traditional music, I found that the sound of nylon
strings was closer to the sound of many traditional instruments. Earlier
I had played electric guitar, but since that time I left it aside. The
sound of acoustic [guitar], especially nylon strings, creates an intimacy
between a musician and the public. People are attracted to you because
you don't take an aggressive stance. If you see a musician sitting with
a guitar, nylon or even steel, there's something nice about it, peaceful.
It's a very different presentation than an electric guitar, just visually.
So I decided to stay that
way. Then when I made my group, I decided that everyone in the group
should have a guitar like that. This was a difficult moment for us because
nobody has a guitar in Mali. It was easier to find an electric guitar
than an acoustic. And to find a nylon-string guitar you could plug into
an amplifier, that was really hard. But that was what I wanted, and
I worked hard for that.
You made your name as
a singer, but everybody knows you're a great guitarist. I've watched
Djelimady Tounkara try to make his name as a guitarist who doesn't sing,
and he's probably been more successful with that outside Mali than in.
Even on his album, he uses singers. Why is it so hard for a guitarist
to be accepted as a star in Mali just for his playing?
KOITÉ
This is really interesting. Mali has a great tradition of song and of
percussion. The Manding people played the balafon from way back. That's
the oldest instrument. But the balafon was always there to accompany
the singer. It was the singer who counted for the Manding people—the
griot, the one who speaks to draw the attention of the people. The players
of instruments, even if they played very beautiful things, they stayed
behind in the minds of the public. It's a phenomenon that has continued
into modern times. The n'goni came. The kora came. The guitar
came. We have some great guitarists, but they are always there to accompany
a song or someone who speaks, and the people follow the line of the
story and the feeling of the voice above all.
The guitarists are known.
Who doesn't know Djelimady? But is he a star? Normally, someone as well
known among us as Djelimady would be solicited all the time to give
his knowledge to others. But the people who direct culture in our country
don't think about that aspect of things. A great guitarist like Djelimady—when
he plays, it makes me cry—but he doesn't get the recognition.
Among us, the singers have everything. Especially the griots, but things
are changing. People have to live. If you are having a party, you have
to call musicians, and they are capable of saying to you, "How
much are you going to pay me?"
So things are getting
better for instrumentalists in Mali.
KOITÉ
Yes, with the development of the music industry. We're still far from
Europe and America, but it's starting. With the creation of many studios,
there is a need for musicians. There the musician can be a king. If
you are a singer and you want to make a record, you need to find musicians.
The other problem is authors'
rights. When a musician is called for a recording, he usually gets paid
one time, and that's it. But there are a few instrumentalists who understand
about interpretation, arrangement, and the importance of having this
written down at the time of recording. We have some great arrangers,
but in the past they didn't think about that. Musicians need to earn
more than just their pay for each concert. This is why we started writing,
since the second album, author/composer: Habib Koité, arranger:
Habib Koité and Bamada. So if there's money for the arranger,
it goes to the group. This helps to keep everyone together.
Excerpted from
Acoustic
Guitar magazine, June 2004,
No. 138.
