Photos by Michel Debock
From the moment they first met, acclaimed guitarists Eric Bibb and Habib Koité knew that someday they’d come together to merge their culturally rooted styles of guitar playing and create an album that explored the differences and commonalities of their respective regions. The only thing stopping them was their hectic touring schedules and the fact that they live in entirely different parts of the world. Showing that kindred spirits care not of geography, Koité from Mali, Africa, and Bibb from Helsinki, Finland, decided to seize the opportunity in 2012 and develop the album they had aspired to create—Brothers in Bamako.
Blending their collective influences of blues, folk, gospel, and world music, the duo reveals their admiration for one another on the album, and their compatibility is illustrated through Bibb’s rhythmic fingerpicking, Koité’s melodic nylon-string lines, and the combined power of their vocals.
“Eric is truly a great guitar player,” says Koité. ”His playing is beautiful and really clear and his voice is in perfect harmony with it. His way of playing a bass line and high line at the same time is close to rhythms played in some areas of Mali.”
Their independent flavors make for an interesting duo, and each player was able to channel a heartfelt depth and fresh energy into traditional blues and folk-anchored material on Brothers in Bamako.
“Habib uses different techniques that add a lot of color to everything,” says Bibb. “He plays a lot of lead lines and does the soloing while I handle the harmonies on the songs. He also has a vast knowledge of his country’s music and he has absorbed styles that are from different regions close to his own. His palette is huge and everything he plays is soulful.”
It was a chance meeting that brought the two players together in 1999 when they were both invited to California to work on Mali to Memphis, a cross-cultural project from the world-music label Putumayo. This marked the first time the two had ever had the opportunity to play together on one stage.
“Right away we directly felt a connection,” says Koité. “During the promo tour, we made some short in-store performances where we played some tracks together quite easily. Our playing is very similar and it was natural for me to play Eric’s blues of Mississippi and Eric seemed really comfortable playing Mandingue rhythms.”
Mississippi Delta blues player Eric Bibb (right) naturally picked up on the rhythms of Habib Koité’s (left) West African music, and vice versa.
An opportunity presented itself for the pair to travel to Brussels, where they spent a week in a hotel room writing songs, playing each other’s music, and sharing stories from their lives. The result of these sessions turned into Brothers in Bamako, a 13-song album featuring new material, selections from their own solo work, a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and the classic blues “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad.”
“This album wasn’t really a big ambitious musicology exercise, it was more of finding the connection within our playing,” says Bibb. “[Habib] is deep into his culture’s music and I am into mine. He studied classical guitar like I did earlier on, and we have a lot of similar influences. We really just wanted to show two guitarists who live far apart from each other coming together to make a record.”
The tracks “On My Way to Bamako,” “Tomboucto,” and “We Don’t Care” meld Koité’s African-inspired soloing with Bibb’s blues-based chops in a way that gives the illusion that they’ve been playing together for decades.
“I like to use a technique where my thumb plays the bass notes and my other fingers do the rest of the work in a Travis picking sort of way, though I’m not a puritan at all,” says Bibb. “Habib has this amazing pull-off technique where he’ll take a line and he’ll pull-off and do these fast little runs that break up the consecutive notes. I think the two work perfectly together.”
While the players grew up thousands of miles away from each other, their paths in music are oddly in line. Bibb was born in New York where his father Leon was a popular singer in the folk scene. After picking up classical guitar at age 7 and getting some sound advice from a young Bob Dylan (“Keep it simple and forget all the fancy stuff ”), Bibb moved from Paris to London to Stockholm to Finland where he established himself as a respected singer/ songwriter and sideman.
Habib Koité (left) and Eric Bibb work out some arrangements, Koité with his Taylor T5 and Bibb with his custom Fylde acoustic built by luther Roger Bucknall.
“Everywhere I’ve lived I’ve been fortunate to always find great musicians to play with and learn from,” Bibb says. “The actual music of the place I’m living has a big influence on me. There are wonderful hybrids of folk music and jazz that have inspired me from all over the world.”
Eric Bibb’s Gear
Guitars
Fylde signature acoustic,
Fylde Pink Ivory
custom baritone,
1930s Weymann
6-string banjo guitar
Strings
Elixir Nanoweb
Habib Koité’s Gear
Guitars
Godin Multiac Nylon SA,
Taylor T5, Fylde acoustic
Strings
Savarez Blue
high-tension nylon
Koité was also born to musical parents and spent his early days playing at the Bamako National Institute of Arts, where he too studied classical music. He began writing his own material, forming bands, teaching the children of his community, and has played in support of musicians spanning the globe, including such American performers as Bonnie Raitt. “Mali is a country with such a richness of music and rhythms that I have a strong desire to play with people from all cultures to share it with them,” says Koité.
The duo enjoyed writing and performing together so much that they’ve already planned a followup album and tour for the future. In the meantime, there is no shortage of projects or tours that demand their attention as they head back to their homelands.
“There’s a certain thrill to being in the zone and being able to be on the receiving end of a really inspiring song,” says Bibb. “It has to do with your own will, but also you have to know that inspiration strikes when it wants to. We’ll always be ready.”
YouTube It
Witness the dynamic chemistry of acoustic players Eric Bibb and
Habib Koité in these live performances of tracks from their new album.
Bibb and Koité give thanks to
Fylde luthier Roger Bucknall for
making them custom guitars
before playing the track “Brothers
in Bamako” on their new
instruments.
The duo performs a beautiful
rendition of “Needed Time” at
Mijke’s Middag on a Radio 6
broadcast.
Mama Koné joins Eric and Habib
on percussion at the Blues
Garage to perform their grooving
tune “We Don’t Care.”
EBS BassIQ Blue Label Triple Envelope Filter Pedal
The EBS BassIQ produces sounds ranging from classic auto-wah effects to spaced-out "Funkadelic" and synth-bass sounds. It is for everyone looking for a fun, fat-sounding, and responsive envelope filter that reacts to how you play in a musical way.
Reverend Vernon Reid Totem Series Electric Guitar - Shaman
Silos features six presets, tap tempo, one full second of delay time, and three voices—two of which are styled after bucket-brigade and tape-delay sounds. In the $150 price category, it’s not unusual for a digital delay to leave some number of those functions out. And spending the same money on a true-analog alternative usually means warm, enveloping sounds but limited functionality and delay time. Silos, improbably perhaps, offers a very elegant solution to this can’t-have-it-all dilemma in a U.S.-made effect.
A More Complete Cobbling Together
Silos’ utility is bolstered by a very unintimidating control set, which is streamlined and approachable. Three of those controls are dedicated to the same mix, time, and repeats controls you see on any delay. But saving a preset to one of the six spots on the rotary preset dial is as easy as holding the green/red illuminated button just below the mix and preset knobs. And you certainly won’t get lost in the weeds if you move to the 3-position toggle, which switches between a clear “digital” voice, darker “analog” voice, and a “tape” voice which is darker still.
“The three voices offer discernibly different response to gain devices.”
One might suspect that a tone control for the repeats offers similar functionality as the voice toggle switch. But while it’s true that the most obvious audible differences between digital, BBD, and tape delays are apparent in the relative fidelity and darkness of their echoes, the Silos’ three voices behave differently in ways that are more complex than lighter or duskier tonality. For instance, the digital voice will never exhibit runaway oscillation, even at maximum mix and repeat settings. Instead, repeats fade out after about six seconds (at the fastest time settings) or create sleepy layers of slow-decaying repeats that enhance detail in complex, sprawling, loop-like melodic phrases. The analog voice and tape voice, on the other hand, will happily feed back to psychotic extremes. Both also offer satisfying sensitivity to real-time, on-the-fly adjustments. For example, I was tickled with how I could generate Apocalypse Now helicopter-chop effects and fade them in and out of prominence as if they were approaching or receding in proximity—an effect made easier still if you assign an expression pedal to the mix control. This kind of interactivity is what makes analog machines like the Echoplex, Space Echo, and Memory Man transcend mere delay status, and the sensitivity and just-right resistance make the process of manipulating repeats endlessly engaging.
Doesn't Flinch at Filth
EarthQuaker makes a point of highlighting the Silos’ affinity for dirty and distorted sounds. I did not notice that it behaved light-years better than other delays in this regard. But the three voices most definitely offer discernibly different responses to gain devices. The super-clear first repeat in the digital mode lends clarity and melodic focus, even to hectic, unpredictable, fractured fuzzes. The analog voice, which EQD says is inspired by the tone makeup of a 1980s-vintage, Japan-made KMD bucket brigade echo, handles fuzz forgivingly inasmuch as its repeats fade warmly and evenly, but the strong midrange also keeps many overtones present as the echoes fade. The tape voice, which uses aMaestro Echoplex as its sonic inspiration, is distinctly dirtier and creates more nebulous undercurrents in the repeats. If you want to retain clarity in more melodic settings, it will create a warm glow around repeats at conservative levels. Push it, and it will summon thick, sometimes droning haze that makes a great backdrop for slower, simpler, and hooky psychedelic riffs.
In clean applications, this decay and tone profile lend the tape setting a spooky, foggy aura that suggests the cold vastness of outer space. The analog voice often displays an authentic BBD clickiness in clean repeats that’s sweet for underscoring rhythmic patterns, while the digital voice’s pronounced regularity adds a clockwork quality that supports more up-tempo, driving, electronic rhythms.
The Verdict
Silos’ combination of features seems like a very obvious and appealing one. But bringing it all together at just less than 150 bucks represents a smart, adept threading of the cost/feature needle.
EarthQuaker Devices Silos Multi-generational Time Reflection Delay Pedal
