LA LOM from left: Jake Faulkner, Nicholas Baker, and Zac Sokolow
These days, trace the cutting edge of modern guitar and you’ll quickly find a different kind of musical ancestor to these early clashes of traditional styles and electric instruments. Listening to artists like Mdou Moctar, Meridian Brothers, and Hermanos Gutiérrez, it’s easy to hear how they’ve built upon the traditions they investigate. LA LOM’s tropical-guitar explorations are right in line with this crew.
If you’ve heard LA LOM, there’s a good chance it was because one of their vintage-inspired videos—which seem to portray a house band at an imaginary ’50s Havana or Bogota café as seen through an old-Hollywood lens—caught your eye via social media. (And for guitarists, Zac Sokolow’s bright red National Val-Pro, which he plays often, lights up on camera.) Once you tuned in, these guys probably stuck around your feed for a while.
LA LOM’s videos were mostly shot at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles and feature cover songs culled from the several-nights-a-week gig that they played there during the first few years of their existence. It’s that gig that started the band in 2019, when drummer/percussionist Nicholas Baker enlisted Sokolow and bassist Jake Faulkner to join him. Sokolow—who is also a banjo player and has worked in the L.A. folk scene as a member of the Americans and alongside Frank Fairfield and Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton—explains that their first task was to find a repertoire for their instrumentation that started with electric guitar, upright bass, and congas. “One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros,” he recalls. “I realized that Nick had an interest in that stuff—his grandmother used to listen to a lot of that kind of music.”
The trio’s all-original debut is steeped in the influences the band explored through their video covers.
Sokolow’s own early love of the requinto intros to boleros by classic NYC-based group Trio Los Panchos, as well as music from Buenos Aires that he’d picked up from his grandfather, informed their sets as well. Soon, LA LOM had embraced a repertoire that encompassed a wide variety of classic Latin sounds—Mexican folk, cumbia, chicha, salsa, tango, and more—blended with Bakersfield twang and soaked in surfy spring reverb.
The trio have moved beyond the Roosevelt Hotel—this year LA LOM played the Newport Folk Festival, and they’ve opened for Vampire Weekend. And the band’s newly released debut, The Los Angeles League of Musicians, is an all-original set of tunes that takes the deeply felt sounds of the material they covered in their early sets to the next logical musical destination, where they live together within the same sonic stew, cementing LA LOM’s vibey and danceable signature. On the album, Sokolow’s dynamic guitar playing is at the forefront. The de facto lead voice for the trio, he’s a master of twang who thrives on expressive melodies and riffs, and he’s always grooving.“One way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands—we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way.”
Zac Sokolow's Gear
Sokolow plays just a couple guitars. His red, semi-hollow “Res-O-Glas” National Val-Pro is the most eye-catching of them all.
Guitars
- National Val-Pro (red and white)
- Kay Style Leader
Amps
- Fender Deluxe or Twin ’65 reissue
- Vintage Magnatone
Effects
- Boss Analog Delay
- Fultone Full-Drive
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario or Gabriel Tenorio (.012–.052)
- D’Andrea Proplex 1.5 mm
LA LOM’s cover-song videos detail the rich blueprint of the band’s sound, and they also serve as an excellent primer for tropical guitar styles. We assembled a setlist of those covers, as if LA LOM were playing our own private function and we were curating the tunes, and asked Zac to share his thoughts on each.
“When you play Selena, it always just goes over well—everybody loves Selena.”
The Set List—How LA LOM Plays Favorites
“La Danza De Los Mirlos” Los Mirlos
“Los Mirlos are a group from Peru. They’re from the Amazon. They’re one of the most well-known classic chicha bands that play that Peruvian jungle style of cumbia. I’ve tried to look into what the history of that song is. As far as I know, they wrote it. I’ve heard some older Colombian cumbias that have similar sections; I think it’s kind of borrowing from some old cumbias, and a lot of people have covered it over the years. In Mexico it’s known as ‘La Cumbia de Los Pajaritos.’
“It’s always been one of my favorites—especially of the guitar-led cumbias. The way we play it is not too different from the original, and it’s one of the first Peruvian chicha kind of tunes we were playing.”
“Juana La Cubana” Fito Olivares Y Su Grupo
“That’s a song from a musician from Northern Mexico, on the border of Texas, who sort of got popular playing in Houston. It’s very much in that particular style of Texas-sounding cumbia from the ’90s. He’s playing the melody on the saxophone. That song is so famous, and you hear it all the time on the radio.
“There was one time that I was driving home from a gig really late at night and heard that, and realized there’s some little saxophone lick he’s playing that kind of sounds like “Pretty Woman,” the Roy Orbison song. I had this idea that it would sound more like ’50s rock ‘n’ roll played that way. We started just playing it [that way] at gigs, and it sounded really good instrumentally. That’s how we decide to keep something in a repertoire—if it feels really good when we play it.”
“La Danza Del Petrolero” Los Wembler’s de Iquitos
“That is from another group from Peru called Los Wembler’s de Iquitos. They’re from Iquitos, Peru. It’s kind of dedicated to the petroleum workers.
“I would say one way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands is we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way. We don’t use that much wah pedal. I usually keep my tone pretty clean. I’ll have reverb and a little bit of delay sometimes with vibrato, but we don’t go for any really crazy sounds. Usually, we keep it almost more in a country or rockabilly kind of world, which has just sort of always been my tone.”
“One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros.”
“Como La Flor” Selena
“That’s probably one of the first cumbias I ever heard. There’s something very emotional about that melody. It's kind of sad, and really beautiful and catchy. When we play that out, people just go crazy. When you play Selena, it always goes over well—everybody loves Selena. And we made a video of that with our friend Cody Farwell playing lap steel. He was trying to find a way to fit steel into it, and I don’t think I’d ever really heard the steel being played on a cumbia before. He was always kind of finding cool ways to fit it in and make the tone fit with ours. On our record, there’s a bunch of his steel playing all over it. It came out sounding pretty different from other covers I’ve heard of that.”
“El Paso Del Gigante” Grupo Soñador
“Grupo Soñador are from Puebla, Mexico, and they were a real classic band playing this kind of style. They call it cumbia sonidera. I feel like that style and that name is more almost about the culture surrounding the music than just the music itself. There’ll be these impromptu dances that happen sometimes on the street or in dance halls, and they’re usually run by DJs who will play all these records and sometimes slow them down or add crazy sound effects or talk into the microphone and give shoutouts to people with crazy echo and stuff on their voices.
“A lot of the records that came from that scene have a lot of synthesizers. Usually, the melody is played by the accordion or the synthesizer with crazy effects. It just has such a cool sound.
“I try to kind of imitate that sound on my guitar as much as I can. Something I often do with LA LOM is to try to get the feeling of another instrument, because in so much of the music we play or the covers we do, it’s some other instrument, whether it’s a saxophone or a synth or accordion playing the melody.”
“Los Sabanales” Calixto Ochoa
“That was written by Calixto Ochoa, from Colombia, who I’ve heard referred to as “El Rey de Vallenato”—the king of Vallenato, which is a style of cumbia that came from mostly around the city called Valledupar in Colombia. And that’s the classic accordion-led cumbia. The much older cumbia was just called the gaiteros, with the guy who played flute and drums. And then the Vallenato style emerged, which is that accordion-led stuff, and Calixto Ochoa. He’s just the coolest. We’ve learned a couple of different covers of his. I think the way we play this is more like rockabilly than cumbia.”
Mdou Moctar has led his Tuareg crew around the world, but their hometown performances in Agadez, Niger, last year were their most treasured.
Mdou Moctar - "Oh, France" (Official Audio)
But the band’s most treasured performances to date weren’t any of these, the stuff of Western musicians’ dreams. They were free, impromptu generator shows around Agadez, a city in Niger’s Sahara desert. They were the type of gig any DIY punk musician knows well: no stage, no light show, no fancy PA or mixing—just some guitars and amps, a drum kit, some flood lights. At one of the first shows, the band set up their gear against the beige walls of a school, and soon a crowd of locals—most of them Tuareg, an Indigenous ethnic group that lives across the Sahara region—had kettled the band in, anxious to hear the music. Kids hung out a window of the school, cell phones alight as they documented the gig. The band tasked a couple local friends with recording the set.
It’s thanks to them we get a glimpse of the blistering, pure power of that night with the performance of “Imouhar” uploaded to YouTube. It’s the second track from Mdou Moctar’s sixth full-length record, Funeral for Justice, released on May 3. It starts at a mid-tempo clip, with Moctar’s lacerating, hammer-on- and pull-off-heavy shredding soaring above Ibrahim’s tight groove and Madassane’s driving rhythm chording. People dance and clap and grin as the song picks up speed, like a runaway train on a steep hill, free and wild and reckless.
On a video call from a New York apartment, Moctar, speaking in French through a translator, says the shows had “historical importance” for the band: “Being able to be in Agadez, and having our people around us, supporting us, and the youth being there was so special for us. Also, to inspire young people for the future. We had tried to do that since [our first album] Anar, right up to [2021’s] Afrique Victime, but we hadn’t managed to do it in that way before. This time, we really managed to. It made us very proud of our work, and the way we were able to work.”
Decades of oppression, violence, and a constantly darkening political horizon for Tuareg people—and Africans in general—have led Moctar to declare a Funeral for Justice.
Coltun, who grew up in Washington, D.C., and is the band’s only non-Tuareg member, started following Mdou’s music while playing in Mali in 2011, and he connected with the guitarist via the Sahel Sounds label shortly after. Coltun was managing the band’s 2017 U.S. tour when Moctar invited him to join the group. Every time he goes with the band to Niger, Coltun says he sees kids mimicking Mdou’s style, a Saharan recasting and mashing-up of Eddie Van Halen’s volcanic tapping techniques. “It’s turned into his own style, and there’s kids around playing in that style,” says Coltun. Madassane’s rhythm playing, too, has left a mark. “Ahmoudou’s right hand, when he gets going, is so fast, and not a lot of people in Agadez can play that fast for that long and be relaxed. That’s really inspiring, to see all that stuff.”
“I’m an eternal student…. I never sit back and say, ‘Now I know how to play guitar.’” —Mdou Moctar
Funeral for Justice is, like everything the band does, rooted in an uncommonly keen sense of place, people, and responsibility. Sung almost entirely in Tamasheq, a Tuareg language, the record puts centuries of imperialism, colonialism, and oppression in its crosshairs. In the late 1800s, European powers endeavored to control Africa’s west coast, resulting in the French occupation and colonization of countries like Mali, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, and Niger. Funeral for Justice leaves no question as to the impact of France’s past and present subjugation of Africans on the continent. “Occupiers are carving up your lands while you watch / Gallantly marching all over your resources / Why is that?” Moctar, singing in Tamasheq, demands of Africa’s governments on the opening cut. Later, on “Oh France,” the Tamasheq vocals mourn, “Youth around the world is thriving, meanwhile my people’s fate remains uncertain / The world rises and falls, meanwhile my people remain immobile.”
Even simply singing in Tamasheq is an act against dominion. “The Tamasheq language is starting to disappear because our youth don’t speak it well,” says Madassane. Moctar concurs. “They’re interested in other languages, mostly French, which is a language that has dominated almost all the African languages,” he adds. “They think that if you speak [French], it means you’re civilized or modernized somehow.” Moctar references the sad case of Tifinagh, a Tuareg script that’s almost disappeared. “We really want to give hope to our youth with our music and make them understand that they need to take care of this language, that there’s nothing more valuable than this. We want to say to the world that this is what constitutes our tradition and origins, and there’s nothing more precious.”
Mdou Moctar's Gear
Moctar and his bandmates prefer Fender instruments, whose bite and immediate presence are a perfect match for the music’s politics.
Photo by Mike White
Guitars
- 2018 American Stratocaster (white) with Lollar Strat Special S and Sustainiac pickups
Amps
- Orange Rockerverb 100 (live)
- Orange 4x12 cabs (live)
- Soldano SLO-100 head (studio)
- Traynor vintage 4x12 cab (studio)
Effects
- TC Electronic PolyTune
- Union Tube and Transistor Shiny
- Analog Man Sun Face
- EarthQuaker Devices Acapulco Gold
- Champion Leccy Rocktar Fuzz
- Analog Man Mini Chorus
- Boss PH-3
- Boss DD-3
Strings and Picks
- D'Addario NYXL .010s
The musical roots from which Mdou Moctar (which is the guitarist’s nickname, but also the band’s name) have launched their furious, two-guitar attack can be traced back to the Sahara desert in northwestern African countries like Niger, Mali, Libya, and Algeria. When France began to occupy the region in the early 1900s, the nomadic Tuareg population was forced under their rule until the French retreated from the area in the ’50s and ’60s. The lands where the Tuareg traditionally lived were divided between nations with bigger populations and stronger political infrastructure, so the minority Tuaregs were once again on the back foot. They rebelled, trying to establish independence and liberation against new, French-installed governments. Malian governments crushed the uprisings brutally. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, a young Tuareg man, fled Mali after his father was executed by government forces for participating in the rebellions. Years later, while playing music in militant Tuareg camps, Ag Alhabib formed the pioneering assouf-rock outfit Tinariwen.
“Ahmoudou’s right hand, when he gets going, is so fast, and not a lot of people in Agadez can play that fast for that long and be relaxed.” —Mikey Coltun
Like Moctar, Tinariwen injected rock and psychedelic sounds into the Tuareg struggle, electrifying their musical practices with Western pop and rock instrumentations. They branded their music “asuf,” a Tamasheq word that speaks to the loneliness, longing, and pain that seemed to characterize Tuareg life. Tinariwen’s bassist, Eyadou ag Leche, told an interviewer in 2011 that when they eventually heard the music of Jimi Hendrix, they recognized something common in his playing, a bond between American rock music and the Tuareg experience. “It was almost as if I had known that music from the day I was born,” he said in 2011. “I’m told that a lot of the Africans who went to North America came from West Africa, from our part of the world. So it’s all the same connection. I think that any people who have lived through something that is very hard feel this asuf, this pain, this longing.”
These are the musical and cultural contexts that shaped Moctar. He DIYed his first guitar from some wood and bike brake cables, and his first recordings were shared via Bluetooth on peer-to-peer cell-phone networks across northern Africa. Sahel Sounds, a Portland, Oregon, record label focusing on music from the Sahara, included one of Moctar’s tunes on a 2011 compilation release, then re-released his 2008 debut, along with two other full-length records and an original, Prince-inspired movie soundtrack. Third Man Records took notice and put out the band’s 2019 live record, M’dou Moctar: Blue Stage Session, then major independent Matador signed Moctar to release his 2021 American breakout LP, Afrique Victime.
Ahmoudou Madassane’s Gear
The music of Mdou Moctar spread regionally in Africa before being scooped by American label Sahel Sounds. After a live release on Third Man Records, the band signed with acclaimed indie Matador.
Photo by Ebru Yildiz
Guitars
- American Stratocaster (custom metallic green) with Lollar Strat Sixty-Four pickups
- 1980s Squier Stratocaster (red) with Lollar Strat Sixty-Four pickups
Amps
- Orange Rockerverb 50 (live)
- Orange 4x12 cab (live)
- Vintage Fender tweed Deluxe (studio)
- Vintage Fender Deluxe Reverb (studio)
- Vintage Fender Champ (studio)
Effects
- TC Electronic PolyTune
- Analog Man King of Tone
- EarthQuaker Devices Erupter
- Maxon PT-999
- Boss DD-7
Strings and Picks
- D'Addario NYXL .010s
The follow-up, Funeral for Justice, was recorded between an upstate New York rental house, Coltun’s apartment, and Agadez. It ups the outfit’s production value, and often, the pulse rate, too. A mid-boosted slam of chording opens the record’s title track, which drops into a crackling 6/8 swagger—a lot of the record plays out in a characteristic 3/4 or 6/8 groove—and introduces the band’s familiar call-and-response vocal style. The lo-fi, minor-key intro of “Imouhar,” which means something akin to “comrade” in Tamasheq, feels like a Tuareg analog to the slick flourishes and lead runs pioneered by original blues players of the American South. But soon enough, an electric note rises and howls, and the band crashes in like a thundering steam engine.
There’s plenty of noise and dynamic movement this time out. “Sousoume Tamasheq” starts with a screeching blast of rapid-picked notes that brings Hendrix’s “Machine Gun” to mind—though unlike Jimi’s distinct solo lines, Moctar’s leads are often incomprehensibly fast. The dark, simmering resentment of “Oh France” bursts open halfway through with a melody and timing change that thrashes upward in tempo until its climax. Then there’s the clap-and-percussion-driven desert-blues of “Imajighen,” as invigorating a modern blues song as you can find, or the acoustic noodling intro of closer “Modern Slaves,” which ducks and weaves between minor and major key over its slow, determined groove. The lyrics, meanwhile, articulate the absurd cruelty of modern inequity and inaction: “My people are crying while you laugh / All you do is watch.”
Throughout, one of the more stunning qualities is the duality of Moctar’s lead-guitar work. It’s difficult to figure out how he strings so many notes together in such frantic, precise phrases, like little strikes of lightning across the fretboard. But part of the magic of Mdou Moctar’s music is that these leads aren’t so much scene-stealers as one of a handful of bubbling, explosive elements, all ricocheting off one another. And while Moctar’s style seems by now distinct and singular to our ears, he insists he’s not content where he is. “I’m an eternal student,” says Moctar. “I’m always curious to try new things within my style. I never sit back and say, ‘Now I know how to play guitar.’”
Mikey Coltun's Gear
Moctar follows a Tuareg tradition of mixing rebellion and assouf guitar music, a lineage that originated in the 1970s with the Malian Tuareg rock outfit Tinariwen.
Photo by Nelson Espinal
Guitars
- 1966 Fender Mustang bass (white)
- 1971 Fender Mustang Bass (green)
Amps
- 1970s Ampeg SVT (live)
- Orange 8x10 cab (live)
- Fender 8x10 cab (live)
- 1970s Ampeg V4 (studio)
- Traynor 2x15 cab (studio)
- Ampeg B-15 (studio)
Effects
- TC Electronic PolyTune
- Boss OC-2
- EarthQuaker Devices Blumes
- Analog Man Sun Face
- Union Tube and Transistor Sub Buzz
- Aguilar Grape Phaser
Strings and Picks
- DR Strings Fat-Beams .045–.105
“We really want to give hope to our youth with our music and make them understand that they need to take care of this language, that there’s nothing more valuable than this.” —Mdou Moctar
The record’s grave title, however, does imply a finality. Funeral for Justice is not just a rhetorical phrase; Moctar and his bandmates really mean it. This record is frenetic and bright, but at its heart, it is a work of mourning. It’s a product of how the Tuaregs—and Africans in general—have been treated for centuries. “I don’t see justice on this earth,” says Moctar. “If you look at a European or an American citizen, they seem to have more value compared to an African citizen.
“The world is a really scary place for us today,” he continues. “War technology is progressing, and each country is just trying to become stronger than its neighbor, as if that was their priority. None of that makes sense to us. Why isn’t the world focusing on how to make life better for people instead of bombing them? Bombing innocents who don’t even make two dollars a day with bombs that are worth millions. Why are these resources not being used to make this world a better, more wonderful place?
“All these leaders know that doing all that would be possible, but instead they prefer to manipulate people into believing it’s not, and to continue to oppress the weak, and make the strong people in this world even stronger. That’s what makes us say that justice doesn’t exist.”
YouTube It
Flanked by comrades and youth, Mdou Moctar blast through a riotous performance of “Imouhar” at an outdoor generator show in Agadez, Niger.
Touré holds his Godin LGXSA, which he says has an even response across all 6 strings, which is perfect for his fingerstyle technique. “I have to have the acoustic sound and the electric sound together,” he says. “It’s a very cool guitar. It gives me my sound.”
About a month later, the guitarist is sitting on the veranda of his Bamako, Mali, home, and talking via Zoom. “If you’re a musician, you’re an ambassador,” he says, explaining his philosophy. “You’re working for your country. People have to know exactly what’s happened here.”
Vieux Farka Touré et Khruangbin - Tongo Barra (Visualizer)
In that last remark, he could be talking generally, outlining a career-long ambition. He has continued to build awareness of Malian culture worldwide in the years since his father—the legendary Ali Farka Touré, who helped bridge traditional Malian music and American blues, and won two Grammys for his collaborations with Ry Cooder and Toumani Diabate—died and Vieux’s musical career began.
But in this case, he’s specifically referring to the turmoil Mali has faced in recent years. “Everything is very, very bad. Two days ago, they killed 132 civilians,” he explains, citing a recent attack by jihadist rebels. Since a 2012 coup, the country has fought to stem an Islamist insurgency and has been host to the UN’s deadliest peacekeeping mission.
Touré sings about Malian affairs throughout this year’s Les Racines. “Real musicians want to do something,” he says. “Like in the World Café. It’s good to tell the people; they have to see what’s going on.” Across the album, he sings over beds of warm, crystalline fingerpicked guitar figures, mesmeric bass lines, and the percussion patterns that are the major contributor to its traditional sound. In the liner notes, Touré explains the meanings behind his lyrics, writing that the incendiary mid-tempo “Tinnondirene” “is a call for community dialogue, that is to say to set up a formal framework of consultation in order to play a role in the process of national reconciliation in Mali.” On the upbeat album closer, “Ndjehene Direne,” he sings that “insecurity reigns” and pleads, “If we love our country, let us be the force to overcome the misfortune that divides us, because there is strength in unity.”
“If you have a father like Ali Farka.… He’s the biggest traditional musician in Mali, so no way you’re gonna be on the same level as him.” —Vieux Farka Touré
“My politics—it’s to use my music, to use my name, to use my picture to make it better,” Touré says. “I love kids, so to make it better for kids, it’s very important. This is why I tell you the lyrics.”
The guitarist is passionate about his musical heritage—he’s also just released a tribute album to his father, called Ali—and the impact it has on Malian culture. Les Racines translates from French as “the roots,” and Touré writes that the slow instrumental title track represents his “full circle return, after years of personal exploration and work in all types of music, to the importance of traditional music and the realization that all music and modernity has its origins in its roots.”
“In Mali, every day the music is getting bad,” he asserts, and adds that the sound of traditional Malian instrumentation is being lost in contemporary music. To that end, he’s set up Studio Ali Farka Touré. “My father always would like to build a studio to help the people,” he explains, “so, I tried to do what my father would like to do. I built the studio.” Touré now uses the studio as a home base for his own projects—including Les Racines—and to produce records for other artists, and it’s also available for rent as a commercial studio. The only rule? They must use traditional instruments. “You wanna use the traditional instruments? The studio’s for you, man. Even the rappers who are coming, they have to use the traditional stuff.”
Fresh Sound
Touré’s guitar playing draws obvious comparisons to his father’s iconic desert-blues sound, in which it’s deeply rooted, but he plays with his own style. Starting in 2001, the young guitarist studied with his late father until his passing in 2006, and he learned to use the traditional right-hand technique in which he plays bass accompaniment with his thumb and uses his fingers for melody and lead. On his 2007 self-titled debut, Touré emerged seemingly fully formed with a musical voice of his own. “I don’t know how I got there. I can’t explain,” he says. In the intervening 15 years, Touré’s playing has only gotten more detailed and personal. “My father told me this all the time, ‘Don’t follow me, don’t follow anyone, you have to be you. The music is coming from here [gestures to heart], so you play just what you feel.’”
Vieux Farka Touré’s Gear
Vieux Farka Touré leads his trio with bassist Marshall Henry and percussionist Adama Kone in Bratislava earlier this year.
Photo by Barbora Solarova
Guitars
- Godin LGXSA
- Godin A6 Ultra
Strings
- D’Addario .010-.046 XL Nickel Wound
At the World Café, as his band—which included bassist and manager Marshall Henry and percussionist Adama Kone—wrapped up the first leg of their U.S. tour, they delivered a raucous, jubilant set that bridged his traditional roots and electric wizardry. They opened with a pair of ballads featuring the acoustic sound of Touré’s Godin LGXSA and Kone playing calabash. By the third song, Kone moved to the drum kit, and Touré queued up a bright electric tone on his Boss ME-80.
Ali’s Legacy
Touré knows that his father’s formidable reputation casts a large shadow, and its driven him to make his music stand apart. “All the people I see following what their father was doing,” he explains, “they didn’t do anything, they didn’t go anywhere, they stayed there. I have to do my own stuff.”
But the guitarist is ready to take on his father’s music along with his roots. On Les Racines, he recorded some parts with Ali Farka’s solidbody Seiwa Powersonic, and he’s dedicated “L’Âme” to his memory. But while Les Racines is a vehicle for Touré to use his creative voice as a songwriter and guitarist to work within traditional music, he also wants to modernize his father’s work.
Les Racines, which translates to “the roots,” was recorded in Touré’s newly built Studio Ali Farka Touré in Mali, where he promotes the use of traditional instrumentation in all genres.
“If you have a father like Ali Farka.… He’s the biggest traditional musician in Mali, so no way you’re gonna be on the same level as him,” he explains. “So, I say, ‘Make your own music, make your own place, make your own type, and, after, you come back.’” To do so, he’s tapped the bewigged psychedelic Texas-based trio Khruangbin to collaborate on the transcendent, reverb-soaked Ali.
The guitarist first approached Khruangbin about working together in 2017. They hit it off after an initial meeting the next year, and the quartet headed to Houston’s Terminal C studio in 2019 for five days of jams. Armed with selections from Ali’s catalog, Touré took his regular approach to arrangements, creating the grooves in his head and teaching the band.
“Vieux knew what he wanted to do when we went in,” explains Khruangbin’s guitarist, Mark Speer. “No one told us what we were going to be playing. We just showed up and sat down. He basically was like, ‘This is how the song goes.’It was very organic. It was very loose and free.”
Fierce foursome: On Ali, Touré teamed up with Khruangbin to interpret a set of music by his father, the legendary Ali Farka Touré.
The quartet kept a leisurely schedule, working from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day, followed by family-style traditional Malian dinners of fish and rice. While the initial sessions proceeded in more of a traditional jam style, as Speer and bassist Laura Lee detail, the recordings were left to Khruangbin to shape and bring into their own sound world.
Because the sessions took place during the same period as the band’s Mordechai and Texas Moon albums—the latter a collaboration with singer/songwriter Leon Bridges—it wasn’t until 2021 that they revisited the recordings. This worked in Khruangbin’s favor. “I like parts and I like to sit and craft parts, and I typically like to do that alone,” Lee points out. “Rarely do things get to marinate for two years, so there was a real freshness when we came back to it.”
Working with Touré forced Speer to consider his own instrumental role. “Straight up, I was like, ‘I’m not really sure what I should be doing.’ The dude can play the accompaniment and the melody and he’s singing at the same time, and it sounds great. So, I was like, ‘Do I even need to play guitar? And if I’m going to play guitar, what am I going to play?‘” Speer's resultant guitar parts are a testament to his role as an effective big-picture creative thinker, and his stark accompaniments to Touré’s sinewy lines float over Lee and drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson, Jr.’s deep-groove rhythms, giving the record a widescreen-sunset feel—an ideal framework for the elder guitarist’s tunes.
When Touré approached Khruangbin about working on a collaborative project back in 2017, Laura Lee, the band’s bassist, says the guitarist received “an instant yes from our camp.” The result is the just-released Ali..
Throughout Ali, Touré sounds at home with Khruangbin. Whether on the desert-blues rager “Mahine Me,” the ethereal “Savanne,” or the funky and propulsive “Tongo Barra,” he boldly takes his father’s music to fresh sonic spaces, putting the mark of his singular creative vision on the material.
The Khruangbin-Touré team-up is no doubt a mutually beneficial one. The trio have carefully sculpted a musical persona steeped in global flavors, and Touré’s firm roots and deep authenticity certainly lends credence to their approach. So on Ali, Khruangbin are no longer particularly adept re-interpreters of international sounds, they are originators.
“The dude can play the accompaniment and the melody and he’s singing at the same time, and it sounds great.” —Mark Speers
If the music world is a fair place—though it’s famously not—Ali and Touré’s association with Khruangbin will raise the guitarist’s profile among Western audiences who might not know about Les Racines and his earlier work, and will hopefully take him to a place beyond nicknames like “Hendrix of the Sahara”—which gets lazily thrown at African guitarists from Mdou Moctar to Farees to Touré, who may have been the first to earn the moniker.In the big picture, it’s probably more important that both Ali and Les Racines allow Touré to further his musical mission. Each record marks a conversation between this master player, his rich musical tradition and heritage, and the modern world. They explore different moods, with distinct parameters. While Les Racines tells people “how they have to be,” Ali is a celebration, and both are necessary parts of Touré’s music. Taken together, they make a major statement and mark a decisive step in Touré’s work as one of Mali’s musical ambassadors.
YouTube It
Vieux Farka Touré and percussionist Adama Kone run through a trio of tunes at the 2022 New York Guitar Festival. Without a bassist, the guitarist’s right-thumb accompaniment is easy to hear and feel, and he plays fluid call and response between his powerful voice and his rapid, percussive fingerpicked leads.
