About this Artist

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Editorial Reviews

The puzzling title to the first Ali Farka Touré album since 1999's Niafunké is a tip-off to hard-core fans of the Malian bluesman. These are the so-called "Red" and "Green" albums -- dubbed so because of their prevailing cover colors and absence of any other details -- that propelled the unknown guitar slinger to international prominence. As BBC DJ Andy Kershaw relates in the notes, "Red" was a mysterious LP he picked up in the bargain bin of a Paris record shop (the original cover is reproduced here). The music on that disc fairly blew the radio jock's mind, as it represented, in its insistently bluesy acoustic picking, some kind of antecedent to American blues. "Was this style of blues, isolated in remote rural Africa for centuries, the very same music slaves had carried with them to the plantations of the American southern states?" he writes. "No, was the short answer to that." "Red" and its follow-up, "Green," do show Farka's most innocent combinations of the Sonrai, Peul, Songhai, and Bambara songs of his homeland with the stark guitar runs of his American blues hero, John Lee Hooker. Later, the African bluesman would go electric and make the blues underpinnings that won him global acclaim much more obvious. Fans of Ali Farka Touré and newcomers alike will thrill to the spare, affecting music here and share in the shock of the new that put Mali on the world music map back in the '80s. Mark Schwartz, Barnes & Noble

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