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Editorial Reviews
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Savane, the great African guitarist and bluesman Ali Farka Touré's final solo studio album, was recorded in his native Mali toward the end of his life, when the artist knew his days were numbered. He spent his last years in his home village of Niafunké, concentrating on farming and family matters, jamming with local musicians of an evening. This impassioned, roots-drenched, mostly acoustic valedictory finds the Maestro's stalking rhythms and high-noon-at-the-crossroads, dusty desert-to-delta vocals in no less than life-summing form. "Soya" (track 5) seems to stand still in a million directions, while "Hanana Soko" (track 9) features a searing njarka fiddle spinning delirious circles around its throaty accompanying percussion. Pee Wee Ellis (sax) and Little George Sueref (harmonica) each manage to make strong impressions while adhering to the groove at hand. Afel Boucoum, a talented younger musician who has been mentioned as Touré's most likely successor (as if such a thing were possible!), graces "Njarou," the last tune. The other players are also at the top of their game, as fluttering ngoni (a West African spike lute) riffs weave in and out and airy female vocals float like a breeze off the river Niger. There are reports that Touré senior sat in on his son's upcoming album and scads of archival material will undoubtedly materialize. But his unsentimental, voluptuously masculine, spirit-guided magic is captured at its best, for all time, in this magnificent farewell. --Christina Roden
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Toure recorded Savane in the Malian capital of Bamako, as part of a three-disc project dubbed the Hotel Mande Sessions, after the studio in which the albums were cut. Savane is the last, perhaps most eloquent, installment. In concept and execution, the sessions recall the magical combination of spontaneity and virtuosity that marked the debut releases from the Buena Vista Social Club. Toure offers reverberating, incantatory vocals to accompany his lean, hypnotically repetitive guitar lines.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
44 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Farewell, Brave Friend,
By
This review is from: Savane (Audio CD)
One of the incredible tragedies in Music this year is the passing of Ali Farka Toure. It is impossible to exagerate his importance to African, Malian, Blues, World musics. He is as seminal figure as anyone in any discipline. Last year he recorded the mystically beautiful IN THE HEART OF THE MOON with Toumani Diabete, and this record as well as Diabete's magical SYMMETRY ORCHESTRA recording just out were recorded nearly simultaneously in the same hotel as the MOON sessions.
Toure's hypnotic guiatr work is set to haunting effect alongside ngoni players like Mama Sissoko, American sax player and Van Morrison collaborator Pee Wee Ellis, calabash virtuouso Souleye Kane, and percussionists like Oumar Toure. This is the cream of Mali's traditional music set, and some of the best international sidemen you can have. For Ellis, it must have been a career highpoint to join in such august company and he plays as though this may never happen again. And sadly, it will not. These are love songs, songs about life along a river, songs of politics and wisdom that ring with an authenticity that almost all of today's music lacks. There are few if any African-Americans whose records could hold a candle to this, let alone white, Carribbean, or any other ethnicity. This is music born of a culture that transcends those identifying markers and reaches into that which is quintessentially human in all of us. Considering that Human Life likely started in these environs, that should not be surprising. That Toure can articulate what is so primally essential to life and bring forth such brilliant contributions from his collaborators set this effort on a plain few have even thought about reaching. This is the blues. Close your eyes, forget the language differences, and it is the voice of John Lee Hooker, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Asie Payton crying out from the Delta, from the northern Mississippi fields. It is a call that began with the dawn of man and continues to call him home. It is the struggle and the passion, the poetic and the political, the directions in the human soul that seek peace, love, justice a safe and clean home, a regard for the planet as a nuturing place instead of a field to be exploited. And in what may yet prove to be his most prophetic call, the last song on the CD, "N'Jarou" tells the story of a brave man who resisted both the tyranny of white colonialization and the the chains of expansionsit Islam to be true to what he knew in his heart and soul. In a Greek context, we might call this Socratic. In any context, it is profound. This is not a dance record. It is meant to be listened to thoughtfully. While "Savane" speaks literally about a drought and the damage wrought thereby in the savannahs, metaphorically, Toure is talking about the drought in our hearts and souls in these times we live in. We ought to listen carefully to this marvellous griot's valedictory farewell.
26 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Monster Album from Farka,
By
This review is from: Savane (Audio CD)
Ali Farka Toure called this album his best "ever" and, amazingly, it is. While Talking Timbuktu and Niafunke were mostly great, they had a bit of filler, and didn't always hold together in the way The Source, for example, did. Savane, on the other hand, is a complete, and completely excellent record from start to finish. Toure's blues stomp is in full force, and the desert sounds of the ngoni and njarka give Toure the perfect accompaniment to his snaky guitar and keeing voice. The album has the hypnotic feel of some of the recent gnawa inspired music to have come out of West Africa. The final track is one of the most beautiful in the Toure collection -- a fitting end to an album, a career, a musical life.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"It's my best album ever. It has the most power and it is the most different".,
By latejazzlover (San Francisco , CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Savane (Audio CD)
If ever an artist embodied the struggle between staying true to his roots and musical exploration, it was the late, great Ali Farka Touré. It would have been easy for him to become a fixture on the international stage playing with anyone he chose and the financial rewards would have been considerable. Instead, he turned his attention to expressing his own culture and exploring the links between it and the surrounding cultures. In doing so he became a local hero and a powerful symbol of national unity.
Although we usually think of `fusion' as a mix between something traditional and something Western, one could argue that Ali was permanently engaged in the twin processes of fusing and distillation most of his life -- although his attention rarely wandered far from West Africa. "Savane" was a work in progress for several years, but it was mainly recorded at the now legendary Hotel Mande sessions in Bamako, which saw the recording of his sensational collaboration with Toumani Diabate "In the Heart of the Moon" as well as Toumani's own "Symmetric Orchestra sessions", which has just been released. Every note of Ali's guitar and every sung word on "Savane" could come from no other artist. And yet, this is an album unlike any of previous albums. There is an unusually international ensemble of musicians including JB horn man Pee Wee Ellis (who has been on most World Circuit albums of late) and Fain S. Dueñas of Radio Tarifa plus ngoni musicians Bassekou Kouyate and Mama Sissoko and Dasy Saré. Now let's be under no illusions, each piece is bent to the will of Ali Farka Touré but under his distinctive canopy all kinds of interesting and surprising things are going on. The title song has a ska-like backbeat for the distinctive guitars to spring off and the opening track "Ewly" features bold bluesy guitar offset by harmonica making the blues connection even stronger. Famously, Ali Farka Touré always maintained he was not influenced by American blues musicians, he was just playing his traditional music. Attempts by musicologists to untangle this tale of origins have mostly come unstuck. One could see this album as a way of stating the external influences in his music or even an attempt to reach out but I think both interpretations are wrong and completely out of character. Carefully, meticulously and imaginatively Ali reclaims the entire African diaspora music for the people of Africa and in doing so he plants his flag on the entire 20th Century music catalogue. It would be, in short, an enterprise of lunatic megalomania except that it works and can therefore be described as nothing less than genius.
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