By the time Ali Farka Toure died of bone cancer in March, the Malian musician's twangy guitar and raspy, rough-hewn voice were touted as proof that the blues had been born in West Africa. But while Toure cut his teeth playing traditional Songhai spirit possession music, he also dug Albert King and John Lee Hooker, so who knows where he got his mojo? Still, as this posthumous release demonstrates, Toure had always been more Bamako than Biloxi. Funkmaster Pee Wee Ellis and blues harpist Little George Sueref gamely ape Toure's incantatory style, only to be trampled by a chorus of one-string fiddles and ngoni lutes. Yet Toure's own neo-griot vocals and curlicued, kora-like guitar licks cut through the busy ensemble textures like desert lightning, threatening to summon the same spirits that first led him to a life in music. His passing makes their world richer, and ours poorer.
Of course there are Japanese Americans and Irish Americans. They are immigrants and the descendants of immigrants. We Africans in America are neither immigrants nor the descendants of immigrants. No where is anyone asked to apologize for enjoying the music? The point is that the writer of the review is ill equipped to make insightful commentary about a musical dialogue between two cultures that share a kinship that he does not possess. White people often times feel frustrated when they are told that they don't have permission to arbitrarily define other people�s culture or cultural dialogues. In other words their privilege is revoked in that area. I have enjoyed kinship and communication with people of African descent from the continent and in my travels to other parts of the African Diaspora. This has little to do with skin color and a lot to do with shared methods of communication that transcend colonial language barriers. Don't be a victim of Mis-Education. Do your homework. Melville Herskovits, Rudi Blesh, Robert Farris Thompson and Zora Neale Hurston have proven the kinship between Africans in America and Continental Africans through endless documentation. My brotha' Ali Farka Toure was not being condescending when he spoke to Corey Booker. He was showing love.
clayev2k 07/30/2006 10:45:00 AM
and of course there are no japanese-americans....only japanese in america...or irish-americans..etc.
question becomes does sushi taste more like sushi to olive-skinned asians than it does to say an african in america? is condescension such a straightforward one-way behavior or the dominion of those who's ancesters speak
a language not known west of the atlantic?
it is funny there are no african-americans as i've tried to share the musics of africa with my neighbors and their children and they preferred to lose my cds and their covers while gleefully watching saw 2 with the younguns gathered round the big-screen.
they would suggest i leave africa to the africans....
but that ain't them.
if truth is nobility then where does that leave us
in america?
i too enjoy the music of ali farka toure without considering my ancestral right to do so....nor without apology.
mcc>
ddeterville 07/27/2006 4:59:00 AM
Alexander Gelfand�s short review is yet another example of the fear (poorly masked by condescension) that white men have of the resonant ancestral connections between Africans born in the Diaspora and continental Africans. Gelfand�s repeated attempts to contrast Diasporic Blues People against African Blues People is a thinly veiled proposition that the blues is born of an �American� experience rather than an African experience caged in America. The condescending delusion that Pee Wee Ellis and Little George Sueref have to �gamely ape Toure�s incantory style only to be trampled by�(other African musicians.)� along with the insinuation that Toure�s awareness of John Lee Hooker and Albert King makes his Blues derivative of them is an aesthetic divide and conquer prelude to cultural colonialism. It�s an attempt to make the Blues relative to the experience of everybody in America. Let�s be real �everybody� means white people when we hear this kind of sophistry and black folks hear it often. Bix, Trumbauer, Elvis, Janis and Clapton. It seems that white writers are intimidated by the African Diasporic call and response of Black musicians communing with the same ancestral spirit. I have met Malian musicians who know how many Bamana people were sold in New Orleans and that we Black folk in the Americas share a spiritual, cultural and musical kinship with them. Farka Toure himself said in Martin Scorcese�s Blues documentary that there are no Black Americans just Africans in America. Alexander Gelfand is unable to perceive the common denominators in our cultures because he can�t commune with ancestors he never had. duane d.
