Let us now praise the French in South Africa, and the glittering array of West African musicians they have brought to our shores. Let us, in particular, praise them for importing Malian diva Rokia Traore, who performed at an overflowing Bass Line in Johannesburg this week.
Traore is an intriguing figure. Daughter of a diplomat who counts among her musical idols Ella Fitzgerald and Tina Turner, she has the diaphanous gown, close tonsure and Benin mask features of a Parisian model.
Accompanying herself on the acoustic guitar, she pitches her lyrics at the Westernised Malian youth. On her mould-breaking first album, Mouneissa, she tells women they need not marry and pitches one ballad at the children of divorced parents.
And yet she is flanked on stage by the most down-home, hard-core ethnic instrumentalists imaginable. The backing instruments include two n’goni, a lute with an animal-skin sounding box capable of only four chords, and the balafon, a wooden-key xylophone which uses as resonators hollow gourds ranging in size from a butternut to a watermelon.
Traore is not a traditional musician and it would be entirely wrong to see her performance as an exercise in ethnomusicology. The “back of beyond” stuff is an aesthetic choice. “I feel more inspired by acoustic and traditional instruments. I know their colours,” she told a US journalist.
The n’goni and the balafon, for example, are used in different parts of Mali and do not co-exist in a tribal setting. She certainly draws on the Malian griotte, or female praise-singer, and brought the tradition to bear in her closing song at the Bass Line, where she praised all her grinning accompanists in turn.
But she is really a contemporary folk-singer who mixes and matches the richly diverse musical resources of her homeland with other influences, including the French chanson triste. In this respect, she closely resembles her mentor, the Malian singer-guitarist Ali Faka Toure, chosen by Ry Cooder for a famous collaboration.
Traore’s albums suffer from an excess of soulful ballads in a minor key, and her first set on Tuesday night likewise. But once the rhythm section was beefed up with some brilliant playing on the talking drum, things started to cook.
The finale was 15-minute tour de force with brilliant syncopated interplay between lute and xylophone, the two percussionists, and Traore and her doo-wop girls. It also featured some nice sinuous combination dancing.
French West Africa has been the source of the most original African music for the past 20 years, in part because its musicians – unlike their counterparts in former British colonies — have the advantage of a large following in continental Europe.
We need to hear more of them. The surprisingly large turnout for Traore shows that the band of local enthusiasts is growing.