VIEUX FARKA TOURE レコード& CD

Review: Ali brings together Malian guitarist and singer Vieux Farka Toure with Houston-based trio Khruangbin for pattern-textured tribute to Vieux's father, the legendary Ali Farka Toure. The group chose to reinterpret Ali's music, drawing on a shared sense of space and groove to honour his legacy without embalming it. Recorded in just a week in a barn in Burton, Texas, the sessions came steeped in warmth and mutual respect, with the final tracklist curated by Ali's eleven children. Khruangbin's dusky, reverb-heavy style embed the earthy, cyclical patterns of the recently popularised Malian desert blues, each side subtly reshaping the other sound while drawing parallels between North American and West African takes on the same name. Though long delayed by the pandemic, what has emerged is an unhurried traditional group mind, invoked to tread newer ground in songs erstwhile deemed well-trodden.

Review: Texan funk-dub stalwarts Khruangbin set aside their own inward-looking solo projects for another collaborative endeavour. Following their first collab with Leon Bridges, they've now covered the work of 'African rock royalty' Ali Farka Toure, alongside his son, Vieux. Toure is a much-celebrated Malian musician whose 'desert blues' evoked a similarly African, primordial version of Khruangbin's Western cosmic folk. While their music came up in completely different times, the throughlines between the Khru' and Toure's musics are far from tenuous; together, the band and Vieux Toure paint a diasporic picture of a legend's music and life, musically documenting the influence his music has had on subsequent generations.