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Entertainment
Music Review
From Mali
String Band Expanding Boundaries of a West African Instrument
Chronicle News Services
NEW YORK--There were no Western instruments onstage when the Malian griot Bassekou Koyate and his band, Ngoni Ba, performed at SummerStage in Central Park on Sunday afternoon.
Ngoni Ba is a string band--four sizes of ngoni, a four-stringed African lute that’s an ancestor of the banjo--with Mr. Kouyate’s wife, Amy Sacko, as lead singer, along with two percussionists playing calabashes and tama, a West African pressure drum.
The band wore African clothes, and the songs were in Bambara, Mali’s main language. One, a meditative 17th Century praise song that Miss Sacko sang in expanding arabesques, delved into 2,000-year-old Malian history.
But this was no traditional African concert.
Through technique, technology and open ears, Mr. Kouyate hurls the ngoni into the 21st Century.
After performing in groups with notable Malian musicians like Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, Mr. Kouyate has taken an instrument traditionally used to accompany a singer, pushed it into the foreground and multiplied it into an ensemble.
The bass and tenor-register ngonis in Ngoni Ba, founded in 2005, were invented by Mr. Kouyate, and they bring extra layers of counterpoint to what was already intricate, quick-fingered music. Traditional musicians play the ngoni in their laps while seated.
Mr. Kouyate and his band members stand up and strap them on like electric guitars.
Mr. Kouyate is also the first to play the ngoni through a wah-wah pedal, and, at times, he bends strings, blues-style, along with traditional harplike plucking.
The music remains unmistakably West African in its minor modes, its vocal lines, its rhythms (often three against two) and the breakneck lines and fluttering trills of traditional accompaniments. But instrumental showcases have taken over the songs, and Mr. Kouyate ignores stylistic boundaries.
“Saro,” from Mr. Kouyate’s latest album, “I Speak Fula” (Next Ambiance/Sub Pop), barely budges from one chord, like a Delta-blues boogie, and its performance veered toward the blues. Mr. Kouyate bent the notes of its central riff amid the flurry of plucking from the other ngonis, and he applied wah-wah to parts of his solos.
“Ngoni Fola” (“Beautiful Ngoni”), from the 2007 album, “Segu Blue” (Out Here), zoomed ahead like an Appalachian banjo breakdown and also included a dueling-ngonis stretch for Mr. Kouyate and his brother, Fousseyni Kouyate, on the slightly larger ngoniba.
Mr. Kouyate has played alongside American musicians like Taj Mahal and Bela Fleck, Leni Stern, an American guitarist and singer who has studied with him joined the group for one song, answering Mr. Kouyate’s pointillistic picking with electric-guitar blue lines.
(The song also had a passage in which Moussa Sissoko’s tama drum became a melody instrument.)
Mr. Kouyate’s music doesn’t sound as if it were diluted in search of some international crossover. It’s activating kinships and lineages that were there all along, waiting to be plugged in.
