 | | Nick Gold on Ali Farka Toure | Place and Date: | New York City
2006 | | Interviewer: | Banning Eyre |
 Nick Gold is the founder and head of World Circuit Records, the UK label that has produced everything from the CDs of Oumou Sangaré to the complete Buena Vista Social Club catalog. Virtually all the available recordings of the late, great Malian maestro Ali Farka Toure are also on World Circuit, and Nick was Ali’s producer for most of his recording career. Banning Eyre and Sean Barlow interviewed Gold in the office of Nonesuch Records in New York—Nonesuch distributes World Circuit releases in the U.S.—in June, 2006, shortly before the release of Toure’s final recording, Savane. Here’s their conversation.
B.E: When I was on my way back from Zimbabwe in 1998, we had lunch in London, and you had just finished recording Niafunke, which had been a frustrating experience for you because you had had certain ideas going in, and then things turned out differently than you expected. What was this experience like by comparison? N.G.: The experience of recording Savane was extraordinary. It was almost, easy is not the right word, but it was very…fulfilling for everyone involved. It was a record that Ali very much wanted to make, which hasn’t always been the case. Before this, you’d have to sort of persuade or cajole Ali into the studio, but on this occasion, a few years ago, he actually sent demos to me, which for Ali is unheard of. He sent me these two CDs which he’d made in Studio Bogolan and said this was the record he wanted to make. And for me that was wonderful. His very, very first records, which were done in the mid-70s, were basically just him singing, playing acoustic guitar, and with an ngoni player. An ngoni being a four-string traditional guitar, which people look at as the precursor of a banjo. It’s got a skin over it. I’ve always wanted him to work with an ngoni again, and these demos had an ngoni player on them, but quite extraordinary playing, very um, thumping, powerful sound, rather than these earlier recordings, which were slightly more delicate. The music as well was very traditional, it was Peul music and Sonrai music from the north, where Ali’s from. Very traditional with hardly any lyrics on them, hardly any singing. There was a little bit of talking on some of them. Praise talking. And then, two years ago, after the Festival in the Desert we went to record, you know, properly. So we started these sessions at studio Bogolon with Yves Wernert in Bamako. And just after the Festival in the Desert, Ali came down, but his ngoni player from the north didn’t make it, for, I don’t know why, he couldn’t find him or … anyway, so he recruited Basekou Kouyate who I’d wanted to work with for years and years and years, who was one of the original people we invited to come to the Buena Vista sessions, which didn’t work out as well as they should have done in terms of African participation - B.E: But they did work out in other ways.
N.G.: Yeah they worked out in other ways, yeah. [WE LAUGH]. But it was fantastic to work with Basekou, and also Mama Sissoko playing the larger ngoni, so you’ve got Basekou playing the small ngoni, the high ngoni, to play fills and solos, and Mama playing the low ngoni, basically giving base lines and rhythm parts. We went into the studio, and Ali was very, very much up for this. He was ready first thing in the morning, got to the studio. He didn’t rehearse the guys before hand; he said, “No, we can do it in the studio.” But he’d start playing a riff, and the others would join in. And Ali was very, very patient as well. He just played and played and played until the other two locked in, and then belted a song down. And he was singing with more, possibly…it’s very difficult to say, but it seemed with more conviction than I’ve ever heard him sing before. I can’t say that he was playing with more conviction, because every note he’s ever played as far as I’ve witnessed was meant. But there was no doodling. Every single note was there for a purpose. And you know, they got this little band sound going, with two ngonis and the guitar, with this weaving in and out, and I thought it made a beautiful sound. And that was the core of the record, the guitar and the two ngonis.
 B.E: Were they using any live percussion at that point?
N.G.: A tiny bit of calabash, but otherwise it’s just these three instruments. And Ali’s foot, which was quite loud, and I think we mic’ed it some of the time, his foot tapping, but he basically would start a song, and just play and play and play until they got their parts. You know, he’s nodding at them all, showing his fingers on the fret board, where to go, until the three of them had got the sound down for a song. And then, he would like, on “Savane” for example, the title track, he’d start playing it, you know this was a song they’d never played before, the three of them together, and they played it for maybe half an hour, just got into the groove of it, and then he’d start. He’d open the song with this introductory figure that seems completely unrelated to the rest of the song, and then the other two fall in with this almost sort of reggae riffing that they do, which seemed to fit perfectly. And then, Ali wanted Basekou to solo, so basically all Ali did was nod at him and close his eyes, and then Basekou was off. You know, Ali was very supportive of them but also hugely confident of what the two of them could do, so he just closed his eyes, and Basekou soloed, and he’d solo and solo until Ali opened his eyes and started singing. So it was very…organic, the way that piece worked out, as were a lot of the songs, although he worked on them a lot, and worked to finesse them and sculpt them, once he was ready to record, he banged ‘em down. B.E: Well, it’s nice because you capture that moment when it’s fresh, the first time when musicians control something is often the most inspiring.
N.G.: Absolutely. The one thing you have to do with Ali is be ready to press “Go”, because once he’s on, you really, really want to capture it, because a second take will be ok, and once you’re on a third take it starts to go down. You want to stop, maybe have another go at the tune the next day, but you really need to be ready for him. When he’s ready to give something, you’ve gotta get it. B.E: So a lot of what we hear on the album are first takes?
N.G.: Yeah, I think maybe two songs are the second take, but nearly everything is first take. Now I’m not saying they went in, played three notes and they were off. They would sit there, working it out, and when I say working it out they would just play the riff over and over again until everyone was locked, and then Ali would go, “OK, we’re ready,” and they’d go.
 B.E: And were these longer tracks that have been edited down?
N.G.: I think maybe two tunes were edited, and they would have been edited because maybe someone hit a microphone or something rather than a mistake being made or them feeling too long. You know, Ali a lot of the time when he’s ready to do a song, the first thing he says is, “How long do you want it?” And you’d go, “Well I don’t know, as long as the song is.” And he’d say, “Make me a sign when we’re at five minutes. This was how a lot of the records were made for him before. You’d do as he said; you’d hold up your hand at five minutes, and he’d bring it to an end. But on this one, he didn’t ask for any of that, they just seemed to take their natural length, they seemed to be more worked out than usual. He seemed to know before he went into the studio what he was after. B.E: And, did you, it seems to me that the very first track “Erdi” has more post-processing, there’s more stuff that you’ve added. It seems really dense. What’s happened to that track since that initial performance?
N.G.: Yeah, I think, basically the track is Ali with electric. He’s playing electric guitar on that track for a start, and he always uses a [Roland] Jazz Chorus with a chorus sound, so that immediately fills the sound. And then with both, I think there’s possibly two tracks of Mama Sissoko on that take, there’s one track of Basekou but possibly, I think there’s two tracks of Mama on it so there’s two bass ngonis, two low ngonis. And then there’s also violin on it from a guy called Fanga Diawara, who was about the only person that Ali would permit to play the violin other than himself. This is the one-stringed traditional violin, the njarka, that a couple of other people tried to play and he was just having none of it, and then Fanga came in. He was older than Ali and almost blind. He came in and played this song and I thought he played it fantastically well. But that’s doubling the riff again, so it’s also on that track everyone’s playing the same part, so it’s like, you’ve got Ali playing this riff with the Jazz Chorus, you’ve got two layers of ngoni playing the riff and they’re all playing the same riff, so it’s like heavy metal I suppose. It’s just this big riff going around and around and around. B.E: It’s interesting about the njarka, that Ali was so particular. Was Fanga based in Bamako?
N.G.: He was in Bamako, and he was part of the National Ensemble. I don’t know if he still is, because he was pretty old, that guy.
 B.E: Was one of the people he tried Zoumana Tareta?
N.G.: No, Zoumana plays with Oumou Sangare. B.E: Right, but it was interesting because when Bela Fleck recorded with Afel Bocoum’s group, the regular njarka player Hasi Sarre couldn’t make it so they used Zoumana. It was interesting to watch the musicians training him to play his sokou like a njarka. And they were happy with it, but I was just curious to know, I mean, did you have a sense of what it was about whoever these other players were that Ali wasn’t happy with?
N.G.: Yeah, they weren’t Sonrai, basically. They weren’t Sonrai and they couldn’t do what he needed them to do. But Fanga was Sonrai. Sonrai is Ali’s tribe, or Ali’s group. Ali’s people. It’s a very specific traditional music that they play. And he just sat in there and did it straight away. And the other thing ending up on that, that’s also got some percussion that we added with Fain Duenãs, the guy who founded Radio Tarifa, which was done in London with Ali and Fain together, because I was just suggesting to Ali that maybe we could have some percussion that wasn’t calabash, just to have some variety, and he was, “Yeah, fine.” He was very open to trying anything on this record. He wasn’t that open about some of the results, I mean not all the results that he approved ended up, there was some stuff that didn’t make it to the record. B.E: Because he said, no.
N.G.: Yeah, there were a couple of tracks with harmonica that we didn’t use on the album because the harmonica went across the rhythm. I didn’t hear it, going across the rhythm, but Ali said, adamantly, as soon as he heard, “No, you can’t have that, that’s messing up the rhythm. Take it off.” There’s nothing on the record that he disapproved of.
 B.E: That’s interesting. I’m pretty sure that there was something like that when I heard that version in Bamako, that was, February of last year. Because I remember hearing this track, and I said, “Wow, that’s a harmonica,” and he said, “No, it’s a violin, but everyone thinks it sounds like a harmonica.” But then I went back and listened to it afterwards, and I said, “That’s a harmonica.”
N.G.: Well sometimes a fiddle sounds a bit like, because it’s just meshed in like this almost wall of sound thing, the harmonica and the violin, you can’t, well, you probably can but some people immediately couldn’t discern which is which. But the harmonica was put on afterwards because years ago I was playing something with harmonica and I asked Ali if he liked it, and we tried it with this guy who’s a Greek guy from Croyden in London a guy called Little George Sueref who’s a guitarist and singer and harmonica player and basically plays excello type blues stuff, and he’s got his own little band. And we put him on a few tracks, and as I say some of them Ali was wildly enthusiastic about, and some of them didn’t quite work. Or, I think it was either it was crossing the rhythm, or he played sometimes over Ali’s voice where he didn’t want him to play, but I think the harmonica on there is great, but it’s also enough. It’s a touch. B.E: Yeah. So, were there other things that surprised you during the unfolding? It sounds like he came in with a lot of ideas, pretty much knowing what he wanted to do.
N.G.: Ali? Yeah. B.E: This record has got more variety that anything he’s made, I would say.
N.G.: I think it’s got more variety. It’s got more variety in the sorts of rhythm, and the sorts of texture. It’s possibly because it was done in different sessions as well. Half of the tunes were done at the Hotel Mande along, with the same sessions we did Heart of the Moon with Toumani, and the Symmetric Orchestra. So you’ve got about six tunes recorded in that session, another five or six recorded at Studio Bogolan, nine months to a year before that. And there’s two songs on there which are from the original demos he did.
 B.E: Oh, really? Which two are those?
N.G.: One of them is “Ledi Coumbe,” which ended up with harmonica on it as well, but the raw track was just Ali’s guitar, voice and ngoni. And the other track is “Gambari Didi,” pour Madame Sankaré, which is basically, again, voice, percussion, and ngoni. The vocal is spoken, as an homage to someone; it’s not sung. I think some of the variety comes from the fact that he sings very differently. He was saying that it was his most traditional record, which is weird because I think it is his most traditional record, but it’s also the record that’s got more in it, where you can hear blues in it, you can hear reggae on one track, you can almost hear some sort of Appalachian bounce on a couple of tracks, and on the very last track, “Njarou” which is quite a known piece in Mali, it sounds to me like it’s almost Celtic. B.E: That’s interesting, there’s a blurb from him on, I think the advance package that I have, where he says effectively that it the most “different” record that he’d ever made, and it was the one he was the most proud of. And yet, at the same time he also sees it as the most traditional, so that’s kind of a paradox.
N.G.: I don’t know if it is a paradox, because for Ali, there’s infinite variety in traditional music. So maybe he’s saying, the more traditional it gets, the more variety is possible. Because he also, I mean there’s Sonrai stuff, there’s Peul stuff, there’s Bambara stuff, there’s Songhoy stuff, and there’s Zerma stuff from Niger as well. These traditions are very specific, and he’ll hear very strong differences in them, and the rest of the band will know that there’re differences and they’ll play accordingly. B.E: And are those nuances described in the liner notes?
N.G.: Yeah, it’ll say what language each one is from. They aren’t fully transcribed, the texts, but they’re explained. As much as you can ever explain Ali’s texts, some of his texts are as enigmatic as his proverbs.
 B.E: Yes, yes, famously. Did you have a sense that Ali knew that this was probably the last record that he would make, and that there was any special consideration along those lines?
N.G.: Possibly. For the last two years of his life he was visiting specialists in Paris, so he was aware that he was sick, so it’s probably not a huge coincidence that at that time, within those two years, there was a flurry of activity from him musically. Because before that, you know he hadn’t toured in Europe, he hadn’t toured in the States for a long, long time except for that one brief visit to Washington with a lot of other Malian artists [in 2003]. He had been mostly working on his farm in Niafunke, but in the last two years of his life he toured, he went to France a couple of times to do concerts, he was doing concerts in Burkina Faso, and in Niafunke, he was playing a lot more, and playing concerts, and doing this record, this record and the Toumani record, and there’s another duet record with Toumani, when he was in London last summer for a series of concerts in Europe that were his final concerts. They put down a second duet album at that session as well. B.E: Similar tunes?
N.G.: It’s more towards Ali’s repertoire. B.E: Oh really? Now that’s interesting because that was the one thing that I felt about that record is that I would have loved to have heard Toumani trying to grapple with Ali’s music.
N.G.: Well you hear more of this, so there’s more pentatonic stuff, of Ali’s stuff, you can hear the kora playing that style, well you’ll hear it and it’s suddenly, suddenly you get this, I’m going to sound like a totally ignorant person, but it sounds like this kind of Chinese-y sound that comes in when Toumani’s playing Ali’s music, and that duet record’s interesting because it’s got the first song that Ali ever heard played on a guitar on it, which is “Sina Kasi” Keita Fodeba, who was his inspiration behind playing the guitar in the first place. And we asked him in the session, can you remember the tune? And he, you know, as Ali does, fiddled around with the guitar for about all of three seconds and then managed to play it, note perfect. So it’s got some of that stuff, some very moody stuff too; you know how sometimes he’ll just play with his thumb playing the rhythm piece, these very moody, minor key things? He does a couple of those with Toumane as well. And Cachaito is there. So it’s really a trio album with Toumani, Ali and Cachaito, the Cuban bass player.
 B.E: Fantastic. And that will be released at some point?
N.G.: At some point, yeah. B.E: And he also played a few cameos on his son’s record. ?
N.G.: Yeah, he played two tunes on his son’s record. B.E: So that is unusual, I mean that level of activity for him.
N.G.: For him, very much.
 Sean Barlow: I’ve got a question. I imagine you’ve heard the record Ali’s son Vieux recorded. What do you think of it?
N.G.: It’s very interesting. I think one of the tracks with Ali on it is fantastic. I think they’ve shortened it now because it went on for over ten minutes I think, but it’s a blinding bit of playing from Ali. B.E: I’m told that if I ask you this question you’ll talk for 45 minutes, but I can’t resist, I want to hear a little bit about your trip to Mali, where I guess you went not knowing that he was about to die, but having some sense of that, to bring him the Grammy was it? And then it ended up being a funeral, and an adventiure.
N.G.: Oh yeah. Well Ali had heard his record, except for one tiny change, which he’d asked me to make, so I’d made this change to his record so I was ready to take him out his finished master of his record. Plus the Grammy had just arrived, the Grammy prize had arrived, so I decided to make the trip, booked my flight and everything, and I was just leaving the house to get onto the plane, and as I left the house the phone rang, and it was a call to say Ali had died. So I made the trip. You know, I’d spoken to him two days before that, and he sounded a bit weak, and usually he’d make these gargantuan efforts to sound fine on the phone. If you were in a room with him when he was sick, near the end, you’d see him sick and tired but he’d still pull everything together to sound well, “Ca va? How are you,” which um, you know but that wasn’t coming across. You could tell, so I wanted to get out there fast. Anyway I got out there. He died that morning, and I got there in the evening, and then this just weird few days happened. I put my foot on tarmac getting off the airplane, and there were two TV cameras there because I was bringing the Grammy, and with somewhere like Mali, with their [culture of] prizes and the international reputation of the Grammy is hugely important. You know how important music and musicians are over there, so it was a big event: Ali’s second Grammy, and for a Malian musician to have done that twice – I don’t know, I don’t think any other African musician has won it twice. B.E: No, a lot of nominations but nothing like that, no.
N.G.: So, you know there was a huge pride for it. So I did that and then I went to his house, where already there were hundreds of people, well not hundreds of people but a lot of people outside his house, this is about midnight now, the Minister of Culture is there, the Deputy Prime Minister’s outside his house, a lot of family and friends, and Toumani’s there. Toumani has been with the family; he became very close to Ali in the last, you know, couple of years. And the next morning at six o’clock in the morning we had to go down to the morgue where there was another ceremony where Ali’s coffin, his box was brought out and the national flag was laid over it, and the president saluted it and there was a gun salute, and was awarded his posthumous medal of honor, and we all drove to the airport to fly to Niafunke to the burial. But a wind had come up and all the dust and sand had settled in the air, so there was no visibility, and people were saying, “The dust from the North has come to take Ali home.” They said it was very unusual that this had happened.
 Of course, no flights were possible, so eventually we hired six or seven cars and put the body in an ambulance and drove up to Niafunke, which was the only way I’ve made the trip before—partly on roads, and partly on the river. It’s an arduous journey. So we start making this, and there’s a lot of dignitaries there, the Minister of Culture is there. You’ll have to excuse my ignorance again but there’s a couple of colonels, there’s people from the cabinet, a lot of dignitaries making this trip. We left at about, I don’t know, 3 in the afternoon and arrived in Niafunke at 5 o’clock the next morning. And it’s a very difficult trip because it really is across desert and scrub, straight into the funeral ceremony in Niafunke where there were hundreds and hundreds of people. And again he’s honored with the flag over the coffin, with speeches from marabouts, from the imam, from the Minister of Culture, and then we go to bury him just outside Niafunke in this beautiful site, with these two huge trees crossed. And by this time, the whole village is there. Ali was an incredible important man in Mali, but especially in Niafunke, where he’d been mayor for two years--mayor was probably the least of how important he was up there. But, you know, there was a real sense of mass mourning. We buried him, and then, two hours after that, drove back to Bamako for the next ceremony, which was this huge ceremony outside his house where all the musicians were. Afel [Bocoum] was there, Oumou [Sangare] was there, Salif [Keita] was there, and Tiken Jah Fakoly. All of the musicians in Bamako came out in force, plus what looked like the whole of the cabinet and hundreds and hundreds of people-speeches all day, he was on TV all the time. It was on the front page of the newspapers all week. It was a huge national mourning going on, but also it was quite interesting, I think, maybe some of the younger people and the younger musicians weren’t that aware of him, but they will be now, because they were really making an effort, they were proud of him. In Mali, they do things officially, but you could tell that these tributes, especially from the president and minister of culture and various people, were really heartfelt. They’re really good at public speaking in Mali, you know, it’s an art. But you could tell that people were really touched by it. Toumani gave a beautiful speech for him on behalf of the musicians. For me personally, it was very cathartic, making the journey up to Niafunke. But I think Ali was up there laughing because he was endlessly trying to get the politicians to come there to build a road. And they never built a road, they all had to fly. But because of Ali, they had to make this trip by road, so they saw the hardship-you know. He’d made this trip hundreds and hundreds of times. It’s a very difficult trip. I don’t think anyone appreciated when he came to Europe or America that this trip had to be made as well.
 B.E: Perhaps that’s the real explanation for the wind storm.
N.G.: Well, maybe, maybe, because they also said, when he was sick, “You need to go back to Niafunke and he said, “I’m not flying back to Niafunke. I’m going in a car.” Because he used to love that trip. B.E: I remember that.
N.G.: Yeah, he used to love it. So I think that maybe he’ll get a road now, cause they’ve seen it. B.E: Yeah, they’ll have to name it after him.
N.G.: Yeah. [laughs] B.E: That’s wonderful. I’ve also heard that they’re planning for a musical event there to commemorate him there, later in the year?
N.G.: Yeah, well, we’re waiting for final dates. It’ll either be around the 25th of November or the 2nd or first week of December. We should get dates any day now. It’s an homage to Ali they want to do. All the big Mali musicians will be represented. And also, invitations will be going out, once we get the date confirmed, to all the international artists that Ali knew and that want to do it.
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