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Rokia Traoré - The man I love

@ Musicmeeting, Nijmegen, The Netherlands 2009-06-01

Rokia Traoré has no desire

to be confined by genre

 

If the Malian singer’s mix of ancient and modern upsets blinkered Europeans, she’s in no mood to apologise

 

By Clive Davis

 

The young woman, chic and slender, who gets off the train at Gare Montparnasse looks much like any Parisian. No one pays her any heed. Rokia Traoré may be one of the world’s most adventurous musicians, yet today she is just another passenger. Another concert awaits in the evening. Before that, she is due to take part in a programme about francophone culture on French TV.

 

She spends much of her life travelling, physically and spiritually, commuting between cultures, floating between tradition and modernity. She explores the ancestral music of Mali — the revered guitarist Ali Farka Touré was one of her mentors — yet she is just as comfortable taking part in a Mozart festival with the opera maverick Peter Sellars. She sings of village life but grew up listening to Miles Davis, Bob Marley and Dire Straits. On her last album she paid homage to Billie Holiday with a treatment of The Man I Love.

 

In the record shops her work is filed under “world music”. Yet if the term seems perfectly suited to her cosmopolitan outlook, she fears being confined to a well-meaning cultural ghetto. Music is music in her eyes, which is why her latest British tour, which opens this week, finds her on a double bill with the experimental rock trio Sweet Billy Pilgrim.

 

She cut an unconventional figure from the moment she arrived on the international circuit. Here was an unassuming young woman who strummed an acoustic guitar, much like a West African Tracy Chapman, while surrounded by the accoutrements of ancient Malian music. Some of us, frankly, did not know what to make of her a decade ago when she played a low-key show at the Pizza Express Jazz Club in Soho. Could such introverted work ever find an audience beyond a narrow coterie of roots enthusiasts? It seemed unlikely at the time. Traoré pushed on regardless, each successive album experimenting with new sonorities. By the time she released the acclaimed Tchamantché — easily one of the best albums of 2008 — she had incorporated the rough-hewn textures of the rockers’ Gretsch guitar.

 

The reviews were overwhelmingly positive, yet Traoré still feels she has to win over the sceptics. In France, in particular, she argues, there remains that stubborn sense among some world music purists that she is simply too cosmopolitan for her own good. As we sit in a Lebanese restaurant around the corner from the station, she does not mince her words. “Some Europeans who love Africa love it for exoticism,” she says. “Anything modern doesn’t interest them. I don’t know why they don’t realise that the traditional and the modern can exist alongside each other. I think they have an image of Africa which they don’t want to change. It’s horrible. It’s the same all over Europe, but France is the worst because here there’s that pretension of knowing Africa.

 

“If they tried to think about it objectively they would be ashamed of themselves. They have decided how African music is supposed to be. So, when a European musician goes to Africa to make a record because he wants a different sound, then it’s amazing, it’s genius. But when an African does something with a European inspiration, it’s not normal.”

 

Her footloose upbringing as the daughter of a diplomat gives her a wider perspective on the mingling of cultures. The fourth of seven children, she spent time in the Middle East, the US and Europe, acquiring most of her secondary education in Brussels. If that makes her sound like a pampered child of the globalised superclass, she is actually refreshingly down to earth.

 

Although her family did not belong to Mali’s caste of traditional singers, much of her love of music came from her father, who had played saxophone in bands in his youth. A pan-African idealist who was educated in the Soviet Union (Mali’s postcolonial rulers were very much men of the antediluvian Left), he encouraged his daughter to study social sciences and anthropology. Music, however, proved a much stronger attraction.

 

She made her name in Mali first as a member of a rap band. It was only later that she gravitated to the folk end of the repertoire. In some respects she was approaching her own culture as an outsider. Having concentrated on writing French lyrics at the outset, she set herself the task of composing in her native language, Bambara. And when she first returned to Mali she self-consciously immersed herself in traditional female tasks — “learning about the life of African women”, as she put it in one interview — from doing the housework to cutting wood. On the musical front, she came up against a tight-knit musical community that was not always welcoming to outsiders. Traoré persisted nonetheless; that Ali Farka Touré gave her his blessing made all the difference.

 

In some respects she seems destined to remain the eternal outsider. Married to her French manager, Thomas Weill, she still has an apartment in the cathedral city of Amiens. But in the past year or so she has taken the decisive step of shifting her base back to the Malian capital, Bamako, so that she can focus on the work of her recently launched music education project, the Fondation Passerelle (French for “footbridge”). Injecting some of her own money and raising funds from corporate sponsors such as the telecoms company Orange, Traoré is setting up training schemes for young people who seek a career in the music business. It is a small organisation; she and a colleague take on most of the daily workload. Still, given the lack of infrastructure in the country, every little bit helps.

 

As she explains: “I started it because I felt ashamed at having nothing to tell young people when they approached me for advice when I was touring. They would say they wanted to go to Europe and I would say, ‘No, don’t do that’, without having anything concrete to offer them.”

 

Each small step — such as getting recording equipment past customs officials eager to have their palms greased — can be a struggle, and a sound and lighting scheme has encountered more than its share of obstacles. But Traoré is delighted with the progress that a group of trainee singers is making: a choir has been formed, with a concert due to take place next month. Traoré is so busy with administration that she has time to see her parents only once a week, when she drops off her son at their house. Although she plans to work on a 2012 Olympics project with the Kronos Quartet — an ensemble that is always looking for ways of broadening its palette — she will cut back on touring for a while once she finishes this summer’s dates. The foundation will take precedence.

 

As Traoré has discovered, watching the young hopefuls take their first steps in the profession has changed her own priorities. “Of course, I want to develop beyond world music. But the foundation has changed my point of view on things in general. I’m not so stressed about my career.

 

“One thing I don’t like about being a musician is that you have to become very selfish. It’s very hard to keep on this Earth and remember that you are nothing. Yes, I’m as narcissistic as anyone else. But this work has made me very serene. It has helped to remind me that I’m not the centre of the world.”

via: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article7105204.ece

 

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