Music From Timbuktu...

A couple of times I've gone to Chicago for Riot Fest. Riot Fest is a big festival event with mostly bands that were not of my taste or experience but like any musical thing sometimes I would rather see something I have not seen before than as Aldous Huxley said "keep on going through that same door." At least I think he said that. I did not go through that Riot Fest door this year. I was always aware that at the same time the Chicago Cultural Center was always sponsoring a World Music Festival which is staged at various venues around town and this year I got to attend a Show by Al Bilali Soudan.  

I'll fight you on this fact. Without Sub Saharan Africa we would not have pop music in the USA. Get your dukes up because the twanging sounds and the invention of banjo, the fiddle, the dobro and familiar chord progressions have their root there in the hot desert sands. Even the dances done by this group at the show are very similar to what you might see at Othar Turner's Goat BBQ every year. If you listen to some Mississippi Hill Country style blues you with the drones and repetitive figures in the music you would dawn on the idea that any musician from Mali would be right at home. The music is there in Mali and it sent no infusion of refreshing messengers after a certain point in time instead continuing the similar traditions through DNA and ancestral memory 

There is a big global music scene for this kind of thing and I have collected up many cds but it's usually an electric type sound where as this group was more in the folkloric tradition with the dances and acoustic instruments. You could probably compare this music to our rural blues vs. the electrified urban versions.  

Actually I've seen a few videos where Robert Plant, former lead singer for the old band Led Zeppelin updated some of that music by adding these African instruments into his group and I thought it really revitalized the old tired classic rock.     

Al Bilali Soudan means Timbuktu. 

These are free shows sponsored by the Cultural Center so it's your government at work bringing you interesting things so you don't keep going through that same door.