A Thousand Shows Later

Habib Koité at the Somerville Theatre

Habib Koité with his Godin guitar, from a recent press kit

Habib Koité tours the world music circuit, and has for thirty years, but he is neither a traditional artist, nor does he play a groove-based music that crosses borders through global rhythms. He is a studied, careful singer-songwriter who over the course of a long career has released only six albums of mostly original songs written in multiple languages from his native Mali. “Composing is a terrible process for me, it explains all the white hair I have,” he told Songlines magazine. As a guitarist, he plays without flash - but excels at a subtle vocabulary he has developed on a Canadian-made, electro-acoustic nylon string guitar, the Godin Multiac. He is, in short, a one-off. Perhaps all great artists are. And perhaps that’s why they so often don’t fit the model of any given genre, much less one based on such a vague (and vaguely suspect) concept as “world” music.

Still, what is a working musician to do but tour the available circuit? By the time the pandemic hit, Habib Koité had already played over 1,700 concerts worldwide, and was planning another long tour to support his latest album Kharifa. The album had taken him two years to record, and in October 2019 he reported to online magazine World Music Central, “Currently, I’m quite busy preparing the tour for the release of my new album: rehearsals, assimilating the songs made in the studio. But we’re mostly a live band, so I listen to the rehearsals to see if the songs come out right.” A few months later, of course, that entire tour was cancelled. And staying put in Mali was not easy either. In March 2021, he said to an interviewer:

“I’ve never known such difficult moments. We’d worked so hard on preparing a 34-concert tour in 2020 to showcase Kharifa, only to have it all wiped out by serial cancellations. At the same time, curfews, blockades and political tensions here in Bamako are pushing even established musicians like myself to despair. It’s unprecedented.”

Only now, in 2024, has Habib Koité finally been able to tour behind Kharifa – so it was with relief, and joy, that his Boston audience greeted him back to the stage at the Somerville Theatre last Friday night. But the difficult years were marked on the singer’s face. He moved a bit more slowly than I remember, though with perhaps even more grace – certainly with more gravity.

The band, as fits these hard times, was smaller than in the past. What I assume was a practical stricture had led to a rewarding musical strategy, however; Koité had brought just three players with him, all on traditional acoustic instruments – balafon (Aly Keïta), kora (Lamine Cissoko), and hand percussion (Mama Koné). No full drum kit, no keyboards, no electric bass. Habib Koité’s own guitar was the only electric – and non-African - instrument on stage. (“We are a colonized country and the guitar is an instrument of the colonizer,” Koité has said. But in the next breath: “You also have to have intimacy with your instrument… by trying another music that is not from your culture and this allows you to enter into other sensibilities and at least change the fingering. All this to enrich your own repertoire.”)

The acoustic setting highlighted Koité’s soft touch on his Godin guitar. Without an electric band behind him there was no need to push for volume, and in this context his guitar’s nylon strings felt closer to the kora than to an amplified instrument. Indeed, the kora sounded more metallic than the guitar. And the balafon was louder than either – especially given Aly Keïta’s muscular approach to the instrument.

Habib Koité’s particular technique also brings his guitar closer to African acoustic instruments – he tunes to a pentatonic scale, like a West African n’goni, and often capos high up the neck to raise the pitch (this is easier done on an electro-acoustic than a classical guitar). He plays almost exclusively in one position, relying on open strings. Yet his picking patterns are far from folky, root-note timekeeping – an ocean apart, you might say. “There are arpeggios of our traditional Malian music that I play with nylon strings,” he explains. On record, “I sometimes double with high notes of a metallic guitar to give brilliance in the mix,” but in performance these nylon-string arpeggios slither around the beat and around the scale, sometimes ducking below the other instruments, sometimes emerging above. It’s an elusive, elegant style that wouldn’t call attention to itself if Koité weren’t standing in a spotlight.

The spotlight does suit his voice, however. Koité’s vocal delivery is soft like his guitar playing, which makes him a bit of a crooner – at least in comparison to many of his West African colleagues promoted by the world music circuit. Stars like Youssou N’Dour or Salif Keita, who came up fronting large dance bands, have extremely powerful voices that project without amplification. But Habib Koité, like Bing Crosby, needs the microphone. And he seems comfortable standing before it, rather than moving freely across a stage.

Still, if nothing calls for a spotlight more than a quiet singer downstage, Habib Koité seems to deflect light onto other players as much as absorb it. He is extremely generous as a bandleader – pointing, encouraging, naming, and clearly enjoying his musicians’ solos. At one point there were literal songs of praise for each, as best I understood. And then his longtime percussionist, Mama Koné, offered one back to the maestro. Respect in this band, even at the end of a long tour, is mutual.

I first saw Habib Koité perform twenty years ago, with his band Bamada, at the very same Somerville Theatre. I know the precise date because I wrote a review at the time for our now-defunct weekly arts paper, The Boston Phoenix (which, strangely, is still online). Even then, I questioned the perfunctory labeling of his music for American and European audiences:

“It may be misleading to classify Bamada as ‘world music.’ Their output is not traditional: Koité has taken pains to explain that he makes use of rhythms and modes from more than his own ethnic heritage. And his guitar playing is in an idiom of his own creation… If there’s a tradition here, it’s one you can see Koité and Bamada creating before your very eyes.”

Some thousand shows later, you might say this music has become a de facto tradition. Habib Koité is even playing the identical Godin guitar he first purchased in a Montreal music store in 1994. But no tradition is so flexible as an individual – this is music that has “evolved,” as Koité himself puts it, alongside its composer and bandleader. “I am still in a situation of evolution in the experience of the instrument, in the experimentation of the music that I imagine on the basis of the Malian terroir. It has evolved but it hasn’t changed much,” says Koité. After all, he isn’t a pop star looking for continual surprise through novelty. His artistic project was well defined from the start, and he is pursuing it. Yet the singer on stage last week was not the same man I saw twenty years ago – how could he be? - and neither was his music. Long live that tradition.

Listening to: The Way Out of Easy, by Jeff Parker ETA IVtet

Cooking: pumpkin custard