Rokia Traoré.

© Richard Dumas

When Rokia Traoré walks on stage everything around her begins to pulsate: as if that small body, only apparently thin, were manifesting an ancestral energy. Her musicians warm up and she immediately starts dancing. And then her vibrant voice, with its sensitive elegance, bewitches our ears.

Rokia was born in Kolokani, in the north western part of Mali; as a child she had the fortune of travelling for a long time together with her father, a Malian diplomatic. The contact with the music of different countries, from the United States to Algeria, from Saudi Arabia to Belgium, gave her the stimulus to begin her musical adventure early on, but it was only upon returning to Mali that she was able to give a shape to the kind of music that characterizes her:  “not pop, not jazz, not classical but something contemporary with traditional instruments” (ngoni, balafon and kora).

Rokia invites us to revise our old prejudices about what African music should or shouldn't be.

In 1997, when she was only 23, she won a Radio France Internationale prize as “African Discovery” of the year, an honour previously won by Mali's Habib Koité in 1993. Recording contracts and international tours followed, as Rokia continued to develop her musical ideas, delight audiences around the world and upset the more conservative world music devotees. The sculptural singer has released her new album Tchamantché, impressing the public with that kind of revolution that has been compared to her previous works (Mouneissa, 1997, Wanita, 2000, Bowmboi, 2003). The sounds this time reveal more westernized features because of the use of European instruments (i.e. the Gretsch guitar) and because it was mixed by Phil Brown (who worked with artists like Bob Marley). Despite these considerations the whole album maintains purely African vibrations. The reason? We should quote Rokia once more: “because music depends on the person making it, and I am an African. But I’m from a new generation, with a new way of seeing Africa and our music.”

As per usual the songs are sung in bambara, except for Aimer and The man I love, a remake of the famous piece interpreted by Billie Holiday; the texts touch on themes that speak of everyday life, but also of political and social realities, such as the tricky and dramatic question of illegal immigration (Tounka). Dounia instead is a sort of appeal addressed to the people of Mali because they shouldn’t have to put their glorious past in a drawer (the video of the song is also very interesting).

Dedicated to Ali Farka Touré, this new album is a perfect reflection of her cultural balancing act, as exemplified by the title, which in bambara means ‘balance’. Despite the spirit of evolution of this new album, Rokia’s music seems once again to embody a new African musical idiom, where terms such as ‘traditional’, ‘contemporary’ or ‘fusion’ all seem inadequate. Her voice has become more refined and her sound more blues-like, but she continues gently and inexorably upwards with an incredible strength.

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