BOOK REVIEW: Away From The Light of Day - Amadou & Mariam with Idrissa Keita

Despite the double-billing and familiar profile of Mali’s first couple on the cover, this slim, engaging volume (written with Idrissa Keita and translated by Ann Wright of Motorcycle Diaries repute) is in reality the Amadou Bagayogo story, with wife Mariam not appearing on the scene until chapter thirteen of seventeen.

Against the backdrop of Malian independence and subsequent political upheaval, and the ritualistic vagaries and moral underpinning of Malian tradition, Amadou tells the tale of his failing eyesight and crushingly unsuccessful operation to correct it at the age of twelve, how he turned to music to assuage the hurt of exclusion from festivals and playground games ,and with the help of an encouraging mother and well-connected bass-playing uncle (who counted the superstar Guinean guitarist Kanté Manfila amongst his acquaintances) found fame, girls, patronage, travel and of course love in a career that is now into its fifth decade.

Amadou’s no griot and it shows in the matter-of-fact conversational tone (one assumes that the book was ghosted via conversations between Bagayogo and Keita). He’s very much at the centre of the simply-told story, the many characters and incidents informing an almost disconcertingly phlegmatic narrative no matter how colourful or tragic. All are treated as fatalistic bumps in the road on the way to a role in the acclaimed Ambassadeurs band in the early ‘70s and enrolment in Mali’s first Institute for the Blind at the end of that decade, where he became a teacher and forged his partnership with Mariam Doumbia (who herself has been blind since she contracted measles aged five). The relationship was not without its hitches. The feeling amongst family members was that both would have fared better if married to a sighted person, and jealousy and workload commitments resulted in a loss of teaching focus that compromised Amadou’s relationships with his students. Through it all Amadou comes across as a normal guy dealing in a down-to-earth way with the contrasting impacts of his disability and fortune, as the pair’s early mixed success paves the way for eventual global success that led to the still-remarkable, peerless Dimanche a Bamako (the already well-documented “glory years” are briefly recounted in the final chapter).

Finally, Andy Morgan bowls a few easy balls in a recent interview with the couple, which reveals little more than that they continue to be one of the most modest and least affected of superstars.

BOOK REVIEW: THE NO-NONSENSE GUIDE TO WORLD MUSIC - Louise Gray (ISBN: 978-1-906523-12-1) £7.99

World Music is such an amorphous concept that pretty much any writer could take a subjective snapshot of what it means today and present that as the ‘essential’ or ‘definitive’ guide to the genre and the title of this slim volume could mislead us into thinking that the author has indeed attempted just that kind of approach. Instead, this book is not so much a guide or a work of reference as a series of short essays wherein New Internationalist magazine’s music correspondent takes a thematic approach to “locat[ing] several manifestations of world music within a larger context” (as she puts it), with in-depth chapters on European genres rembetika and fado, and music as political catalyst, before tackling (perceived) authenticity in music and asking whether (and how) the outsider – ie the world music consumer - can engage with music that is essentially community-based. There’s a brief run-down of the oft-recounted early history of the term “world music”, but other than that no real attempt to map out a chronology of events or sketch out biographies of the major artists involved. Nor indeed are there descriptions or playlists of landmark albums or songs (although there is a decent, if far from comprehensive, discography and list of DVDs and books at the end). Mention of artists is dependent on their relevance to the essay in hand; contrasting examples of this - Pakistani Sufi great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan gets mentioned as part of the essay on Sufism, gnawa and trance music, but the former Zaire’s superstar guitarist and bandleader Franco isn’t anywhere to be seen. No surprise that, when you consider that African music is addressed mainly in contemporary geopolitical terms, through the mention of bands such as Tinariwen (who are described a few times as ‘proto-blues’, with no real explanation as to what that term might actually mean). In the section on music as political motivator, the author drifts off the whole idea of music’s engagement with the rest of the world (surely the whole point of “world music”, if indeed it has one) by focusing on the controversial role (and subsequent conviction) of singer-songwriter Simon Bikindi in encouraging the slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda. It’s a powerful topic, and one worthy of debate, and it’s one that Gray addresses with characteristic care and admirable balance. But Bikindi’s impact on World Music was negligible, and it might have been more relevant to open out the earlier reference to fado’s (perceived) relationship to past Portuguese regimes (given its recent cross-over into the World Music market) and/or developing the intriguing section on Middle Eastern music and the effect of artists, such as Idan Raichel, that are familiar outside of the region. Or indeed focus on any number of South American or African artists – from Algeria to Zimbabwe – whose broader exposure brings into question our attitudes to the socio-political milieu from which they evolved (Tibet/China is touched upon and merits further investigation by the writer at a later juncture). That gripe apart, it is refreshing to see these subjects tackled without fear of crossing established de facto boundaries, and Gray is to be applauded for the way she draws on disparate viewpoints (from the anti-tree-hugger cynicism of the Magnetic Fields to Laibach’s subversion of East European nationalism) and includes Lomax-era investigation of American roots music as a template for the rights and wrongs of celebrating ‘authenticity’. It all makes for an engaging and thought-provoking read, leaving a trail of thoughts, questions, ideas and debates in the reader’s mind about what motivates our desire for new sounds from outside our social sphere, despite not giving any real sense of which of those sounds are worthy of further investigation.