Ali Farka Touré - Talking Timbuktu

Ali Farka Touré est originaire de Kanau, un village proche du fleuve Niger, à environ 65 km de Tombouctou. Il appartient à une famille noble de l’ethnie Djerma, elle-même issue de l’ethnie Songhaï. Son père était un militaire, il décède pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Sa famille s’installe alors à Niafunké (250 km au sud-ouest de Tombouctou). Il ne fréquente pas l’école, il passe ses journées à travailler aux champs. Déjà, il s’intéresse à la musique, et plus particulièrement à certains instruments : le gurkel, petite guitare traditionnelle, le njerka, violon populaire, la flûte peul ou le luth ngoni à quatre cordes.

Farka Touré commence alors une carrière solo en donnant des concerts dans toute l’Afrique de l’Ouest. Son premier disque Farka sort en 1976. Dans les années 1980, il effectue plusieurs tournées internationales en Europe, au Japon et aux États-Unis. Après quelques albums à succès, il enregistre en 1991 The Source avec le bluesman Taj Mahal et s’ouvre ainsi à la fusion de la World music. La sortie en 1993 de l’album Talking Timbuktu en duo avec Ry Cooder, le guitariste américain, le propulsera sur la scène internationale avec succès : il reçoit un Grammy Award pour cet album.

Ali Farka Toure - TalKing Tinbuktu

Pass: Kristalna

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - Mustt Mustt

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (born October 13, 1948, died August 16, 1997), was a Pakistani musician, primarily a singer of Qawwali, the devotional music of the Sufis (a mystical tradition within Islam). He featured in Time magazine's 2006 list of 'Asian Heroes'
Traditionally, Qawwali has been a family business. Nusrat's family has an unbroken tradition of performing qawwali for the last 600 years. Among other honorary titles bestowed upon him, Nusrat was called Shahenshah-e-Qawwali, meaning The Emperor of Qawwali
Initially, Nusrat's father did not want him to enter the family business. He had his heart set on Nusrat choosing a more respectable career path by becoming a doctor or an engineer, because he felt Qawwals had a low social status. However, Nusrat showed such an aptitude for and interest in Qawwali that his father finally relented and started to train him in the art. At first, he was taught to play tabla, playing alongside his father. He then learnt Raag Vidya and bolbandish. Once he had mastered such arts, he was taught to sing within the classical framework of khayal in the Qawwal Bachchon Gharana and learnt dhrupad from the Dagar family. This training was left incomplete when Fateh Ali Khan died in 1964, while Nusrat was still in school. However, the training was continued by Nusrat's paternal uncles, Mubarak Ali Khan and Salamat Ali Khan.

Mustt Mustt is the first Qawwali fusion album of singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and guitarist and record producer Michael Brook. It was released in 1990 on Peter Gabriel 's Real World Records label.. Michael’s first collaboration became an early benchmark of the then-burgeoning world music genre; the sessions for Mustt Mustt found Brook adopting new approaches to studio recording. Putting Michael together with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the foremost exponent of the Pakistani devotional singing known as qawwal, was initially the idea of Peter Gabriel, at whose Real World studio facility the sessions took place. With David Bottrill engineering, Michael embarked on an intensive four day session with Nusrat, the pair learning how to collaborate in spite of each man’s inability to speak the other’s language

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan-Mustt Mustt

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Yerba Mater - Raga Praga

Coming back from long journeys, of different type, often not merely geographical, three guys met, somewhere on the outskirts of a big city, picked up their funny and awkward instruments and began to play. It was everything but an incident...They were sipping yerba mate to stay awake and play more. It worked...Yerba was truly the Mater of invention. From the very beginning there was this notion that the outcome of the event was quite unlike anything they had previously heard. Soon they had their first chance to record their music in an empty concert hall of the Warsaw Music Academy. That was spooky. All those empty chairs and the four of them Bart (cello), Cierlik (al-`ud), Raf (saz, baglama) and Seba( sopilka, bass recorder).

In 2002 Yerba Mater began to perform life in Poland playing at different kinds of folk festivals, refugees days, theatres, museums etc. They play almost only their own compositions, improvisation and maybe two folk tunes to ease the tension. The thing they played was always very different from everything else that was played. Some people were a bit suspicious as it might have sounded a bit Moorish, and that wasn't exactly the best time for anything with the sign of the Crescent on

Yerba Mater - Raga Praga