It was a sad day for African music when Ali Farka Touré died on March 7 2006, four months before his final solo album, Savane, was set to hit the shelves.
Savane was the third and final part of producer Nick Gold’s Hotel Mandé Sessions, which had produced 2006’s Toumani Diabaté album, Boulevard de l’Indépendance, and the 2005 Grammy Award-winning collaboration between Farka Touré and Diabaté, which was titled In the Heart of the Moon.
The collaboration was completely improvised, with the musicians claiming that the music flowed naturally and effortlessly.
“It all went down very, very quickly, with very little talk between them,” says Gold. “Ali would just play around with the beginnings of a melody, Toumani would check his tuning, they’d nod at each other and off they would go.”
“Everybody was talking about In the Heart of the Moon when it came out,” says Diabaté. “It was an immediate success, thanks be to God, and it scooped a Grammy Award.
“But let’s say that I am a believer, and I thought that we had more to do,” he says.
So when the duo was asked to perform some shows together in Europe, Diabaté asked Gold to organise for them to travel a little earlier to allow for a further recording session.
“Obviously if Toumani or Ali ever came and told me they wanted to record, I’d just say yes,” says Gold. “So I booked the studio and called Cachaito in Cuba to invite him over.” Orlando “Cachaito” López was a bassist who worked with the Buena Vista Social Club, another of Gold’s stellar production jobs, who has also since died.
“Ali was becoming aware that he was very sick,” says Gold. “It’s incredibly difficult to know whether this awareness coloured his playing, because you can’t avoid hindsight, but it seems to me that Ali’s performance in the studio was deeper, heavier and more searching than on In the Heart of the Moon.”
“When you listen to this album it’s like you’re reading a book about Ali,” says Diabaté. “The album was going to be a summing-up of all the albums that Ali had done in the past.
“It wasn’t about covering old songs just because there weren’t any new ones; no, not at all,” he says. “It was about revealing all the different possibilities once again.”
“After we finished, both Ali and Toumani went away with copies of the recordings and they both seemed very, very happy with it,” says Gold.
“I understand that Ali kept listening to his, at home, right up until his passing.”
The resultant album, Ali and Toumani, is a masterpiece, a worthy successor to In the Heart of the Moon, if not its better, more refined younger brother.
“I believe this album to be stronger and wiser, better than In the Heart of the Moon,” says Diabaté.