Not sure how I haven’t heard about these guys before. But my source tells me they have signed to the holy motherlode, Fat Possum Records.
These boys are ‘a desert blues music group from Timbuktu, Mali.’ They are blindingly good musicians, which is usually a curse for the kind of blues I like.
You probably remember Feel Like Going Home, https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1065622/ the Martin Scorsese documentary that follows Corey Harris as he traces the blues back from Chicago to Delta to West Africa. And here’s the link- one of the African musicians he meets is Ali Farka Toure, and they find some clear similarities between Malian roots music and blues.
So I guess the idea is that modern west African music and blues rock should be a natural fit.
I didn’t like the second record, ‘Resistance,’ from 2017. By this time they had a bit of major label distribution and this is what Jamiroquai thinks blues sounds like. Apart from a pretty lilting thing in the middle with echoes of Jr Kimbrough, it sounds like some A&R exec has taken one look at them and fitted them into a stereotype of ‘World Music’ backed with jazz funk and occasional bouts of hip hop.
But in the first and third LPs there are some great Mali blues crossovers like Worry and Soubour.
Anybody else like this stuff? I think crossovers is one way Delta Blues can be a living genre rather than the rather sterile cul de sac of Joe Bonamassa.
Slim Jim Blues 