The Siren Song of Mali

By JOSHUA HAMMER

WE were walking down a dirt road in a neighborhood of Bamako with the mellifluous name of Badalabougou, following the rhythmic beating of a bongo drum. Then we saw it: down an alley lined with dusty neem trees and flowering jacarandas, a few hundred wedding celebrants had gathered under a canopy made from scraps of United Nations-issue sheeting, intently watching a local percussion band play a rousing music known as deedadee. Lithe male dancers wearing leather headdresses, cowrie-studded orange vests, burlap shorts and iron bangles leapt and shook rice-filled calabashes known as yabbaras. A jembe fola ("he who talks with the drum") pounded on a bongo fashioned from sheets of horsehide stretched over a gasoline can. Another percussionist banged a grooved metal cylinder called a karinyan.

Then the dancers disappeared and a petite female singer moved in, circling through the crowd and singing praises to relatives of the bride and groom. Suddenly, she began gesticulating in our direction, while guests looked on, amused.

"She is singing about you," one told me. "She is praising you for visiting Mali."

The band had been playing for six hours when we arrived, at 4 p.m., and the music would go on until long after dark. As the light faded, people spilled out of their houses and gravitated toward the tent. Street vendors circulated on the periphery of the crowd, selling peanuts, chewing gum, bananas, tea, firewood, sandals, toothbrushes and sunglasses. The whole neighborhood had turned out for the show.

"This band usually plays at weddings for people from Bamako who have roots in the Niamala region," said my companion, Paul Chandler, an American record producer and schoolteacher who has lived in Bamako for several years, "but their music is free to everyone who wanders by."

Bamako, a hot, dusty city that sprawls along both banks of the Niger River in southern Mali, near the border with Guinea, does not, at first glance, bear the markings of one of the world's great cultural capitals. Although it is the capital of the former French colony and has a population estimated at more than a million, in many respects the city feels like an overgrown village, with a handful of high-rises along the wide and murky Niger, goats grazing at roadside and a sprawling market, the Grand Marché, filling much of downtown. Yet its musical tradition goes back at least six centuries, and public open-air performances by itinerant musicians, like the one we saw, are as much a part of life here as pickup games of le football. Moreover, during the last decade, the city has undergone a transformation.

A Malian music boom that began in the 1990's, when the soulful vocalist Salif Keita and the singer-guitarist Ali Farka Touré achieved international stardom, has brought an influx of tourists, record producers and aspiring musicians seeking to emulate the stars' successes. (The news of Mr. Touré's death on March 6 from cancer resonated around the world.) As a result, Bamako has become a meeting place and incubator for West African talent, and one of the best places on the planet to hear live music.

Bars and nightclubs have sprung up, often intimate venues with thatched roofs, bare scuffed walls and a few dozen rough wooden tables and chairs, where some of the biggest names in Malian music drop by to play when they're in town. (Several of these establishments, including Mr. Keita's Mofu and Oumou Sangare's Hotel Wassulu, are owned by musicians.) Such Western artists as Robert Plant, Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker and the French Basque star Manu Chao have visited Bamako to jam and record with the local stars.

The city has become a cultural hothouse, in which singers and instrumentalists from Mali's myriad tribes — the Tuaregs of the Sahara, the Sorhai of Timbuktu, the Malinkes from the border region south of Bamako, the Dogon cliff dwellers, the Wassalous near the Ivory Coast, the Peuls of central Mali — mix and fertilize one another's art.

"The number of ethnic groups here is vast, and each culture is distinct," said Mombé Traoré, a dreadlocked disc jockey in his 30's known as D. J. Vieux who agreed to be my guide during several days of sampling the music scene in early February. "Everyone meets up in Bamako."