On paper and in person, Malian singer and songwriter Habib Koite seems the perfect world music artist. He sings and plays guitar beautifully. He writes varied songs, informed by a broad understanding of Western harmony and arranging, but rooted in African rhythms and melodies. His lyrics are both topical and resonant. He has built a juggernaut band whose musicianship and stage choreography make much of the competition look like wannabes. He's attractive, intelligent, modest and articulate. He speaks fluent French and his English is coming. What's more, Koite is a lifelong student of Malian traditional music, perhaps the coolest and most soulful body of music in Africa, and one whose connections with American blues, jazz and rock have made it a natural for global marketing. Indeed, Koite seems so perfect that you might conclude some global pop think tank conjured him out of thin air. But there lies the kicker. Koite is a natural. He has quietly followed his instincts for over 20 years and never made the slightest concession to the "world music" biz.

I sensed Koite's star potential when I first visited Bamako, Mali, in 1992. He was something of an upstart in Bamako's crowded music scene at the time. He and his band Bamada ("mouth of the crocodile") were gigging in small clubs around town, mixing blues vamps and the odd jazz standard with Koite's idiosyncratic compositions. A year earlier, Koite had won the prestigious Radio France International African Discoveries award for an anti-smoking ditty called "Cigarette Abana," featured on his first album, Musa Ko. After our interview, Koite--ever the nice guy--offered to give me a ride across town on his motorcycle. When he dropped me off, a gang of children surrounded us in the dusty street and began chanting the refrain from Koite's hit--"No more cigarette. No more cigarette. Abana!"

Koite just smiled his million-dollar, "gee-whiz" grin, but I knew this was significant. Koite was not a griot--an official praise-singer working in the ancient ways of the Malian music profession. Nor was he a foreigner, nor a local boy who had made good abroad, like Salif Keita. These kids knew Koite because of a new phenomenon in Bamako--legalized private radio. With a dozen or so stations competing to promote local music, the city's pop music landscape was changing beneath our feet, and Habib Koite represented a new kind of celebrity.

Koite's band made an impression even in those early days. Boubacar Sidibe's harmonica playing gave the songs an original color, and Baba Cissoko's splendid outings on traditional instruments like talking drum and balfon met and exceeded Bamako's high performance standards. What impressed me most about Koite's music back then was his guitar playing. In a world where "traditional" guitarists have developed rigid rules for playing Malian music on guitar, Koite was breaking all of them.

Using a nylon-string guitar and avoiding the universally-African, thumb-and-forefinger picking technique, he was struggling to play music from traditional instruments like the doso ngoni and the kora in his own way. Speaking recently over the phone about his sensational second album, Ma Ya (Putumayo), Koite told me that he still writes songs on guitar. "I think the force of my feeling comes from my work with the guitar," he said. "My way of playing comes from my training in classical guitar, where I learned to pick with all the fingers on my right hand. This along with my research in traditional music has given my playing this certain color."

Koite caresses the strings to produce textures. His rhythms are forceful, and always characteristically Malian. He stands apart from other guitar-based, West African singers. He's at least as innovative as his countryman Ali Farka Touré, but considerably more varied stylistically. And where a traditional guitarist like Guinea's Alpha Yaya Diallo has cleverly fit lightning-quick griot riffs into broader pop formulas, like African rumba and reggae, Koite keeps the focus on Mali. He points to the diversity of musical modes and rhythms in Mali, and his desire to dignify all of them. "Here, each ethnic group has its own music," he once told me. "And that's it. Those who play the Manding balafon think that people who play the Senufo balafon are savages. They're not intelligent. They have only five notes. Now me, I went to music school. I'm curious about lots of kinds of music. I play the ethnic musics of Mali in my way."

When Koite tried his hand at the Songhoi takamba style from the Malian north, he made a huge hit in the southern capital, where Songhoi are a small minority. Koite's song, "Fatima," outdid even the best-selling records made by actual Songhoi artists!

After the success of Musa Ko--his rocking 1992 debut, at last being released in the US on Alula this spring--Koite decided to focus on his gift for universalizing Malian culture. "We were looking for a more acoustic sound," he told me in reference to the new Ma Ya. "We wanted to add more traditional instruments--kamelengoni (small hunter's harp used in Wassoulou music like that of Oumou Sangaré), jeli n'goni (the griot ancestor of the banjo), balafon and calabash. When we mixed, I told the engineer I wanted the guitar to sound very acoustic so that it would mix with the traditional instruments. The presence of these instruments on this record creates a feeling of calm."

Don't confuse calm with bland. Ma Ya's gentleness has depth and bite you won't find on New Age records. The title track builds on the lope of hunter's music with booming doso ngoni and the percussive, metal scraping of the karagnan. Koite's guitar enters decisively, blending without taking a back seat. On the mesmerizing "Sirata," Koite sidles up to the bright plinking melodies of the jeli n'goni. Track after track, the soundscapes on Ma Ya prove richly evocative. In all, this may be one of the most successful meldings of acoustic guitar with traditional African instruments ever recorded.

Koite writes songs with subtle hooks and durable melodies, and he sings in a velvety tenor that exudes strength and intimacy. No surprise that his songs dwell on the need to protect and preserve Malian culture. In "Bitile," he sings about a "fear for my Manding culture/she is so beautiful." I asked him what he fears.

"I fear all the influences from the world," he said, "Because of television, we see everything in our homes and villages now. We see mostly the good side of [European and American] life. That can be bad, especially for the young. We don't have certain things, like technology, but there are things that we are the only ones to have. If we lose them, they will be lost not only for us but for the whole world." Paradoxically, Koite aims this message at Malian youth by putting it into a Malian-ized rap song. "I say in the song, `Be careful not to just take up the behavior of an American,' but at the same time, the music has the spirit of rap. The lesson speaks for itself."

Elsewhere, Koite sings of his "love" for technology. Instead of a predictable, anti-Western rant, Koite offers honest questions about how Africans should evaluate the blinding glories of foreign cultures. He like the image of an African round-house with a thatched roof and a computer inside hooked up to the internet.

On both of his records, Koite sings the praises of Malian women. On songs like "Musa Ko" and the sweet, rumba-inflected "Saramaya" from Ma Ya, Koite voices adoration for female "charm" and "beauty." This could easily sound patronizing, but Koite makes his case with sincerity and substance. "In reality," he told me, "women occupy the best position when it comes to education, procreation, child rearing, in fact everything that involves children. A Malian woman is modest, but she pays very close attention. She preserves life by paying attention. She shows us how we must pay attention to life."

Koite boasts the increasing presence of women at high levels of Mali's democratic government, and the fact that excision (female genital mutilation) is now illegal nationwide. He also points out that Malian women often get a raw deal in the cases of divorce or the death of a husband. But he adds, "All of that is under discussion now in Mali."

Putumayo is releasing Ma Ya simultaneously with a compilation called Mali to Memphis, an African American Odyssey. So when Koite brings his band to these shores (hopefully this summer), he will face questions about the connections between Malian music and the blues. Don't expect pat answers. "This is not simple," he told me, before launching into an analysis of musical characteristics in Songhoi, Bambara, Manding and Peul music, and Mississippi Delta blues. "If you are a Bambara, the day you encounter blues music, you are going to say, `This music resembles Bambara music.' People say `blues' because that's what they know." Everything depends on point of view.

Koite's point of view is unique. He belongs to that select class of African artists who operate both inside and outside tradition. Mali's greatest pop musician, Salif Keita, had to leave behind the strictures of his country in order to blossom fully, and though he has now moved back to Bamako, he works on the international plane, recording most of his music in Paris and New York. Artists who have stayed in Mali but still managed to create international reputations--Ali Farka Touré, Wassoulou queen Oumou Sangaré, or griot diva Ami Koita, for example--mostly started out working within a defined cultural niche. Koite has never relied on an ethnic niche. Neither has he gone to Paris or Berlin and fashioned himself as a pan-African crossover artist. As such, his work has the kind of integrity and balance that promises lasting stardom, something rare and wonderful that no world music think tank could conjure. Banning Eyre
Contributed by: Banning Eyre

First published: Rhythm, May 1999