This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #102 (October / November 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Radio Planet 3
by Cliff Furnald

Much is made of the "localness" of music, of its place in a culture, a geography, a social milieu; its roots, if you will. I am probably among the first to check the authenticity of the sources, to peruse the map and see where its from and how it might relate to its neighbors. In these days of global communication, global travel, and universal access, artists are likely to know more about the music of people thousands of miles away, sometimes in more detail than the music made two counties east of their own home. These musicians fuse and abuse "world music" and pummel it into submission to create something that is simply new, obstinately different, or infuriatingly trendy, and the record racks and home pages of the global marketplace are rife with records purporting to have discovered something deep in another world.

And then there are true geniuses like these:

There has been a lot of buzz about how Moffou [Universal] is the big return to his roots for Mali's favorite son, Salif Keita. It seems like an odd announcement, as Keita has fused both the traditional and the modern for many years, beginning with his days with the group Ambassaduers, and this recording is no exception. In the biggest productions on the recording, songs like the thundering "Madan," with its driving rhythm section, its complex percussion ensemble, and a big backing chorus, still lean heavily on the combined strings of the electric guitar and the acoustic kamel n'goni, the incessant beat of the Malian desert and the urban persistence of jazz and rock.

This is where Keita has always excelled, and in the past, when he strayed too far from these roots for the purpose of Euro-popularity or even just artistic curiosity, the music often failed. There are no such failures on Moffou, and there is a good reason for this. In the recent past, Keita has been beguiled by producers like Joe Zawinal and Wally Badarou, whose interesting experiments were never really what this great writer and singer needed. Here we finally get the real deal, with a recording produced by longtime Keita companion and guitarist Kante Manfila, whose deep understanding of the man and the music brings Keita's songs to full fruition. Manfila and Keita know that their roots, while intensely loyal to Mali, Senegal, and west Africa in general, reach deeply into Havana, Paris, and New York with little differentiation. What they create is an unselfconscious fusion, born of history instead of media hipness.

This allows for some stunning moments. The stark "Souvent" is a simple acoustic guitar, its notes wrapping around an electronically processed vocal, the echoes playing mournfully off the guitar's melody, Keita's voice sounding almost unstuck in time and space; it exists in no one nation, no one culture. A number of the songs on Moffou are more playful than one would expect from Keita, with some lilting accordion, light Caribbean or Cape Verdean influences in the rhythms, bright choruses of call and response that offer music with more swaying than dance groove. The opening track, "Yamore" brings a lot of this together, offering a distinctly Malian melody over a metallic percussion, an insistent accordion that sets up the sound for the guest vocals of Cape Verdean queen Cesaria Evora; the barefoot diva meets the mansa of Mali; her smokey, whiskey-tinged earthiness, his serene contemplation. It doesn't matter where they come from, only that you are there.

There are 3 more recordings discussed in this column from Dirty Linen #102 (Oct./Nov. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.