Boubecar Traore

Rokia Traore has changed direction once again, with dramatic results. In the five years since her last album, Bowmboi, she has toured the US celebrating the life of Billie Holiday, and written a new work - an African response to the life of Mozart - for the maverick director Peter Sellars. Now comes an intriguing, sophisticated and often intimate set that is quite unlike any of the other great music Mali has produced. Many of the songs are built around her subtle and bluesy electric-guitar work, but also make use of the classical western harp and African ngoni, though no longer the balafon. The result is an exquisitely recorded set that manages to sound contemporary but still distinctively African. It's remarkable mostly because of the quality and range of her singing, which can be quietly slinky and personal, rousing, as well as breathy.

Having already achieved considerable critical and popular acclaim with her first two albums, Rokia Traoré's next step was Bowmboï, the fullest realization to date of her musical vision: a global patchwork so broad that the Kronos Quartet fits seamlessly on the album and The Daily Telegraph has likened her to Björk. With Bowmboï, Traoré emerged as a veritable star in Europe. By its US release on Nonesuch in 2004, the album had sold more than 100,000 copies in France alone and had provoked rave reviews by everyone from MOJO to Rolling Stone to Elle and Time, which has said of the album, “Bowmboï is mesmerizing, casting its spell with virtuoso vocals, rich textures and startling diversity.” While the arrangements on Bowmboï are simple and sparse, the album is rich in musical and lyrical depth.

Wanita is a mild quantum leap from Traore's debut, Mouneissa. The style she cultivated on her debut – a glorious mix of the singer/songwriter with the rootsy, acoustic instruments of her native Mali – is refined here, and she approaches everything with more confidence. She's very much a rarity in African terms, a female singer/songwriter, and one whose lyrics are very progressive, dealing with the rights of women in a patriarchal society. But she's representative of a new generation that has brought forth a lot of professional women, for whom she's become a figurehead.

Boubacar Traore (born 1942 in Kayes, Mali) is a renowned singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Traoreqq also goes by the nickname Kar Kar, "the one who dribbles too much" in Bambara, a reference to his soccer playing: "a nickname I got from playing soccer when I was young. People would yell 'Kari, Kari' - dribble, dribble - the name stuck with me"

On his new album, "Dounia Tabolo", Boubacar Traoré has decided to bring in musicians from the Southern States of the USA he had met on tour: Cedric Watson on violin and washboard, and Corey Harris on guitar, together with Leyla McCalla on cello and vocals. His intention was to change the coloration of his songs, while conserving their original character.

Bamako-based producer/educator Paul Chandler has been documenting the sonic and cultural complexities of Malian traditional music for more than a decade and “Every Song Has Its End” is an out-of-time, visceral collection of sounds from Chandler’s unparalleled archive.