#bounaly

Bounaly hails from Niafounke, a small town in central Mali best known as Ali Farka Touré’s birthplace. It’s a town that’s famous for music, where music is a key part of the local economy. Touré, for instance, used part of his earnings to pay for an irrigation system; he’s been the mayor of the town. And yet even here, where everyone understands the spiritual and commercial value of music, factional violence has turned things upside down. Bounaly fled to Bamako when war in Northern Mali spilled over into his hometown.

Dimanche á Bamako documents the way that the dispossessed come together, far from home, to celebrate the sounds that they grew up among. On Sundays in Bamako, people gather in squares and streets and courtyards around make-shift sound systems as immigrant northerners let their desert sound rip.

And rip it does—with a vengeance. “Wato To” takes shape above the murmur of audience members, its guitar licks searing, its rhythmic pulse driving and strong, a thread of melancholy woven through its hip-moving grooves. The sound quality isn’t perfect, but this somehow adds to the charm. Guitar solos flare in mid-flight into frantic buzz, like a phoenix catching fire to live one more time. About halfway through the cut kicks up a notch, both in tempo and in energy, pitched drums rattling, guitar spiraling, Bounaly shouting and grunting and yelping in increasingly frantic bursts. You can’t hear this part without picturing bodies in motion, arms raised, hands punching, a sea of cathartic gesture, of communal release.

Bounaly has his lyrical side. “Ma Cherie” unspools in languid eddies and swirls of guitar, the vocals full of longing. But it, too, catches fire mid-cut, in a burst of trebly, quick fingered shredding that rachets up tension in stair steps, higher and higher and higher, before subsiding into a liquid groove. But it’s the antic, manic, speed-addled rushes like “Mali Mussow” that really stand out, where the band is playing as fast as it can and the people, you imagine, are hopping frantically to keep up. It’s like the world is after them, and maybe it is, and only music can magic the danger away.