Saturday 23 October 2010

Red & Green

by Ali Farka Touré

Red & Green is a CD reissue of two LPs by the late Ali Farka Touré. Incidentally, the original LPs were not called anything like “Red Album” and “Green Album”. According to the BBC review, they were

the last two of seven untitled discs he <Touré> released on the Paris-based Sonodisc label between 1975 and 1988.

In the liner notes (in both English and French), Andy Kershaw writes how, back in 1986, he came across the “Red Album” in the bargain bin of an African record shop in Paris. This find led to “discovery” of Ali Farka Touré by the Western audience.

Personally, I have a trouble with telling the songs apart. At first, most of the “Green Album” sounded like one song to me. It does not look that there are any chord changes either. But this is kind of irrelevant. The music is hypnotic, eternal, beautiful. Like a desert. It puts you in the mood where you don’t want the chord to change, you don’t want the song to end.

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