Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 7:30 pm Sidi Touré Malian guitarist and singer
"Sidi Touré is a worthy successor to Ali Farka Touré. Among Songhaï musicians, Sidi is the best. Sidi Toure has all the talent, quality , simplicity, playing and singing skills, it's incredible. We need people like Sidi." – Bassekou Kouyaté At 801 South 48th Street (Calvary Church, corner of 48th and Baltimore) Tickets ($10-30), music samples and more information: http://crossroadsconcerts.org/?p=3103 Sidi Touré's "Songhaï blues" is warm and inviting, with precise acoustic guitar picking intricately interwoven with his clear tenor voice and a second guitar or a traditional lute like the kurbu and kuntigui (which also provide a kind of minimalist percussion through the tapping of the players' fingernails against their skin heads). Touré made his first guitar as a child, constructing it from his wooden writing slate in the ancient town of Gao, Mali, once the capital of the Songhaï empire. Like another Malian noble turned singer, Salif Keita, he faced a conflict between the inexorable pull of music and the expectations of family and society. Touré's family, descendants of ancient kings, had been sung about, and sung to, by traditional griots for centuries, but until a small boy challenged the rules, the Touré's did not sing! Despite his family's disapproval (Sidi's older brother often broke his homemade guitars in protest), Touré became the lead singer of his school's band. In 1976, Touré became the youngest member of Gao's regional orchestra, the Songhaï Stars, who played bi-annual festivals like the Bamako Biennale and toured both regionally and nationally. Early on, etiquette and convention demanded that he sang in Bambara, the capital's local language, which often found Touré singing lyrics in a vernacular he did not understand. This changed in 1984, when he won the award for best singer for "Manou Tchirey," a song of his own, written in the Songhaï language. After winning the same award an unprecedented second time in 1986, he took the band to the northern regions of Mali and to Niger, where Songhaï was spoken regularly, and toured much of the western Sahel region. Sidi is widely praised for his ability to capture a sense of tradition while also challenging it. Both his lyrics and guitar style are full of reflection, hope and promise; even in some of his sparsest arrangements he manages to ignite social dialogue.---- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to the list named "UnivCity-Announce." To unsubscribe or for archive information, see <http://www.purple.com/list.html>. You may post announcements to this list, but this list attempts to prevent discussion. Please use univcity to discuss messages on this list. Subscribers of univcity receive all mail to this list.
