Taj Mahal & Bassekou Kouyaté, Royal Festival Hall - music review

Taj Mahal and Bassekou Kouyaté's performance was a show with potential that it didn’t fulfil but was at least timed early so people could get home for the football
Blues brothers: Taj Mahal & Bassekou Kouyaté
Simon Broughton14 July 2014

Grammy-winning Taj Mahal is one of America’s most respected blues musicians and Bassekou Kouyaté is king of the Malian ngoni — a West African precursor of the banjo. So blues meets roots-of-the-blues makes musical sense.

Taj Mahal (he was actually born Henry Saint Clair Fredericks) opened the show with his musicians on bass guitar and drums. Dressed in a colourful shirt and hat, he gave good anecdotes for several of the songs, but barking his vocals performed as if on remote.

He was most charismatic in his guitar and, particularly, banjo solos. But he sounded one-dimensional in comparison to Bassekou with his more sophisticated-sounding line-up of wood and goat-skin desert lutes, gourd percussion and Ami Sacko, his wife, on vocals.

There was more colour, texture and power. One of his new songs, Desert du Mali, was encouraging people back to the country and the Festival in the Desert now that the Islamists have gone.

But it was presumably for the collaboration that most people had come.

It didn’t start well, with an aimless and under-rehearsed blues with a lot of growling, but improved with Taj Mahal’s song Zanzibar and others from the Taj Mahal and Toumani Diabaté collaboration album Kulanjan which, if you believe internet rumours, is supposed to be a favourite of Barack Obama.

It was a show with potential that it didn’t fulfil but was at least timed early so people could get home for the football.

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