Markus James

Songwriter Markus James has been visiting Mali for years, exploring the relationships between its music and his beloved American blues. In the language of the Songhai of northern Mali, a toubab is a white man. When James visited Timbuktu to write and record new songs with three traditional Malian musicians, the resulting fusion became the subject of the documentary film Timbuktoubab, a colorful, loving memoir of musical camaraderie and interchange between peers and paragons.

In the film, James' warm relationship with calabash player Hamma, kamale n'goni player Solo, and njarka violin virtuoso Hassi unfolds through anecdotes about the development of songs and videos. Parallels of legend and philosophy, as well as paths of divergence reveal themselves before the camera, offering a rare insight into the music and culture of Mali.

"After Nightbird, which was made in a studio down in Bamako, we started meeting up in TB2. Solo and I would travel up there, with Hamma and Hassi coming in from their villages which are in that region. And when we started to play together, it became apparent that this was not going to be like Nightbird. It was going to be a group sound, and it was going to have the sound of the adobe-walled rooms we were playing in.

"And then Hamma started singing, and the whole dimension of lyric ideas came in. This has been endlessly amazing for me, to find myself playing something like "Wabissimila" with the great Hamma Sankare, and to realize that we wrote this song together from a simple blues-type riff. And now he's singing some philosophical ideas from his ancient culture (and the Songhai is as far back as it goes, they're thought to be the first people to settle down and build houses, right there in the Niger River Delta region).

"The next year when we started getting ready for our first concert in Timbuktu, Solo and Hassi used stick-on pickups and plugged into these very funky old amps we borrowed from the local musicians guild, amps and a PA that are used for virtually all gigs up there (the PA mixer features faders that are frozen in place from so much sand in the air)...at that point the whole thing started to sound like an old blues band playing in a club, and with Hassi wailing on his njarka through an overdriven amp, it even started to tend towards the psychedelic, which I loved. His njarka started to remind me of a blues harp played through an amp. But really, most gigs up there sound that way: speakers are blown, things are overdriven. It's just different from the quiet atmosphere of recording with just a couple of acoustic instruments in a house. These first songs are the sound of the houses we recorded them in, except "Sun is risin'," which Hamma, Hassi and I recorded outside under a nice tree, because they said that would be better for the jimbala rhythm (because the Jinn love natural beauty and are drawn to the river, trees, etc)." — Markus James, 05/04.

— Courtesy Calabash Music