In his final years Ali Farka Touré grew indifferent to stardom’s demands. A deference towards agricultural and infrastructural needs led him to become the mayor of his town, Niafunké, where he graded the roads, constructed sewer canals, and fuelled a generator, while working his land. After sundown he withdrew with his black Seiwa Powersonic ‘Tjowmidini’ (Satan) and his red Telecaster ‘Alkannaasi’ (Angel). The body of his guitars didn’t weaken with age like bone. One of his eleven children, Vieux, left home for Institut National des Arts de Bamako, despite the family’s adamance about enlistment. A few months before Ali passed, Vieux asked his permission to record an album on guitar, with the encouragement of Toumani Diabaté. Ali relented, and much of their remaining father-son time was spent playing and listening to the guitar. His funeral procession began in a dust storm.
We met Vieux on 28 September in the back stage of the Crystal Ballroom, where we found him talking with his two bandmates, children, and wife before the performance. He was warm and assured, with a light antagonism to some of our early questions that were too abstract and focused on his fingers. My friend Elise Guerrand, another guitarist, helped us speak and brought the questions down from air to earth. The band performed as if in a canoe heading down Vieux’s native Niger River, east of Niafunké——steady-turning, together in an unhurried rhythm. Vieux’s ten albums more closely resemble the riverbanks his blues cousins across the Atlantic knew, along the lower Mississippi’s meander belt; they often take wide, winding detours, coil around themselves, then reroute back toward the traditional course.
Although Vieux's music is not an imitation of Ali, his care for the people of Niafunké and Mali are a son’s echo. He devoted the proceeds of his debut album, Vieux, to purchasing and distributing 3000 mosquito nets to children and pregnant women throughout Timbuktu. His fourth album, Mon Pays, decried the 2012 coup d'état and territorial fighting between the Tuareg and Ansar Dine. As Elise and I stood among the audience neither this history nor the brief interview could enter our minds. The performance made our bodies sway as wind carries sand.
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Could you speak about the first time your hands touched a guitar?
That’s not today. . . You know I was a drummer, bass drum. But with friends, we took the guitar to have fun, anything we could touch; this was beginning in 1994. I’d play any instrument around at the Institut National des Arts. But the guitar, the guitar was forbidden. I come from soldiers, men who served in Mali’s National Guard. Guitar was a secret.
How did it feel to harbor that secret? Did you have a desire to express it, play for others, or were you at ease with it being a private bond? When did you become a guitarist?
The guitar gives pleasure, always. It’s good because it settles you; it’s restful. The secret couldn’t be painful. I wanted to be three things: a driver, a chauffeur——I like to drive; a soldier in the army——I like to protect people; or a musician. That’s it. Music is not something I chose. Nobody chooses music: music chooses you to be a musician. Music is the only mystical thing that knows who it belongs to. You cannot ask music to be chosen; it knows. I was never afraid because I knew I was chosen, and couldn’t not express this pleasure.
Do you see a relation between these three jobs? Is the source of your attraction to them is the same?
Yes: they are all life, enlivening. You are dependent on all of them! For a soldier to go anywhere, to protect you, he has to be driven by a driver; it could be a fellow soldier, an army driver. People don’t understand that drivers are everything, since everything travels. What we eat, a driver transports it from the countryside to the market. If there is no driver, even the airplanes above stop. There’s no movement. That’s extraordinary, that’s everything. The soldiers are on land, protecting humans from each other. Your life depends on them; they put your life in front of their life. And music——without music, I don’t believe people could live. If there is no American blues, there are no Black Americans. There are Africans who were enslaved in America, and reside here still; they brought the blues. It travelled. They put their heart out there. You can’t pay for someone’s heart the way you pay for fruits. You can’t pay for the heart because you can’t remove it; not from the head, the spirit, the chest. It comes to you briefly in music.
People often encounter your music by way of your father, though this isn’t what you want to hear! You’ve said you don’t want to identify with him, to admit, “I am the descendant of Ali Farka, I am the next Ali Farka.” Do you have another musical ancestry in mind that’s not biological, a more self-determined lineage to which you belong?
My father and I are the two of our generation who do music. It is a two-man lineage. We love the blues of B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Jimi Hendrix, but they are not really our brothers. We’re still bonded, but not brothers. My grandmother was a genius singer. Her songs healed the mad——the people who were possessed, seen as mentally disturbed. She was a healer; she didn’t see herself as a musician! Now I hope the next generation does music. Toumani Diabaté, my second father——godfather——my father’s friend, taught me about Mande, and introduced me to his orchestra. He convinced my father that I should take music seriously. He taught me the kora on the guitar. Now people come up to me and say “Vieux, you’re playing kora on guitar!” “You play like kora!” I tell them I owe it to my other father Toumani.
(Ali Farka Touré came to guitar by way of other instruments, too; he was circling the perimeter. His first instrument was the one-string njurkel. He played it as a ngoni, fretting his hand down. Then he fell for the guitar upon seeing, at a distance, Kante Facelle, member of “Les Ballets Africains de Keita Fodeba.” He worked as an ambulance driver and chauffeur, saved to buy or borrow a mandolin, then transposed the njurkel technique to the mandolin.)
How do you feel sharing your music with this crowd in Somerville, knowing many don’t understand Bambara, Songhay, Fula, French? That many hear but might not receive?
When I start to sing, an energy emerges from me. The sounds don’t need to be comprehensible. It is an exchange of energy. I am gifted the energy of the crowd, and I gift them mine. All the bad people with bad hearts, when they sing it doesn’t say anything, no energy emits, because they are not good people. You have to have a heart to have ears, to have a mouth.
This interview was conducted in French with the assistance of Elise Guerrand and translated into English. It was edited for clarity. During the interview Vieux washed his face and changed his shirt as we spoke. How immediately at ease he was made us content.
2026