At it's heart, all jazz is a distant memory of how Africans used to dance. How nice of the San Francisco Jazz Festival to remind us of that with a concert exploring other directions those African influences took on their way into American culture.
Top billing for Saturday's performance at the Paramount Theater in Oakland went to Taj Mahal, a nimble guitar player and deep thinker who's been exploring the vast possibilities encompassed by the blues for more than 40 years. But the real magic came from the combination of the bluesman's stomp with the shimmy of two great African musicians -- Foday Musa Suso, a master of the kora, a sort of African guitar-harp; and Vieux Farka Toure, son of the great Malian guitar innovator Ali Farka Toure, around whose work the concert was organized.
The younger Toure opened the show with a dazzling set. His father was frequently heralded as the African John Lee Hooker, and Viuex emerges as the continent's Buddy Guy, a flashy but disciplined player exploring the spectrum opened by electrification. As Toure spun out hypnotic patterns that expertly merged ancient and modern, you suddenly had the answer to a question you probably never thought to ask: What if Ali Farka Toure and Jerry Garcia had been twins? Or at least shared a room in college?
Suso was a last minute replacement for the ailing (malaria!) Toumani Diabate, and it was hard to complain about the substitution if for no other reason than to see how Suso has turned kora into a walking-around instrument, a la Chuck Berry.
Mahal, a bluesman whose approach seems beholden to nothing but a steady groove, rattled the rafters with 30 minutes of high-octane boogie-woogie before bringing Toure and Suso back to the stage to assay one of Ali Farka Toure's signature tunes. The three string-benders, each wielding different axes and different approaches, locked into continually evolving groove so organic and sinuously powerful that the only challenge seemed to be figuring out how to end it.
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Comments
What a great review-- I was at the show, and this really captures what it was like.
great performance. all of the musicians were spot-on. but the sound quality was just terrible. i know the paramount theatre is not the most acoustically desirable space, but someone must have been asleep at the sound board.
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