On my way out of the city, I asked the taxi driver if he had a tape instead of listening to the radio. It's an old habit I'd gotten out of. Not only did he have a tape, he had a huge shopping bag of mix tapes and a veritable doctoral thesis on African music.
The best music in all of Africa, he said, is in Mali. He's from Ghana himself, but even the Ghanaians have to admit Mali is the best. The tape we had in at the moment was a mix of tracks by Toumani Diabaté and Ballake Sissoko. Diabaté is the "prince of the kora, a 21-string harp/lute combo. (His father, Sidiki Diabaté is the king of the kora and Sissoko's father Djelimadi is also akora master.) New Ancient Strings is a collaboration of these two sons.
I'm in the backseat, frantically taking notes on my computer-printed boarding pass while this professor of afropop explains the nuances and development of afropop music. I'll add more when I get back in front of my own computer, but the encounter rekindled a project I'd begun several years ago but abandoned: TaxiMusic.net. (It started as taximusic.org, but then I let the domain expire.)
| Continue Greg.org's "Taxi Music v. 1"
posted in weblogs on December 29, 2003 1:55 AM | t (0)
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