Vieux Farka Touré plays Cyprus Avenue for Cork Jazz Fest 

“It’s every country having its difficult and good stuff. The good thing in [Europe and the UK] is, when you’re travelling, it’s two hours, four hours, three hours. Y’know, this is good, it’s not like United States, you have to drive for, like, 10 hours, 15 hours.”

Quietly-spoken and unassuming, Malian singer and guitarist Vieux Farka Touré is enjoying some downtime before he and his band hit the road on an autumn/winter excursion that, like many touring ensembles at this time of year, will involve a stop at the Guinness Cork Jazz Festival, playing Cyprus Avenue on Monday, October 27, and capping off a massive programme of music from around the world that marks the busiest weekend of the year.

“I love to play there, because the audience, they’re very good,” he says in relation to European and UK audiences. “It’s a very good audience, but the only thing is, we drive on the other side, it’s a problem for us, when you’re driving on the right side, and now you got the left side. It’s also difficult to just have, like, visas and stuff. This is the big problem for us, because we don’t have a consulate in Mali, so sometimes we have to take flight to go to Senegal, get your visa, and it’s very, very expensive, you know. We love to tour, but [with the UK] it’s not that much profit, you see, this is the thing. If it’s not, I don’t think it’s any problem.”

Vieux Farka Touré’s name puts him in a rare stratum in African music, the son of Malian desert blues legend and crossover superstar Ali Farka Touré, whose involvement in Mali’s struggle for independence and post-colonial development casts a shadow all its own in his home country. As we speak, we’re a few days past the 65th anniversary of Mali’s independence, and while Vieux is proud to bear the flag for Mali’s cultural and musical history, he emphasises that it’s about representation of his people, rather than significance to a state.

“I have the influence from my father, y’know, I grew up with his music, but I have also my own experience in the music. When I [was at the beginning, I was like], I have to show my own stuff, who I am, what I’m going to do. I’m not a political guy. I would say every time, I’m just a musician. I’m for everybody. I know we have many, many problems in Mali, but we try and take musicians [on the road] to help them to be living better than what they have.

“Now, you know, everybody knows that’s a very big problem, but what my music is, what I’m saying, I’m also a soldier for the music, y’know, to try to bring this Malian music, to bring this culture, y’know, to like, how they say, to grow up. Because my father’s like, doing this [for a long time], everybody knows him, and I think it’s in, it’s in my obligation to to take care of everything he was doing before, and to bring it more and more up, y’know. So I’m trying to do my best, to work really hard. It’s not, say, for the government, but it’s for the population. It’s for the culture. It’s about, like, how the people live.”

One can assume, as with anybody maintaining or tasked with protecting traditional or native forms of art, that struggle and that effort to progress them into the future and put them into contexts and situations that following generations can see and bring along with them, brings with it pushback from the kinds of people for whom cultural conservatism is somehow a cornerstone – as though any culture or community could ever just be cast in amber. Lucky, then, that Touré doesn’t seem to be terribly fussed with such holdouts.

“How do you deal with people that are always… you have to do the traditional like before, you have to play like your father playing before. I say, ‘no, it’s not the same generation’. We change, man, y’know, it’s not the same generation. We have to get change. We have to change by the world, how the world is changing, you see. I have this problem many times, but the same people, like, years after, they come to me again to say, ‘oh, you’re right, y’ know, it’s good’. You’re changing a little bit, you know? I say, ‘ah, okay, now you guys understand exactly what it is, what’s happened’.

“It’s not easy, y’know, like everybody to be changing. You know, some of the musician I see in Mali, we have, like, many, big musicians, and they have the son, and most of them have problem. It’s what I tell them, ‘don’t follow only your father’s music. You have to tell the people who you are, what you’re doing’. It’s the truth. You are the son of your father, but you have your own stuff too, so you have to show the people who you are, what you going to do, what your capacity to doing something, to changing the stuff, to make the stuff more, more better.”

An example of this urge to drive matters forward is 2022 album ‘Ali’, in which Touré teamed with US psych-rockers Khruangbin to collaborate on their interpretations on some of his father’s best-regarded works. Here, Touré emphasises that, above all else, that taking this music to new sets of ears and letting new people in on his creative inheritance is a matter of respect.

“It’s very easy to do something with them, y’know, it’s not crazy stuff for me, because it’s Ali Farka Touré’s music. And I tell them, you guys just have to be very simple just to play. When you listen, it’s very simple to do, y’know, the good things. They’re very good people, like, they are not, like, completely ‘big stars’, they just feel like [they have a] good approach, you know, nice stuff.

“We work together, we joke, we eat together, this is what we know. So it’s a very important example, very important for us, you know, for African musicians. We love when the people respect us, yeah, because we give many, many respect to the people. We don’t need anything we just need if we respect you, we have to have the same back. And that’s what’s happened with Khruangbin, you see? But if you want to say, ‘oh, I’m this big star, superstar’, that’s going to be a problem, yeah.”

• Vieux Farka Touré plays Cyprus Avenue on Monday, October 27, helping close Guinness Cork Jazz Festival with a 5pm set. Tickets €33, available at eventbrite.ie.
• Find the music of Vieux Farka Touré across your digital streaming services.