Search - Roswell Rudd, Toumani Diabate :: Malicool

Mali's one of international music's most fascinating zones, a place where the blues went home to help stir a music that blew the world's mind with Ali Farka Toure, Oumou Sangare, and Boubacar Traore in the 1990s. Then Damon Albarn (of Blur and Gorillaz fame) rekindled the flame in 2002 with Mali Music. And now, free jazz's greatest trombonist, Roswell Rudd, has created another masterpiece. His horn--wide-bore and fatly swaying blats--mixes magically with Toumani Diabate's kora, Lassana Diabate's balofon, and Basseko Kouyate's ngona to make a wonderland of strings, percussion, and resonant color. Sayon Sissoko's guitar and Henry Schroy's bass lend a structural foundation over which the marimbalike plunks dance and Rudd's horn pliably fills space with broad, full-blown clouds, an ideal, unexpected expander of all that's going on around the trombonist. Monk's "Jackie-ing" has a structure that Toumani's kora thrives in, with canyons where the strings make a phenomenal, rich showing. It's the more traditional stuff that has Rudd thriving, always with such sureness that he sounds as if he's played Malian music all his life. But still: you won't believe the adaptation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony's "Ode to Joy" as it forms the launch pad for the set-closing "Malijam." --Andrew Bartlett