Talking Timbuktu

Ali Farka Touré's "Talking Timbuktu" — the album that gave the world a specific word for what his guitar was doing — captures a music that travels in only one direction: deep into the earth. His playing is single-note and patient, drawn from the pentatonic logic of West African desert music and the American blues that descended from the same source, a genealogy the record makes audible. The guitar has a dry, almost tactile quality — you can hear the wood and the string and the air between them. When Ry Cooder joins, the two guitars don't mesh so much as recognize each other across the Atlantic, trading phrases with the ease of people who learned something from the same teacher without ever meeting. Touré's voice is conversational, warm, entirely uninterested in ornamentation, delivering its phrases in Songhai and Bambara with the unhurried authority of someone who has already decided the song is true. This is music for late afternoons, for dusty roads, for the recognition that a blues melody is a technology invented once and then reinvented everywhere the conditions were right.