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Malian Legend Oumou Sangaré Glows in Stripped-down Arrangements on 'Acoustic'

On Acoustic, Oumou Sangaré's inner world shines through with particular clarity as the Songbird of Wassoulou performs stripped-down arrangements of some of the most powerful tracks she's recorded over the last 30 years.

                                      
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On Acoustic, Oumou Sangaré's inner world shines through with particular clarity as the Songbird of Wassoulou performs stripped-down arrangements of some of the most powerful tracks she's recorded over the last 30 years.

Globally-minded jam band Toubab Krewe defies narrow classification with often unpredictable grooves on Stylo.

Mali's last original bluesman, Boubacar Traoré, takes a trip to the Mississippi Delta on trans-Atlantic triumph Dounia Tabolo.

On new album 2017, Afropop artist Leila Gobi is a one-woman sugar rush.

With her latest album, Malian singer-songwriter Traoré has made something beautiful and moving from the traumas of war and personal crises

A razor-sharp group of six instrumentalists founded by a Californian who plays djeli n'goni and guitar.

Plenty of grinding jangle on the debut solo album from this talented Malian guitarist.

Execution is king here.

As guitarist and singer Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni explained sagely, Tinariwen's music has a global message.

Two musicians merging with as little friction as possible.

The latest in a surge of guitar music from the western Sahara region.

The register shifts, now more West African and sweeping, now more Hendrix and restless.

System Krush has done the right thing and given us tracks that are long.

The Malian singer stays steady and firm at the centre while the Frenchman roams baroque around her, fascinated by her ringing treelike isolation.

The boundary for this compilation is huge, and surrounds all of Africa, a continent with more guitarists and guitar styles than anyone can easily count.

Madina N'Diaye plays an elegant kora.

It's starting to feel -- heady delusion -- as if the rest of the globe is going to be able to relive 1970s West Africa completely just by bouncing from label to label.

The sound of a man in no hurry and his patient guitar, which is less imperious than the guitar of Touré.

Donso has a happy-kora feel -- golden and intricate.

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The sound is so steady and so fluid that it might have turned to mush if it didn't have so many strong and piquant things bearing it up.

The album searches for a framework that will suit its star, trying this and that, probing. It wants to sell her, but how?

Tinariwen paid a visit to Brooklyn's Bell House this past February.

Oumou Sangaré has surpassed herself.

If Amadou and Mariam's last album felt like a shift in the couple's career, then Welcome to Mali feels like an even greater one.

The kora, with its lacelike and intricate patterns of notes, is the more attention-catching instrument, and you could easily forget that this album is a partnership and start to think of it as a Mansa Sissoko project.

An album that is paradoxically almost redundant and almost perfect.

An American jazz singer ventures to Mali and achieves an African/jazz meld of the first order.

If Kouyaté is trying to turn himself into the Diabaté of the ngoni, an innovator who takes ancient instruments and tunes and moves them forward, then he's going about it in the right way.

Tinariwen plays rock guitar with a rangy American sound, broad and lazy and slow.

These are the sort of flowers that bloom in the Sahara Desert: thumb pianos, distorted amps, muddy blues, and traditional chants.

Comparisons between Tartit and the better-known Tinariwen seem inevitable, but, really, there's no reason why one should be confused with the other, or why you shouldn't like both in different ways.

This debut album by Tinariwen, also known as the Tuareg Rebel Blues Band, can seem the antithesis of Western pop music, even that generated by the engines currently driving the world music markets.