Throughout her youth Traore's transient lifestyle made it difficult for her to fit in with her peers, and she was neither fully part of her African nor her European classmates' worlds.
Traore found solace in music and recalled to Renee Graham in a Boston Globe interview, "I was a very solitary child Music was therapy for me. I was writing lyrics even before I realized I wanted to be a professional singer. Given Traore's family backgroundshe is a descendant of a noble warrior casteit is unusual that she had the option to pursue a professional music career because, according to Mali custom, members of the noble caste are forbidden to sing in public.
Singing is reserved for members of a lower caste. Mali's rich musical traditions are backed by strict hierarchical standards, wherein male singers, or griots oral historians , and female praise singers, or griottes, perform at ceremonies and weddings. Traore, however, is a member of the Bamana ethnic group, a social group that does not impose such restrictions on its upper caste, so she was free to become a singer.
Traore received her early musical training from Massamou Welle, a family friend and master who gave her lessons in traditional West African singing. Her early musical influences were varied. She listened to her father's jazz and blues recordings, sang traditional songs with her sisters at family ceremonies, and shared an interest in British and American rock with her brother. While she was in high school, Traore sang backup vocals in a rap group. Always interested in poetry, she wrote her own songs and played guitar, developing her minimalist style.
With the exception of early compositions written in French, Traore writes in her native Bamanan language, a poetic, honeyed language best suited for her lilting style. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Traore has stated that "Banaman speaks in images and proverbs. It provides a poetic framework to speak thoughts and ideas. When she was 22, while living with her family in Belgium and studying social sciences at a university, Traore made the difficult decision to return to Mali and live on her own to pursue a professional music career.
Her electric performance there launched her career, and she was subsequently named African Discovery of by Radio France International. At this point Ali Farka Toure, the legendary Malian guitarist called by many the "John Lee Hooker" of West Africa, took Traore under his wing and mentored her singing and guitar playing.
Following the successful release of her debut CD, Traore toured extensively in Europe and in her homeland, although at first she had difficulty forming a group of musicians because her role as a female arranger was not initially accepted. Additionally, her work was viewed with suspicion because Traore was combining traditional West African instruments that had never before been played together.
For example, in what has become her stylistic innovation, she frequently mixes the balafon African xylophone with the ngoni African lute and precursor to the American banjo to create a previously never-recorded sound. Traore told Boston Globe critic Steve Morse, "When I expressed the idea of putting together the ngoni and balafon, the musicians said, 'Come on, they are impossible to tune together. Her concerns about the fairness of the Belgian and French legal systems led her to stop performing in Europe.
Your email address will not be published. Skip to content Rokia Traore. He founded the websites worldmusiccentral. Angel is also co-founder of the Transglobal World Music Chart. She is not a criminal. She is famous. She will not run away. The whole country here is asking for her release.
This is more than a painful celebrity custody battle because it also involves a clash between European and African justice systems.
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