Vieux Farka Touré

Vieux Farka Touré is a guitar player and singer-songwriter from Mali who works in the musical traditions of the region, specifically in the style known as desert blues, which is an off-shoot of West African music that shares ancestry with the American blues traditions. His father Ali Farka Touré was a legendary guitarist who put this genre on the west's radar, about a decade before Tinariwen cassettes first began to circulate. Vieux himself is a terrific musician who came to his own right out of the gate, clearly ready to take his father's work forward. His music has the usual harmonies, chord progressions, and rhythms of the Sahel region and it is lively. He sings in a voice that is much smoother (and lower) than his father's, but his guitar style is very similar with respect to the nimble finger picking and the soulful tunes. His 2013 album Mon Pays is generally considered a classic.