In Mali, the music scene is popping

I was on the back of Paul Chandler’s moped, riding through the red-dirt side streets of Bamako, scanning the landscape near two tall mosque towers whose pale plaster gleamed in the late sunlight. We passed a soccer pitch where boys were sending balls thocking into the air. We were searching for a wedding, one of many unfolding across Mali’s low-lying capital as another weekend got underway.

“I can’t imagine living anywhere other than here,” Paul said over his shoulder, “as a musician.”

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Tagging along with Chandler, an American musician and producer who has spent seven years in Bamako, I was hoping to get a glimpse into the scene made famous by such Mali musicians as Salif Keita, Ali Farka Toure and Amadou & Mariam, a scene where other performers such as Grammy winner Toumani Diabate regularly play.

Ask most people for one fact about Mali, and chances are they’ll say it’s where Timbuktu is. That’s the city where, every January, you find the Festival in the Desert, a major concert that has brought together a heady mix of world rhythms and Saharan views for a decade. In their rush to get to that festival, though, travelers often miss an even richer music scene in Bamako and in Segou, a sleepy city that you pass on the way to Timbuktu.

A hub in the ancient Mali empire that stretched from Africa’s westernmost tip inland to Niger, Segou has its own big concert festival every February. Amadou & Mariam, Mali’s chart-topping world music duo since their breakthrough 2005 CD, “Dimanche a Bamako” (Sunday in Bamako), headlined this year’s event. And Bamako has a livelier cultural scene than you might expect for the capital of such a poor country.

In a new memoir, Amadou & Mariam give a poignant sense of the capital in the 1970s: its sounds, its smells and its street life. As kids, Mariam and her friends pooled their money for dance parties: “In those days, in our neighborhood of Madine-Koura, there wasn’t enough electricity for street-lighting and lights in public places. We waited for the moon to shine so we could go out into the street and organize what in Bambara we call tekere-tlolonguai, ‘having fun by clapping hands.’ ”

When I heard Amadou & Mariam several years ago at the Birchmere in Alexandria, their concert drew shaggy old Peace Corps types, fresh 20-somethings and West Africans of an in-between age, all bouncing to Amadou’s infectious guitar. I was one of those Peace Corps types, having spent two years in neighboring Mauritania way back in the 1980s. Now I was visiting good friends posted with an international agency in Bamako and curious to see how West African pop and the traditional griots, or storytellers, had fared in the pop era.

“That may be them,” Paul said, as we heard a singer’s amplified voice waft through the streets. Thursdays and Fridays — this was a Friday — are popular days for bridal showers in Mali, with women gathering to celebrate the bride near the family compound. We wandered down several clay streets lined with mango trees until we found the one filled with women of all ages, a clutch of colorful headscarves surrounding a singer.