1970s Malian orchestras: Radio Nationale du Mali recordings (?)

My primary motivation for maintaining this blog is to transform the spiritual desolation of twenty years of obsessive music collecting into an opportunity to invest more time and careful listening into specific musical treasures.  Over the last ten years I have divested myself of tens of thousands of CDs, thousands of cassettes, and a few hundred LPs.  It has been liberating, freeing up time and mental space to practice instead of collect music.

More than hunting and hoarding music, what always brought me the greatest satisfaction was spending an afternoon, an evening, all night, listening to music with a small group of friends.  I don't mean hanging with a group of friends with music playing in the background.  I mean sitting with a friend or two, close to the stereo speakers, listening attentively, intensely, to song after song, discussing and analysing favorite passages, ending the session with cassettes and CDs strewn all over the floor.

For whatever reasons, there could be many--age, moving around too much, family, lack of time--these moments of musical sociability seem to be fewer and farther between in my life.  Not only does this blog give me the opportunity to focus more closely on music, rather than on collecting, but it also is a way to reach out, across the divides of space and time, to the (small?) group of music lovers that share my musical passions.

In spite of my efforts to free my soul from the drudgery of collecting, I still have more accumulated music than I will be able to get through in my lifetime.  The recordings featured in this post are a good example of the futility of hoarding.  I have had this group of cassettes for fifteen years now and I only last week got around to listening to them.


All of these cassettes are part of a set I picked up in Bamako in 2003. 

I have no specialized knowledge of Malian guitar bands of the 1970s. And everything I do know is mostly becuase of Eric Charry's research, Stefan Werdekker's blog, and Graeme Counsel's website.  I can't tell you much about any of these recordings.  Stefan has written about the Orchestre Bronkoni de Niono (the ever informative Ngoni contributed some insightful comments as well), Manguemusic has featured several cuts from a few of these cassettes.

I don't know if these recordings are dubs of commercial releases or if they are dubs of reels from the Radio Nationale du Mali archives.  If I had to wager a guess, I would go with dubs of Radio Mali reels.  There are no LPs listed for most of these groups in Graeme Counsel's comprehensive discography.  [I have a few other cassettes that Dramane Doumbia recorded for me that are obviously dubs of LPs.  You can hear the difference.]  Does anyone know if these Super Djata tracks were ever commercially released?

Download Baniko Jazz de Dioïla

Download Le Bida Regional de Koulikoro

Download Le Souala Band de Banamba

Download Orchestre Bronkoni de Niono

Download Super Djata Band

Download Super Mono Band de Bougouni

Download Thiwara Band - Koumi Djosse

Download Thiwara Band de Kati

The beautiful picture was taken by Jorge Tutor, 

Enjoy the music!