Mali's state orchestras and the Rail Band of Bamako

At the buffet of the railway station hotel in Bamako, from 1970, music was played five nights a week. It started at two in the afternoon and ran into the small hours.

The band on that stage was the official orchestra of the Malian railway. The players were employees of the rail authority and the instruments belonged to the state.

That is not a figure of speech. For twenty years it was how modern music got made in Mali.

After 1960, the president founds the orchestras

Mali became independent on 20 June 1960. Straight afterwards president Modibo Keita founded the Orchestre national A, led by Panga Dembélé and Kélétigui Diabaté, with B and C following.

The model was socialist and came from next door: Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea, which in 1958 had set up a state record label, Syliphone.

Mali was poorer and took twelve years to do anything comparable. In 1970 the Ministry of Information signed a short-lived deal with a German label, Barenreiter Musicaphon, and some fifteen LPs came out of it. They are almost impossible to find today.

Of the Orchestre national A only one record survives, cut that same year, and the sleeve notes say what it was for: to safeguard Malian heritage.

One orchestra per region

Still looking at Sékou Touré, whom he had visited in 1962, Modibo Keita set up the National Youth Weeks to push new groups into existence.

They appeared everywhere. Super Biton de Ségou, driven by the trumpeter Amadou Ba and formed by merging three bands from the town, won the Bamako artistic biennials repeatedly between 1970 and 1976.

What those orchestras actually played was not what the return to authenticity had in mind. Manding classics, the Afro-Cuban music that had been circulating since the fifties, and rock and roll and twist numbers. In 1963 the hit by Boubacar “Kar Kar” Traoré was called “Mali twist”.

The Rail Band, and the Motel across town

In October 1969 the saxophonist Tidiane Koné, who came out of the Orchestre national A and was the first to bring that instrument into Manding music, founded the Rail Band of Bamako.

The venue was the Buffet Hôtel de la Gare, run by the station master Aly Diallo. The band took requests: Manding standards, French pop, salsa.

Listen while you read

That same 1969, on the other side of town, Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako came together out of the remains of a band from Ivory Coast. The name describes the line-up: Malians, Ivorians, Guineans, Senegalese.

The Motel belonged to the state as well. On 19 November 1968 Moussa Traoré had overthrown Modibo Keita, and the head of the security services, Tiekoro Bagayoko, took the place over and became the band’s protector.

The rivalry between the two was musical and political at once. In 1974 they met in a competition and nobody could separate them.

We passed the two of them around for days trying to choose, and we could not settle it either.

Who came through it

In July 1970 a shy young albino man joined the Rail Band. He stayed three years, then moved to Les Ambassadeurs: Salif Keita, born in 1949 in Djoliba, thirty kilometres from Bamako.

His replacement was Mory Kanté, who says he started there as a guitarist, bassist, drummer and balafon player. “I filled every hole,” is how he puts it. It was Tidiani Koné who pushed him to sing.

Another singer from those years, Makan Ganessy, gave up music entirely in 1976 out of religious conviction, and asked Radio Mali to destroy all his recordings.

In 1978 Salif Keita and Mory Kanté both left for Abidjan in search of a better fate, and the golden age ended there.

The guitarist Djelimady Tounkara stayed, and spent nearly his whole career in the band. The measure of that work sits in a piece like “Soundiata l’exil”, twenty-seven minutes and forty-nine seconds long: an orchestra with every night of the year in front of it had no reason to keep things short.