Khruangbin continued its global conquest on Friday with the release of Ali, the band’s new collaborative album with Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré. The album, Khruangbin’s first full-length since 2020’s Mordechai, serves as a tribute to Vieux’s late father and African guitar icon Ali Farka Touré.
Whereas Mordechai expanded Khruangbin’s musical pursuits to South and Latin America, Ali sets the Houston trio’s course for a new continent. Guiding Laura Lee, Mark Speers, and Donald “DJ” Johnson is Vieux, who is himself taking a spiritual journey to honor his inspiration, the three-time Grammy-winning desert blues pioneer nicknamed the “African John Lee Hooker.”
“My father said all the time, ‘We always have to give the best of ourselves.’ When I’m at the studio with a guitar in hand, his words go through my whole body, so it comes on its own,” Vieux told BBC in a recent interview. “It’s a feeling that can’t really be explained.”
Vieux’s ornate guitar work proves the missing ingredient to Khruangbin’s trance-like international funk. The chocolate-meets-peanut butter moment came together through Vieux’s manager, as the guitarist wasn’t familiar with the trio until his representative set up a meeting over fish and chips in a London pub. Over the course of a weeklong recording session at Khruangbin’s Houston barn studio fueled by the Ali family’s secret fish casserole recipe, they recorded the 11-tracks, with Khruangbin not even knowing most of the material until stepping into the studio.
“We didn’t even know the names of the songs until we were nearly finished with the project,” Lee told BBC. “The working titles were ‘song one’, ‘song two’, ‘song three’, ‘song four’, for a very, very long time. Vieux wanted us to approach it with a blank slate and I think that was the right approach. Because as soon as you know what the original is, and the context of it, it’s so easy for your brain to either replicate it or try to do the opposite thing.”
That approach is in line with Vieux’s musical style which places heavy emphasis on improvisation. It’s a lesson learned from his father, who initially forbid any of his 11 children—who all hand-picked the Ali tracklist—from going into music due to his negative experiences with the industry. Ali stepped away from music in 2000 to tend to his farmland and community, eventually being elected mayor of Niafunke’s 53 villages in 2003 and going on to invest most of his music royalties in an irrigation scheme, per BBC.
All the while, however, Vieux practiced guitar in secret. When he finally revealed his musical aspirations to his father, it caused a riff in the family that took years to heal. Just before his death in 2006 from cancer, Ali gave his son his blessing and even recorded a contribution to Vieux’s self-titled debut that came out just prior to Ali’s death. Though greatly inspired by his father, Vieux forged his own musical path, only returning to his genetic desert blues roots with his first album of 2022, Les Racines, and furthering that homecoming with Ali.
“To me, music is magic, it is spontaneous, it is the energy between people,” Vieux said. “I think Khruangbin understands this very well.”
Stream the new collaborative album from Khruangbin and Vieux Farka Touré, Ali, below or on your preferred platform. They also released a new music video for “Diarabi”, available below.
Khruangbin, Vieux Farka Touré – Ali
Khruangbin, Vieux Farka Touré – “Diarabi” (Official Video)