Nick Gold, the Musical Matchmaker Who Gave Mali the Blues •

Nick Gold, the Musical Matchmaker Who Gave Mali the Blues • Ali Farka Touré, left, with Nick Gold, who recorded him for World Circuit Records in sessions in Bamako, Mali, in 2004. Two of the resulting albums are due out this week. Mr. Touré died in March. Credit... By Ben Sisario • July 23, 2006 FOR the final recording sessions of Ali Farka Touré, the sage Malian guitarist who died in March, Nick Gold chose a particularly memorable location. Mr. Gold, the proprietor of World Circuit Records, Mr. Touré’s label, needed a very large space, and Mr. Touré, who was suffering from cancer, wanted to remain in Mali. So a temporary studio was set up on the top floor of the thatched-roof Hôtel Mandé in Bamako, the capital, where the wide windows offered panoramas of life along the Niger River. “All you can see is river and grasslands and villages and people in pirogues and canoes and boats,” Mr. Gold said in a recent interview. “It’s just beautiful.” Over a few fruitful weeks in June and July 2004 Mr. Gold produced three albums. The first, “In the Heart of the Moon,” by Mr. Touré and the kora (harp) player Toumani Diabaté, was released last year and won a Grammy Award for best traditional world-music album. The other two will be released on Tuesday: “Boulevard de l’Indépendance” by Mr. Diabaté’s 30-odd-piece Symmetric Orchestra — hence the need for the big room — and Mr. Touré’s “Savane,” a series of steady, pulsating meditations on the virtues of farming and hard work, in music that bridges modal West African traditions with the blues. Mr. Gold, 45, is no stranger to exotic locales. A disarmingly casual man with a self-effacing smile and hands that never stop moving, he has been the force behind some of the most successful world-music projects of the last two decades: “Buena Vista Social Club,” which has sold seven million copies around the world; “Talking Timbuktu,” Mr. Touré’s Grammy-winning album with Ry Cooder from 1994; and the reunion of Orchestra Baobab, a Latin-flavored Senegalese band of the 1970’s and 80’s. The typical World Circuit album is high quality and high concept, with rich packaging — crisp photography, muted colors, generous and engaging liner notes — that reflects the care taken with the recording. Mr. Gold’s engineer, Jerry Boys, who has worked on almost every World Circuit album over the last 10 years, is renowned for his natural sound, and Mr. Gold, when making “Buena Vista Social Club,” went through four costly mixes and several mastering sessions until he was satisfied. Mr. Cooder, who produced “Buena Vista Social Club” and some of its follow-ups for Mr. Gold, described their collaborative approach. “Everybody gets what they need,” he said. “They get treated right. That is how you get musicians interested, by letting them know that you intend to represent their sound as best as it can be represented. Not to just shove a mic up there and say, ‘O.K., boy, go.’ ” In the age of corporate music conglomerates, Mr. Gold has built a small empire on personal taste, tight quality control and canny marketing. But his entry into the music business 20 years ago was largely accidental. Working in a jazz record store in London after graduating from Sussex University with a degree in African history, he heard about a job with an organization called Arts Worldwide that presented concerts by musicians from around the world. Its audiences wanted records to take home, but in many cases none existed, so the company created World Circuit to produce recordings. Mr. Gold was hired as a jack-of- all-trades for the label, and in many ways his job description has not changed. His first assignment was finding a studio, a producer and everything else for a Kenyan group called Shirati Jazz. He had no idea what he was doing, but he was hooked. Editors’ Picks “It was the first time I’d been in a studio, the first time I’d seen a console,” Mr. Gold said at the Manhattan offices of Nonesuch, which licenses World Circuit albums for release in North America. “And I just fell in love with it.” By the early 90’s, he had bought out Arts Worldwide and taken over World Circuit, developing a reputation for tasteful work and bold ambitions. He invited Mr. Cooder to dinner with Mr. Touré in London, and they passed a guitar back and forth and agreed to work together in the future. Mr. Gold made sure that Mr. Touré was soon in Los Angeles recording “Talking Timbuktu,” which has sold nearly 250,000 copies in the United States. (Most World Circuit albums — and most world music albums in general — sell far fewer.) But his most influential project wasn’t the one he had planned. In 1996 he intended to bring two Malian guitarists to Cuba for sessions with Mr. Cooder and a group of Cuban musicians, as an experiment in Afro-Cubanism. When the Malians did not arrive (they never got visas), more Cubans of varying ages and performing styles were gathered, and “Buena Vista Social Club” was born. Since then, other producers have gathered groups of musical elders everywhere from Texas (Los Super Seven) to the Congo (Kekele). Mr. Gold says he has no guiding philosophy behind World Circuit albums, but many of his liveliest — and most successful — have involved some kind of musical matchmaking: the Malian guitarist with the American blues player, urban Cubans with country Cubans. “I’ve got criticized for these collaborations,” Mr. Gold said. “But in the experience I’ve had, musicians want to play with other musicians. Bringing in these weird combinations that happened with the Cuban guys, it made them think on their feet. They’re challenged a tiny bit. It makes you raise your game.” With “Buena Vista Social Club,” Mr. Gold showed his talent as a marketer. To sell a record of musicians in their 70’s and 80’s singing forgotten pre-Revolutionary Cuban songs, Mr. Gold seized on the idea of a fraternity of nostalgia: a small ensemble cast of salty old men conjuring a lost musical paradise and breaking through Cuba’s isolation. The story behind the music, of remembrance and rediscovery, only made it more appealing. Before the album’s release, Mr. Gold executed a thorough publicity campaign, arranging for many European journalists to visit Cuba. After the album became successful and Cuban albums flooded the market, Mr. Gold distinguished World Circuit’s releases with a recognizable brand name: “Buena Vista Social Club Presents Ibrahim Ferrer,” “Buena Vista Social Club Presents Omara Portuondo” and so on. “He set the bar for every other label active in world music,” said Joe Boyd, a record producer (Fairport Convention, R.E.M.) who in the 1990’s, through his label Hannibal, was a sometime collaborator and sometime competitor of Mr. Gold. “He single-handedly created the methodology of marketing that everybody now tries to do.” With his latest releases Mr. Gold has come up with another brand name: “The Hôtel Mandé Sessions.” Like “Buena Vista,” it conjures a romantic exoticism and emphasizes a back story that is not easily forgettable. In the case of Mr. Touré that back story is of a great African musician making an oracular last testament. But as with “Buena Vista,” the “Hôtel Mandé” brand does not eclipse the power of the music. Mr. Gold said that for “Savane” Mr. Touré took the uncharacteristic step of recording demos, and the songs on the album are obstinate and intense. Singing parables about farming, politics and leadership, he surrounds himself confidently with the sounds of both the new world and the old. In the title song, over a gentle but ominous pattern of guitar and two ngonis (small African lutes), Mr. Touré sings ruefully and obliquely about displacement and globalization but ends with an affirmation of localized hard work: “Instead of giving us bombs/Give us powered pumps.” And while there are whiffs of harmonica and tenor saxophone, the dominant sounds are Mr. Touré’s guitar and its trail of ngonis, suggesting that despite all the experimentation and matchmaking, his music has remained undiluted. “He thought his music was so powerful that it was indestructible,” Mr. Gold said of Mr. Touré. “He had this incredible self-belief that he was given this gift to play music, that it was something of incredible value and that he is the holder of the key to this music, which he needs to share.” .

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