National Geographic Music (National Geographic)

(Music from the Soundtrack) These new recordings from the film 'Timbuktoubab' are a set of pre-released tracks only available as downloads. Markus James talks about these new songs:"After 'Nightbird', which was made in a (the) studio down in Bamako, we
started meeting up in Timbuktu. Solo and I would travel up there, with Hamma
and Hassi coming in from their villages which are in that region. and when
we started to play together, it became apparent that this was not going to
be like 'Nightbird', it was going to be a group sound, and it was going to
have the sound of the adobe walled rooms we were playing in. "And then Hamma
started singing, and the whole dimension of lyric ideas came in. This has
been endlessly amazing for me, to find myself playing something like
'Wabissimila' with the great Hamma Sankare, and to realize that we wrote
this song together from a simple blues-type riff, and now he's singing some
philosophical ideas from his ancient culture (and the Songhai is as far
back as it goes, they're thought to be the first people to settle down and
build houses, right there in the Niger River delta region). -- Markus James 05/04

— CalabashMusic.com