Diversity is the pulse of Africa

What does the phrase “African music” mean to most Americans? Light-spirited guitar lines made danceable by polyrhythmic talking drums; big bands led by tall men in regal garb, smiling as women in bright headdresses dance behind them.

In the two decades since rock stars such as Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel enlivened their music with an African tinge, a stereotype has formed, created by those crossover hits, many charity concerts and “The Lion King”: an ethnographically rich pageant, politically relevant but somehow separate from the rest of pop.

Now, as part of a movement toward a truly global music marketplace, the American cliche of African music is falling apart -- or, really, exploding. Greats like Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour and Mali’s Oumou Sangare maintain fruitful careers within the usual avenues of what’s become known as “world music.” But a new wave of artists and archival releases is exposing the diversity of sound that’s always been the African reality.

In the past few months, a select group of African artists has made its way to America to promote new releases or play shows. In conversations held in hotel bars or over the telephone with a translator at hand, they’ve discussed their relationships to tradition and to globalization, and their hopes for making music at home and for a worldwide audience. And they aren’t all wearing those bright colors we know so well.

“For me that’s not really how it is,” said 44-year-old South African star Vusi Mahlasela, who has released two albums on Dave Matthews’ ATO label in recent years. Mahlasela’s storytelling gifts and glistening tenor have gained him a cult audience around the world; he even performed at the world’s most elite nerd-fest, the TED conference, in 2003. “I have been going on stage with T-shirts and jeans. I don’t need to project that identity because my skin tells it all.”

Rokia Traore might agree. “I never have done traditional music, because I can’t,” said the 35-year-old Malian singer-songwriter during a chat about “Tchamantche,” her gorgeous, electric-guitar-focused second album for Nonesuch, released in February. “I don’t know how to think and how to compose in that language. There are some schools for that, and I didn’t have this chance to learn this music. My style is unusual, and in Mali I have a special career.”

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Changes of address

Traore grew up a diplomat’s daughter, traveling the globe. Fluent in Bambara and French, she sings one song in English on “Tchamantche” -- a cover of George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” that recalls the best work of jazz queen Cassandra Wilson.

“I started listening to American traditional blues, jazz and R&B; when I was 5,” said Traore. “I was listening to this the same time as I discovered African music. To say that the blues began in Africa, everybody knew about that. And African music comes back to American blues for people like me.”

Amadou & Mariam, the blind married couple from Mali whose career-changing 2005 album, “Dimanche a Bamako,” helped define the current African shift, have a similar relationship to their homeland and the world. Their new album, “Welcome to Mali,” was partly produced by Brit-pop elder Damon Albarn and takes their “Afro-blues” sound into unexpected corners.

“The way we are doing this music is a positive side of globalization,” said Amadou Bagayoko in a phone call from London, promoting the American release of “Welcome to Mali,” coming March 24 on Nonesuch. “For us to be able to collaborate with people from different cultures is good. We’re still doing our own music, but we are open to others.”

For Somali-born, Toronto-based hip-hop artist K’Naan, “African music” can’t be contained by any one definition -- and not even by the boundaries of the continent itself. “Troubadour,” his just-released second album and debut on the A&M;/Octone label, incorporates samples of vintage Ethiopian funk along with reggae, rap and even hard rock influences. Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett solos on one cut.

“In my music, I do address Africa in general,” said K’Naan, 30, in Hollywood last month for a date at the Roxy. “I address Somalia more specifically because I know it more intimately. I was made in that stream. I owe a debt and gratitude to that world. But I think there is no real start and stop between being African and being an immigrant. My spirit is obsessed with movement, and the distance that is caused by the movement. So I never allow myself to feel at home anywhere.”

Nowhere outside its own boundaries is the African idea of “home” more fraught than it is in America. The fundamental links among African music, jazz and the blues were forged through the slave trade and have been well documented. Another parallel emerged during the 1960s, when South African exiles Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela came to represent the civil rights struggle on a global scale.

Most contemporary American listeners’ ideas about African music solidified in the 1980s. Paul Simon’s “Graceland” album introduced new fans to the sounds of the continent through collaborations with its stars, most notably the South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. At the same time, major tours by the large ensembles led by Nigerian bandleaders King Sunny Ade and Fela Kuti dazzled audiences with spectacular stage shows.

Embraced by pop stars such as Simon, Gabriel and David Byrne, African music became a key lifestyle accessory for the liberal elite. That it also often served as the soundtrack to liberation movements, especially the South African struggle against apartheid, made loving this joyful music feel like a noble act.

“There’s this old-school audience for African pop, this aging, liberal, NPR listener demo,” said Banning Eyre, one of America’s leading authorities on African music, in a recent phone call. (Eyre is senior editor for the website Afropop.org and often serves as a National Public Radio commentator.) “In general you see the major African stars and you see the same old crowd. But now, I’ve identified three or four fronts of new audiences for African music.”

Those new fans, Eyre said, often discover African music through American transliterators. Matthews, who was born in South Africa, and the Mali-loving North Carolina band Toubab Krewe promote the music among jam rockers, who also have welcomed Mahlasela and K’Naan at the annual Bonnaroo festival. Afrobeat inheritors Antibalas and the Budos Band pay homage to Fela on the New York club scene. The much-buzzed-about Vampire Weekend is leading indie rockers back to Congolese and Senegalese styles. And in hip-hop, Akon’s massive mainstream success, along with M.I.A.’s hipster adventures, might have primed ears for the emergence of K’Naan.

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World without borders

“I hear Akon and I’m like, I love you,” said K’Naan when asked about the Senegalese-born pop star. “He’s using all these melodies, all this tone of Senegal in pop music. I don’t think he could have done it as a traditional African, because Akon is very African-looking, very dark. So he did it with sound -- with his nuance, with his melodies. And then he dressed up in a suit and told you about the club.”

K’Naan’s image is more forthrightly African. With a gently curling Afro and skin the color of well-steeped tea, he presents himself as casually elegant -- the quintessential African immigrant, blending in with the other black residents of his city but maintaining a difference too.

“I remember when we first lived in Toronto, Somalis would move to the ghettos . . . so they could save money and send it back home,” said K’Naan, who emigrated at 12 and lived in several U.S. cities before settling in Canada. “People congratulate you when you get public housing -- because you finally get to send money back. So the kids, they just have their Wal-Mart sneakers or whatever, and other kids say, ‘Man, you must be a real loser.’ That Somali kid, you’re judging him by his shoes, but leave the guy alone. That kid was a militia leader back home. He’s been firing a gun since he was 7. That is the thing that I try to unveil.”

K’Naan’s border-crossing style also allows him to reach across musical genres. Some tracks on “Troubadour” reflect the influence of rappers such as Chubb Rock, who guests on one track, and Q-Tip. Others highlight K’Naan’s connection to the first family of reggae; he recorded the album at Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong Studios and the late Jamaican legend’s sons Damian and Stephen are his good friends. As for pop crossover -- besides that rare guest turn by Hammett -- blue-eyed soul man Adam Levine pops up.

“In K’Naan, we saw a hybrid of musical styles,” said James Diener, CEO and president of Octone Records. “There’s an African hip-hop component, but what distinguished him were the elements of reggae and world music, and most interestingly, his sense of melody and his pop aesthetic. This album has incredibly commercial appeal.”

Amadou & Mariam have exhibited a similar ability to not simply cross but seemingly erase musical boundaries. The pair met as students at Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind and made several more traditional albums before pairing with the polyglot Basque-Galician producer Manu Chao for “Dimanche a Bamako.”

Amadou & Mariam’s U.S. label, Nonesuch, is a leading force in world music. Cuba’s Buena Vista Social Club, Brazil’s Caetano Veloso and African stars N’Dour and Sangare are a few of the many artists who license or release work through the label. But “Dimanche a Bamako” represented a breakthrough, said David Bither, a label senior vice president.

“Of all the African records we’ve released, I’ve never given a record to more people who came back and said, ‘This is incredible,’ ” he said. “That was something we heard in that right away. It was crossing stylistic boundaries, international boundaries, all kinds. It was so fresh.”

Bagayoko, who always has cited Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin as influences, said that several decades of the world embracing African artists has helped make this new sound realizable. “From the time we started, things have changed, for sure,” he said. “There’s more access to the tools we need to make music, which makes the scene more international. It’s universal, we need to be universal. It’s not that recording studios are better [in Africa]; they didn’t exist before.”

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Get up and dance

“Welcome to Mali” was not recorded in Bamako, but in Paris and London -- centers of African immigration -- and in Dakar, the capitol of Senegal. K’Naan guests on one cut. Malian kora master Toumani Diabate appears on another. Its sound is boisterous -- the fans who discover Amadou & Mariam opening for Coldplay this summer will dance their sneakers off -- and brilliantly multifaceted, leading back to the Malian folkways that centuries ago inspired the blues, and reflecting a hyperactively interconnected future.

“We don’t want people to see Africa as only one picture,” said Mariam Doumbia. “We don’t want them to see Africa as a place under war at all times. There are plenty of good things in Africa, the human relationships, the solidarity, the tradition, the stories.”

K’Naan, who briefly journeyed back to Somalia after beginning his recording career, agrees that the tragic Africa so often represented in the American media offers a greatly diminished picture of the continent.

“More than what I could give Africa, for me, it’s been about what I can get,” he said. “Of course, when I drive around there and older ladies are getting out of the car and kissing me, saying, ‘You are doing something for us and we appreciate it,’ it’s great. But there’s just the warmth of the people. I miss the humanity. Here in North America, it’s great and progressive. We get things done. But we just get it done. There’s nothing, no flesh. Over there it’s flesh. I really miss that.”

Today’s African stars have not turned their backs on the troubles in their home countries. Mahlasela, who was a major voice in the anti-apartheid movement as a young man, now works as an ambassador for Nelson Mandela’s 46664 Foundation to raise global awareness of AIDS/HIV. He also helms his own foundation, dedicated to educating young South Africans about indigenous music.

Raising awareness about Somalia is a primary mission for K’Naan. Traore seems more concerned with raising consciousness at home than abroad; she’s overseeing the completion of her new home in Bamako.

“My audience in Africa is really young,” she said. “I would like to inspire them to be more self-confident. . . . For Africans in general, and especially young people, everything from Western countries is better. And white is better than black and whatever white can do, black can’t do. I think even when they say the opposite, they think that way. So many things are linked to the inferiority complex we get from the colonization.

“I had the chance to start traveling when I was really young, and I discovered Africa the same time as Europe, so I don’t have any complex,” she continued. “I don’t presume to think I can change people’s attitudes, but I can do what I do, and I can say what I feel.”

Traore has a 2-year-old son -- that’s the other reason she’s returning to Mali. But it’s also why she’ll leave again. Discussing her personal plans, she almost seems to be speaking of the way African music itself moves now. “I think I wanted him to know about my country and live there,” she said. “If I have the resources in a few years, we will move from there to an English-speaking country. I would like him to travel as I did.”

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ann.powers@latimes.com