He Needs No Interpreter

The voice of Salif Keita is what hits you first. It’s a penetrating tenor with the power to cut through the most profuse thicket of rhythm.

It is a sound so powerful that it takes a few moments before his remarkable visual impact also comes into focus: Stark white skin, soft, reddish blond hair, luminous dark eyes glistening behind white eyelashes.

Keita, one of the great treasures of African music, is an albino from Mali.

No wonder his listeners are mesmerized from the moment he walks on stage.

“To me, when I come out, it’s like a prayer,” says Keita. “People have come to give love and to get love, and I can’t let them down. It’s what their presence demands--emotion and feeling.”

On Saturday, Keita will appear at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater in his first local performance since early 1994. The program will feature material from “ ‘Folon’ . . . The Past,” his album on Mango Records that has been high on the world music charts since its release in November.

And it won’t matter that the meaning of his words will elude much of the audience.

“What matters most,” says Keita, “is how you present yourself on stage. The way you convey the rhythm, the melody--just the way you are on stage.

“Whether the words are understood is second in importance. I know that many of my listeners are driven to understand what I’m talking about, and they will eventually learn the meaning of the words. But what is most important is that I communicate with them emotionally.”

The first African bandleader to win a Grammy nomination (for “Amen” in 1991), Keita has been for nearly two decades one of the major acts in world music. His charismatic presentations, layering Western horns and keyboards with the traditional sounds and rhythms of Mali, are passionate outpourings of feeling. His singing is rich with the primal elements that link emotionally expressive R&B; shouters to the praise singing of African griots, communicating with a universal connectivity that reaches beyond the barriers of language and national borders.

“There are pieces I compose,” Keita says in a phone interview from his home in Paris, “that are conceived for joy. And there are pieces that are intended to reflect a spiritual message. But what’s most important to remember is that even music that makes you dance can have a spiritual quality.”

Keita’s popularity has expanded to worldwide proportions, even though very few listeners--outside of Africa and France--comprehend the West African languages (mixed with French) in which he sings.

But his capacity to reach such a wide audience is not unusual in the volatile arena of world music, which has been undergoing many changes in the past few years.

Two factors are having the greatest impact.

First, the heterogeneity of musical interests around the world, always diverse, has become even more eclectic in recent years.

Second, many regions are showing an increased tendency to support their local artists.

On the first point, other parts of the world are receptive to an enormously colorful array of sounds--while the U.S. market has rarely responded to songs in languages other than English.

The fact that there is a category for world music at all may say more about American cultural chauvinism than it does about any sort of all-inclusive identification. World music is simply the 85% or so of the global sounds that are not American, ranging from roots music to the latest slick international pop. Anyone who has spent time overseas knows that listening to the radio in other nations can open a cornucopia of musical delights not often heard in this country.

To note only a few examples: African music, perhaps the richest, most varied music in the world, is played almost as widely as American pop throughout Europe. Jazz continues to be heard in Europe, Japan and many of the former Soviet Bloc countries. Parts of Asia tend to embrace balladeers. Rock music and heavy metal are surfacing in Russia and China. Locally, Los Angeles has seen overflow crowds for acts such as Argentina’s Mercedes Sosa and Cape Verde’s Cesaria Evora.

Clearly, as Keita noted, effective performances, on records and on stage, are not just about the words of a song.

Business Week magazine recently reported that Mexico’s Luis Miguel, singing in Spanish, sold 500,000 albums in Korea, where he was voted top international artist of the year. Michael Learns to Rock, a Danish rock band, sold 2 million albums in Asia, including 500,000 in Japan, and Italy’s Laura Pausini has become a major star in South America.

“The music I listened to when I was young came from every part of the world,” says Keita. “First it was Latin music, Cuban big bands--very influential in Africa in the ‘60s. Then it was jazz. In fact, ‘Mandjou’ was recorded with [the band] Les Ambassadeurs, who did virtually nothing but jazz and improvisation. I also listened to Pink Floyd and James Brown. After that, rhythm & blues, Barry White and, always, lots of European music.”

All of this is not to suggest that North American and British pop do not continue to be a primary international force. Even a quick survey of the best-selling charts reveals the frequent presence of albums by Alanis Morissette, Celine Dion, Sting and Michael Jackson. But North American and British pop no longer dominate worldwide as they once did, and must contend with competition from such international artists as Miguel, Pausini and Jacky Cheung.

Rap, one of the hottest current commodities in American music, has had only selective success overseas, especially spotty in the vital markets of Europe and Asia. Its in-your-face descriptions of violence, racism and crime are precisely the images that are bothersome to many foreign listeners.

On the second factor impacting world music--the growing regional support for home-grown artists--both European and Asian audiences are seasoning their diet of music imported from America and elsewhere with local counterparts. Algerian-rooted rai in France and reggae-derived ragamuffin in Italy are typical examples, with nations such as Sweden developing their own version of urban African American styles.

The success of regional performers has been aided by the extensive availability of sophisticated audio and video technology. Not long ago, in terms of production quality of records, concerts and videos, American and British artists were dominant. But the playing field has leveled and releases by performers such as Cheung are technically comparable to American productions.

The net result of these changes, industry observers note, is that American and British pop, which accounted for 65% of European music sales in 1985, now accounts for just 45%. And most major record companies are stumbling all over themselves to find lucrative positions in a rapidly changing international marketplace.

For Keita, these transformations in the music marketplace are of little personal significance.

“I don’t think of the future,” he says. “I live in the present. The future, for me, is in God’s hands.”

His dispassionate acceptance of what each new day brings is characteristic of a man who, despite his achievements, has been somewhat of an outsider for most of his life.

Keita was born in 1949 in Djoliba, a village to the west of the Mali capital of Bamako, the third of 13 children. He is a descendant, both paternally and maternally, he explains, of Sundiata Keita, the 13th century founder of the Mandinka Empire.

In the still-hierarchical society of Mali, professions are caste determined. Although Keita’s family was relatively poor, it possessed a high-level blood line. And members of high-level castes do not ordinarily become musicians, or jalis, in Malian society.

Keita recalls developing his voice when he was very young when he would “go out into the fields and sing loudly to scare way the birds.” But the growing appeal that music’s “magical powers” held for him raised serious family difficulties.

“I had enormous problems to overcome, especially with my father,” he says with a sigh. “Because in my family, men do not sing. It simply isn’t done.

“And I believe that the suffering and the pain I experienced at that time is what brought a lot more strength and a little more violence to my voice. Because I wasn’t only crying out at the birds, I was crying out to express my pain.”

Keita solved his dilemma by telling his father that there were two choices that could be made.

“I told him,” he says, “that I could either become a juvenile delinquent, or I could sing. And since my father preferred that I not hang out in the streets, he decided that it was more noble to be a musician--even though he only saw it as the lesser of two evils.”

The early family difficulties were compounded by the unalterable reality of having been born an albino, a fact which, in ancient times, might have led to his sacrifice with other “troublemakers” on the large slabs of stone which still stand outside his village.

“It is something I have had to deal with for my entire life,” he explains. “And it brought many problems when I was a child. But later, when I became an artist, I discovered that music made it much easier to deal with my life as an albino.”

Keita’s breakthrough came in the mid-’70s when he joined a resident hotel ensemble, “Les Ambassadeurs du Motel.”

“Mandjou,” a signature song which, ironically, praises former Guinean dictator Sekou Toure, was recorded when the band moved its activities to Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast. Keita, who refuses to be distracted by politics (“I am only a musician, first and foremost”), reports that the song was written to acknowledge Toure’s honoring of Manding culture and musicianship.

These days, Keita, always emphasizing his desire to live in the moment, nonetheless expresses some contentment about the direction of his life. He returns to Mali from his Paris home at least once every few months (“It’s like a fish going back to the water for me to go back to Africa”). And he is pleased with the success of “Folon,” which reunited him with keyboardist-arranger Jean-Phillippe Rykiel, who played an essential role in Keita’s important 1987 album, “Soro.”

But any conversation with him inevitably turns to the subject of his live performances and his feeling about his listeners.

“My only concern when I sing,” says Keita, “is the people who have come to see me--that they receive everything they have come for. Because to me, singing is like an exchange of energy--in both directions. The more I give, the more I get.”

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Salif Keita performs on Saturday at Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Veterans Administration grounds, Brentwood, 8 p.m. $28.50-$31.50. (310) 825-2101.