Boubacar Traore is a contented man. After a difficult life, the Malian singer, guitarist, and songwriter is happy again, the happiest he’s been since the death of his beloved wife, Pierrette, 11 years ago. “I go to Europe, and to America,” he said. “People like what I do, and they’re willing to pay me for it.”
    With two CDs recently released in the U.S., Macire and Sa Golo, and a current tour, Troare has become quite visible. It wasn’t always that way. In the early ‘60s, after Mali gained his independence from France, he was the country’s voice, on the radio every day, with people singing his “Mali Twist.” He was a star. Everyone knew him. But he made no recordings - and no money from his music.
    People called him Kar Kar, “a nickname I got from playing soccer when I was young. People would yell ‘Kari, Kari’ - dribble, dribble - the name stuck with me,” and they still use the affectionate term for the man who grew up in Kayes, in the west of Mali.
    His songs might have woken up Mali every day, but there was also a living to be made. So Traore worked as a tailor, a shopkeeper, a farmer, and an agricultural agent among other things. As his family responsibilities grew, music took a backseat to money.
    Like the great Ali Farka Toure, who came after him in his homeland (and who accompanied him on an earlier recording), Traore uses the pentatonic scale of his native region, giving his material a feel that strongly recalls blues, not only in sound, but in the wistful tone, as on “Ala Ta Deye Tignaye,” dedicated, like so much of his work, to his late wife. “After she died, I went to Europe,” he recalled. “In Mali, in 1987, I’d been ‘rediscovered.’ But I didn’t want to be there any more.” He flew to Paris and worked construction, sending money home for his children, now living with relatives.
    It was there his luck finally changed. Tracked down, he was brought to England, and recorded his first CD. Two years later he returned to Mali, settling in the capital, Bamako. Everyone was astonished to find Kar Kar back; he’d been silent for so long, they thought he was dead. These days he’s more alive than he’s been in a decade, playing “in Mali, concerts and on television, and all over Africa.” His songs are played on the radio, and he’s become an international name, not only for his own material, but also for his interpretations of traditional songs like “Soundiata.” “Things happen in their own time,” he reflected. “This must be my time, the time of Kar Kar.”

- Chris Nickson