Daby Toure
with special guest
Skip 'Little Axe' McDonald
Saturday 21 March 2009

Fiddlers, Bristol
with DJ El Gringo
8-2am (Band on stage at 9.30)
Tickets £9.50 adv

As soon as they met, they knew each other. Daby Touré: a thirty-something musician raised in Mauritania, West Africa, currently a leading light on the Paris, France scene. Skip McDonald: an old school African American bluesman from Dayton, Ohio, long time resident of London, England. And having met and jammed one summer’s night at Real World they kept on meeting and jamming at festivals around the world. Now on their debut tour to promote their Realworld release which Call My Name captures the magic of this unique creative union, with songs – some by Touré, others by McDonald – transformed via imaginative, instinctive collaboration. Here is African/French culture. African American/English culture. Traditional African rhythms. Influences from elsewhere. And, of course, the blues.

Being children of Africa helps, of course. “We’ve both got roots in the Motherland,” notes McDonald, the son of a blues guitarist who used to lull his son to sleep with bedtime songs instead of stories. “We’ve both ended up somewhere else. So we’ve got African/French culture. African American/English culture. We’ve got the blues combining with African music - which makes sense, since they’re relatives – as well as our huge range of influences. So we’re going in and out of Africa,” he says, “which is where all music comes from anyway.”

Daby Touré, member of a musical dynasty forged on the banks of the Senegal River – and the artist behind Real World albums Diam and Stereo Spirit, is forever seeking fresh sounds and innovative ways of applying them. “All the music I picked up when I was young is still in me and that doesn’t change. But in my music I am still searching, and mixing, and trying new things. I am African but I am also European.”

As front man for 21st Century blues project Little Axe – whose lauded albums for Real World include Champagne and Grits, Stone Cold Ohio and the forthcoming Bought For A Dollar, Sold For a Dime – Skip McDonald has often likened himself to an archaeologist, ploughing the roots of American blues.

Touring to promotr thie new mini album out on Realworld in March, this show is a rare meeting, down by the river side; the Mississipi and the Niger Delta that is