SIDI TOURE'S "SAHEL FOLK"

Sahel Folk Sidi Touré Say we're old friends. I ask you over for tea and you bring a guitar. It's a sunny morning, so we sip and strum outside, on the fire escape. Now imagine I am a celebrated singer from Mali, with a voice as exacting as a raconteur's. You too are a virtuoso, practiced in both the local Songhaï tradition and American blues. And the city beyond the fire escape? That's a vast field by the Niger River, outside the ancient town of Gao.

This is the backstory to Sidi Touré's new album, "Sahel Folk". The unofficial ambassadorship of Malian music was thrust upon Mr Touré after the death of Ali Farka Touré in 2006 (the two men were not related). But recognition first came to him when, at 25, he won the vocalist's top prize at the 1984 Mali National Biennale, a government-produced cultural fair (now defunct, along with the single-party political system that administered it). Another ten years passed before Mr Touré recorded "Hoga", his first solo album. "Sahel Folk" is the long-awaited follow-up to that debut.

The disc features nine songs with a different collaborator on each track. To heighten the sessions' convivial air, the album's producer, a Frenchman who goes by the mononym "Covalesky", recorded Mr Touré and friends in single takes, outside a family-owned house in Gao. Mr Covalesky intended to make "Sahel Folk" an audio documentary on Malian culture, recording hours of street sounds and interviews. But he scrapped this idea when he started listening to the session tapes. "In the face of such beauty and power delivered so simply by Sidi Touré and his friends, there was nothing to add," Mr Covalesky said last autumn in an interview with National Geographic.

With the help of Chicago label Thrill Jockey Records, Mr Touré's second album bypasses the uncertain channels of West African distribution, which had otherwise slowed the singer's output to a trudge. After 16 years, Mr Touré finally returns to us on "Sahel Folk", his voice an aural wonder that's essential intimacy remains intact.