It's a land of Saharan beauty, surreal architecture, and sartorial splendor (check out the outfits). But for centuries, Mali was synonymous with the ends of the earth (think Timbuktu). Then along came the world music boom—and now the country is its red-hot center. James Truman puts on his dancing shoes

I had gone to Mali for the music, in the same way that one goes to Italy for the food or Wales for the rain. It promised an experience both sensual and elemental. Mali is one of the world's great musical treasures—the home of such superstars as Salif Keïta and the late Ali Farka Touré, and a primary source of the music that America would remake into the blues. From its fertile southern savannas to the Sahara Desert in the north, the country is awash in diverse musical styles. I arrived lacking scholarship in the finer distinctions between Bambara and Wassalou melodies as well as Bamana and Mande rhythms. But I had a long-standing fascination with Mali's tradition of griots, the caste of musicians who were once minstrels in the courts of emperors and whose handed-down epic poems form the backbone of the country's history.

The phenomenon of the griots is uniquely West African and so beguiling to foreigners that the poets have been mentioned in dispatches home since the sixteenth century. Nowadays, griots (and griottes, as women singers are hugely popular) are the dynastic virtuosos of Malian music, its pop stars and its divas. From what I'd read, Bamako, the capital, was an inspired combination of old Europe, with balladeers wandering the streets, and the round-the-clock fiesta that is modern-day Havana. As it turned out, I heard barely a note of music in my first few days there. It just wasn't to be heard. Which is not to suggest that Bamako is peaceful. Chaotic, overpopulated, and polluted, it is joyously, percussively noisy. Street peddlers and market traders throng its choking thoroughfares, as un-mufflered trucks and mopeds kick up squalls of the reddish-brown dust from which the city is built. Dust is everywhere. In the afternoon heat, you can half close your eyes, inhale, and dream of being in a fairy-tale land made entirely of paprika. In the backstreets, behind the walls of extended-family compounds, the steady drumbeat of millet being pounded reverberates day and night. From behind the corroded doors of roadside workshops, the sound of metal banging metal hammers the city with a vengeance. In a country still struggling to move beyond subsistence, ironworkers are a highly valued caste; they are the artisans-cum-alchemists who invent a new application from every discarded resource.

But still no music. I gradually discovered that Malians' relationship to their music is complicated, circumscribed by a public Muslim culture and private animist beliefs, as well as by a sense of decorum that informs everything from their courtly, elaborate greetings to their immaculate dress. ("You can always tell a tourist by his shoes," a Malian told me, and my dusty sneakers sadly proved this true.) Malian society is an intricate system of caste and hierarchy, as nuanced and rigid as any I've encountered—and I grew up in England. But it seems to operate without the conflicts, resentments, or opposition that normally accompany such stratification. The country's relative peacefulness since emerging from French colonial rule in 1960 suggests that this system may actually have helped unite a polyglot nation of multiple ethnicities, languages, and customs. To an out-sider, the social details appear fantastically arcane, and I tried to keep a running tally in my notes: "Blacksmiths (including ironworkers) can marry only potters, but have close relations with Fulani, who are cattle herders"; "weavers always married to dyers"; "leather makers entitled to repair calabashes"; "all Bozo are fishermen"; "griots were once hunters, though both hunters and griots now deny it." I kept this going for a week, then surrendered to befuddlement. In particular, these traditions shed little light on the elusive status of musicians. I did know that in the years following independence, there had been a griot renaissance. In the rush away from Europeanism, the griots' memorized songs and epic poems of Mali's heritage had ennobled them as cultural historians. And then, in the 1980s, came the world music boom, with Mali as one of its hot spots. I imagined that the older prejudice against griots, as hustlers looking for handouts, had been supplanted.