Still in pursuit of music, I spent my second night in Bamako looking for a television. Along with my guide, Loes, a young Dutchwoman, we wandered through the Hippodrome district, a buzzing neighborhood of restaurants, bars, and French patisseries. Friday night is when Mali's leading music show, Top Étoiles, is broadcast, and I had read that the city stopped to watch it. The bars were packed—Malians have made an accommodation between Islamic observance and beer—and the TVs were blaring, but no one could be persuaded to change the channel from the soccer match in progress. We ended up in a small hotel lobby, swatting mosquitoes and awaiting the magic hour of 10 P.M. The show began about a half hour late, and it didn't disappoint. The mise-en-scène recalled the joyful days of pre-MTV television, of Vaselined lenses and trick psychedelic effects. The highlight was a griotte, bejeweled and dressed to the nines, who sang of the hardships of being a woman in Mali, while pounding a bowl of millet with a heavy pole, a task she miraculously performed without breaking a nail. I wasn't sure if I was witnessing appropriated bling or proto-bling—cultural exchange is a blurry mechanism—but the connections between griottism and rap were on glossy display.

By day, Bamako has a few worthwhile distractions. The Musée National, located in an urban park, houses a glorious collection of Malian sculpture, masks, and pottery; the Artisanat, a crafts market, turns up some bargains in vintage textiles; small shopfront restaurants serve the limited but delicious national cuisine of rice and stewed sauces as well as brochettes of the local fish, capitaine, which is hauled out of the Niger morning and night. The city's topography tells the story of Mali's post-colonial history, the sprawling neighborhoods of crumbling, earth-red enclosures, reminders of Bamako's continuing poverty, interspersed with the occasional architectural monument to governmental optimism and foreign largesse. We stop at one vast, half-built development that will be the new seat of Mali's government and is financed by Colonel Muammar Kaddafi. I had heard of Libya's growing investment in Mali, but the notion of a foreign dictator building the platform for a democratic government struck me as outrageous. In a magically African turn of events, my inflexible attitude was swiftly challenged. On returning to the hotel—which that very morning and the morning before had been called the Hôtel Kempinski—I noticed that the sign had been crudely erased and a new name painted over it. I was now staying at the Hôtel Libya, a guest of Kaddafi. An official-looking delegation of North Africans were patrolling the lobby, giving orders. In my room, I found a Kempinski tote bag and pen. I couldn't decipher if this was an act of rebellion or just a way to get rid of obsolete merchandise.

That evening, after dinner, we cruised the streets looking for a crowd and pulled in at Le Hogon, an open-air nightclub frequented by locals and tourists. We were in luck: There was music. Even better, it was the Symmetric Orchestra, the occasional band of Toumani Diabaté, regarded as the living master of the kora, the harplike instrument essential to the melodious sound of West African music. When the group played New York last year it was at Carnegie Hall, so the opportunity to see them up close was thrilling. African music was born to be intimate, both as a sound track for dancing and as observance of cultural ritual. Since it began to find an international audience in the 1980s, the challenge of transitioning into more formal concert performances has had some dubious side effects, most often the addition of electric bass and programmed drums. Where Western popular music is about drums and bass at the bottom and wailing guitars at the top, West African dance music typically pulls toward the center, which is not the only reason that it seems to come from nowhere but the heart. Layers of melody and syncopated rhythm rise up and peel away around a thrumming, shifting core that is both irresistibly danceable and ethereally hypnotic. From this mobile foundation, the vocal lines swoop and soar, recalling the upper register—the heaven-bound aspect—of great flamenco singing, at other times floating back to earth for bravura ensemble choruses reminiscent of Cuban son.