That night's show didn't quite catch fire. In the African tradition, guest musicians jumped in and jammed, and several of them looked and sounded a little worse for wear. In the Western tradition, the dance floor was a sea of touristic self-expression: frugs, bunny hops, electric boogaloo, and even a textbook tango. Which is not to disparage the white man's dancing. Malian music, in all its myriad styles, teases Western ears with constant hints of the familiar. You might hear B. B. King in the sweetly lyrical guitar lines, Muddy Waters in the repeating vocal callouts, and you can't miss Bo Diddley in the music's locomotion. When and how African music and the blues fed into each other is a question that can never be fully answered. It occurred in the two hundred years between the institutionalization of the slave trade and the invention of sound recording in the mid nineteenth century. Hypotheses abound, but I prefer the explanation offered me by a Malian musician: "Of course."

Our ultimate destination in Mali was far to the east, out to Timbuktu and then into the fringes of the Sahara for the Festival au Désert, a three-day rave that has earned its reputation as the world's most inaccessible music festival. We piled into a Land Cruiser and disentangled ourselves from the choking outskirts of the capital. The mood quickly softened: Fields of scrub and pasture extended to the horizon, crowned by the tufting tops of baobab trees. Villages went by in a red-earth blur of ramshackle buildings and smoky fires and piles of metal scrap. The French left a shoddy legacy in Mali: terrible roads, no national railway, and little supporting infrastructure. In some sort of make-good, Orange, the French telecommunications giant, has built a dynamite mobile phone network. Orange vous accompagne partout au Mali, read the billboards, and it is so. Its advertising is so ubiquitous that, after a few days, I began to feel that the Prophet himself wanted me to buy a calling card.

When the inevitable occurred and our Land Cruiser broke down, Orange came to the rescue. While the driver and I, like men the world over, prodded and poked the dead engine, my guide Loes called the owner of a local hotel, who cheerfully came to collect us and took us to lunch. A few hours later, we were back on the road. The landscape became ever more parched and desolate. To get us through the siesta hour, we started sharing stories. Our driver, a large man overflowing with bonhomie, was called Tounkara, a typical griot name, and I was curious about his history. He swiftly pointed out that his lineage was of the noble Tounkaras, not the griot Tounkaras. He told of having to prove his noble roots to his in-laws before they'd allow him to marry their daughter. Apparently, no one wants a griot in the family. I was immediately interested in how nobility is measured in a country without private estates or visible wealth. He explained that nobility is a kind of moral obligation, expressed in conduct alone. A noble man is expected to take care of his extended family materially, even if this requires working the most menial jobs. A few years back, finding himself unemployed, Tounkara had left his home in Ségou, Mali's second-largest city, to unload trucks in a small town where he wasn't known. This was, he explained, the noble thing to do.