Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Voice

True Griot

Elegant, ectomorphic and intense, Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traoré is the sort of performer who’ll have you convinced you know what she’s singing about even if you don’t understand a word of her native Bamana. While her music has always drawn from West African traditions, Traoré is a classic cosmopolitan: A diplomat’s daughter, she lived in the U.S. and Middle East in her youth and played in a hip-hop band while studying in Brussels. Since her breakthrough in 1997, the singer — who, unusually for a woman in the African tradition, accompanies herself on acoustic guitar — has made four albums and collaborated with Peter Gabriel and the Kronos Quartet. Traoré brings her strikingly intimate, ever-evolving sounds to the Hop on Tax Day, then to the Flynn on Sunday.