Watch Rokia Taore perform

As if the business of keeping a band on the road were not enough of a challenge, Rokia Traoré is now playing the role of cultural administrator, too.

Having set up a music foundation in her homeland, the Malian singer-guitarist has been plunged into preparations for its launch. After years of living in the provincial calm of Amiens, north of Paris, she will spend much of the next five years in Mali’s capital, Bamako, a city that has become the unofficial capital of world music.

As she has to keep a toehold in Europe, where her reputation is flourishing, she is also looking for a place to live in the French capital. Add to that her duties as the mother of a three-year-old son and you have all the ingredients of an impossibly complicated life. Traoré, though, seems remarkably unruffled as she sits in a west London hotel. Like the music on her current album, Tchamantché, the 35-year-old performer is elegant, restrained and unflustered. A diplomat’s daughter whose work draws on the ancient traditions of her landlocked West African nation, she is every inch the 21st-century artist, accustomed to shuttling back and forth — literally and metaphorically — between two worlds.

All manner of influences have shaped her work. At school in Bamako, she was a member of a rap band. When her parents were stationed in Brussels, she fell in love with the bittersweet chansons of Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg. Later, she became a protégée of Mali’s grandmaster of the so-called “desert blues”, Ali Farka Touré. She loves jazz, too, and made room on Tchamantché for a Billie Holiday-style cover of The Man I Love. She has even collaborated with that arch nonconformist, the opera director Peter Sellars, on a project celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth.

Traoré’s work transcends national barriers. At the core of Tchamantché is the Gretsch guitar, an instrument for ever associated with roots rockers such as Chet Atkins. Traditional Malian instruments certainly have their place in her art, but they are often deployed in unconventional ways. In everything she does, Traoré expresses an ingrained sense of simultaneously belonging yet not belonging.

“I was born in Mali, and I still have so many friends there from my childhood,” she explains in her heavily accented English. “But because I have experienced other cultures, I have this thing that we call in French ‘recul’ — I can see things from the outside. So many people in Africa lack that, simply because they haven’t had an opportunity to travel. At the same time, Europeans have a particular idea of what African music is supposed to sound like, so I am conscious that I maybe have to work harder than someone who has a career in pop music or pure African music. I’m part of a generation that’s finding its own way of coming to terms with the rest of the world.”

Traoré’s sense of being an outsider also stems from the fact that, as a member of a high-born family, she does not belong to Mali’s time-honoured caste of griots, or traditional musicians. Although her father had played the saxophone in his youth, he discouraged her from pursuing a musical career and was happier to see her studying sociology at university. When she first began performing, many traditionalists in the tight-knit music scene resented this ambitious young interloper who had spent so many of her formative years abroad.

She talks of her native land with passion leavened with a hint of benevolent impatience. Her father, a Marxist like a number of his peers, had seen many of his dreams collapse in the harsh dawn of the postcolonial era. Something of a theoretician herself, Traoré is prone to lapsing into discourses on the politics of development and the need for pan-African unity. At a practical level, though, she has learnt the importance of making progress one step at a time. Hence her decision to launch the Fondation Passerelle (“passerelle” being French for footbridge), which will help young people to build careers in the music business.

As a successful artist, Traoré had long been used to being approached by youngsters seeking advice or help. To them, she is “grande soeur” — “big sister”. The foundation is her chance to put those piecemeal efforts on a more formal footing. One of her first goals, for instance, is to run sound and lighting courses for youngsters who would otherwise have little prospect of acquiring professional training.

While facilities may often be substandard, Mali — a country whose musical traditions date back almost 1,000 years, to the foundation of the Mande empire — is now the most fashionable destination in world music. Ali Farka Touré attracted pilgrimages by visiting American bluesmen. The kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté and the singer Oumou Sangaré have both risen in the great man’s wake. Like him, they are fixtures on World Circuit, the London-based label that gave the world the Buena Vista Social Club.

If there is one act that has enjoyed more success than any other in seducing British audiences, it is the raucous guitar-and-vocals duo of Amadou & Mariam. Former members of a band at an institute for the blind, the married couple achieved superstar status with the help of the charismatic French- born singer Manu Chao, who produced their 2004 disc Dimanche à Bamako. Last year’s follow-up, Welcome to Mali — co-produced by the Mali-addicted Damon Albarn, driving force behind the Africa Express touring project — has won an equally enthusiastic response. Once the preserve of musicologists, Malian music is breaking through to pop audiences who might never have thought of setting up a tent at Womad. Another of the breakthrough acts of the past couple of years is Tinariwen, an uncompromising band of guitar-playing Touaregs who, ironically enough, are part of a movement trying to break away from Malian rule.

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