Chance Meetings: The Touré-Raichel Collective and "Azawade"

Chance plays a huge role in our lives, and history wouldn't have been the same without chance meetings. Would we have ever heard of Lewis Carroll had he not by chance met a young girl named Alice who inspired him to Wonderland? Where would Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet be today if the Titanic had not had a chance encounter with an almost 90 years prior to the movie? What would rock music be like today had John Lennon not met Paul McCartney at a church party, or if Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, former school chums, had not bumped into each other on a train years later? What would our lives look like if Woz hadn't met Jobs?

I'm not trying to suggest that today's random tune, a collaboration between Israeli and Malian musicians, is of the same caliber, but it's fascinating that sometimes chance meetings lead to some really good things. Azawade is by the The Touré-Raichel Collective, which developed out of a chance airport meeting between singer and guitarist Vieux Farka Touré of Mali and pianist Idan Raichel of Israel. Promising to perform together, they fulfilled the promise in 2010 at the Tel Aviv Opera House. An impromptu session the day after at a recording house led to three hours of improvised musical recordings and was the birth of the collective. In 2012 they released their debut album, The Tel Aviv Session, on which this song, Azawade, appears.