Earlier this month, the world lost a giant of African music with the death of Ali Farka Touré. His Grammy Award–winning 1994 CD Talking Timbuktu, produced by Ry Cooder, is the world's most popular recording highlighting the musical link between African music and American blues to date.

Born in 1939, Touré lived his early years in a considerably different musical landscape than young African people do today. Over the past 30 years, battery-operated cassette players and an avalanche of international recordings have filtered into even some of the continent's most remote backwaters. The result has been a new generation of African artists who blend traditional music with American and European influences.

This week Prague audiences will have two opportunities to hear that music, with ensembles from both sides of the Sahara playing royal music that rocks.

"We claim to renew the tradition, but remember that this is a tradition with movement," says Ba Cissoko, who hails from Guinea. "We take new influences from jazz, rock 'n' roll, reggae, hip-hop, dub and electronic music — not to adapt them, but because they speak to us, and we feel they can make a dialogue with our tradition."

This dynamic dialogue is evident on Cissoko's latest CD, Electric Griot Land, which has critics hailing his bandmate, the electric kora player Sekou Kouyate, as "the Hendrix of the kora." (A kora is a 21-string harp that can be played to sound like a guitar.) Cissoko and Kouyate represent two lines of Griots, who — as historians, poets and musicians — claim a cultural heritage that reaches back to medieval African empires. As Cissoko notes, "We have been a family of Griots for many generations."

The music of Saïd Tachiti has more recent roots in the Saharan city of Guelmim, where Tachiti was raised while his father lived the entirety of his working life as a slave. (Slavery was not banned in Mauritania until 1981.) Tachiti now lives in Budapest, where he talked to The Prague Post last week in the earth-toned Ellátó Café in Klauzál Square about his life and music.

"Everybody in my family played music, and my mother practiced El Guedra," Tachiti says, referring to one of the musical sisterhoods who gather for healing and social purposes. A key component of these musical societies is similar to Santeria (Cuba) and Voodoo (Haiti). As Tachiti explains, "The trance is always practiced as a therapeutic method, not only in my city, but especially in the great [Moroccan] imperial cities where the older religious brotherhoods are established."

Tachiti has taken both musical and social gambles. He relocated to Budapest to ply his musical career seven years ago, when there was virtually no regional market for world music. He worked with DJs in remixing his studio tracks, to the ire of fans who expect purer traditional references. In Budapest, Tachiti also dared to throw Sephardic and Central European Jews into mixed religious celebrations with Islamic Magreb musicians.

Although his efforts yielded mixed results, Tachiti insists, "What I do is sincerely the mirror of my true identity; otherwise, it would be simple folklore or hypocrisy."

It's hard to challenge Tachiti's authenticity, whether he is jamming with Western jazz musicians or soloing on his guembri (a three-stringed bass instrument), singing praises to the Gnawa saint Saadi Belwali. Like Ali Farka Touré, he is constantly innovating in harmony with an Afro-Islamic environment, which he says has an historic precedent.

"The majority of our musicians who found their way to posterity fused their musical styles and instruments with other cultures over the centuries. The result is that during my lifetime, the electric guitar has become a principal, if not traditional, instrument in the music of West Africa. It is similar to the historic integration of the banjo into Moroccan Berber music, and the violin into classical Arabic music."

Not everyone is ready for a mix of such diverse influences, however. "Sometimes I disappoint people who want a 'pure' folklore spectacle," Tachiti admits, shaking the collar-length dreadlocks that frame his Afro-Berber features. "But who can talk about 'pure' race these days?"

Although on two previous CDs with a group called Chalaban, Tachiti wove a blend of transcontinental genres, his new project is set to a tighter North African focus. With his new trio featuring Tabet Ahmed and Boudraf Kamel from Algeria, Tachiti cooks a Saharan gumbo he describes as "Algerian Chaabi, Moroccan Gnawa, desert blues and trance music."

The late Ali Farka Touré began his career playing a simple desert lute not unlike Tachiti's guembri, but by the time of his final CD, the 2005 Grammy Award–winning Heart of the Moon, he was also blending traditions, merging his guitar's desert-blues sound with the kora music of Toumani Diabate. Touré's obituaries in the international press spoke of a man who won respect not only on the international music charts, but also as a farmer in his hometown, where he was elected mayor.