The young Malian guitarist Samba Touré has spent most of his career in dialog with Ali Farka Touré’s vast and complex musical legacy. Samba Touré’s debut, Songhai Blues, was an unabashed tribute to Farka Touré’s life and work, but on Crocodile Blues Samba Touré has made some effort to step out of his mentor’s shadow, honing a slightly less traditional, more pop-inflected variant of Farka Touré’s pulsating desert blues. While Farka Touré (no relation) often made music with an air of forbidding austerity, Samba Touré’s tracks are warm and approachable. Songs like “Alabina” and “Dani Dou,” which might have sounded like laments in Farka Touré's hands, appear on Crocodile Blues as exuberant bursts of communal celebration. As engaging as these ebullient performances are, Crocodile Blues’ best moment may come when Touré slips into a more melancholy mood, as on the dreamily evocative instrumental “White Crocodile Blues,” which fuses John Fahey's romanticism with the entrancing polyrhythms of Ali Farka Touré’s legendarily fleet-fingered guitar style.