Malian singer and guitarist Vieux Farka Touré is an enigmatic musician. His first name means “old”, yet he’s only 28. He’s a big Buddy Guy and B. B. King fan and reveres John Lee Hooker, but says he’s never heard of Muddy Waters. And it’s hard to believe that the rising star of world music only started playing guitar professionally in 2004. On the evidence of his sophomore album, Fondo, Vieux is confidently assuming the mantle of his father, Ali Farka Touré, the late master of desert blues.

It’s not as if Ali was grooming his son for the role. He wanted Vieux to be a soldier. “But the army isn’t something I like at all,” says Vieux, reached in Chicago and speaking in French. “My passion was music. My father would tell me, ”˜Ah, son, the people in the music business are not good, not honest. I would prefer you do something better.’ But I followed the same path as him.”

Vieux—named after his grandfather—started playing music in his teens and became principal drummer in the Orchestra of Niafunke, where he lived. He left to study music at Mali’s National Institute of the Arts and began learning guitar. “I had a cassette player and some of my father’s tapes. I tuned the guitar the way he does and played along.”

Vieux quickly grew so proficient that Ali was won over. In 2004 the pair performed on-stage for the first time, and just before his demise in 2006 Ali played on his son’s self-titled debut, Vieux Farka Touré. “I’m the only one of my father’s children who’s a musician,” he notes, “so I inherited all his instruments and equipment—lots of guitars and amps.”

Small wonder that, on Fondo, Vieux seems to be channelling Ali’s spirit at times. But he’s also developing a distinctive style and sound. From the opening cascade of rippling, jangling, reverberating notes on “Fafa”, you know you’re in the hands of a master of tone and texture. Vieux’s guitar carves deep grooves, like a plow cleaving the rich earth of the Niger River’s floodplain, where he grew up.

For all the recent international acclaim, however, Vieux isn’t going to let his head swell. “My father’s most important lesson to me as a musician was to be really simple—not to take yourself for a star or some guitar god,” he says. “Stay low and let people say what they think. I want to remain equal with everybody. Life is better like that, isn’t it?”

Vieux Farka Touré plays Performance Works on Thursday (July 2).