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second’s consideration. It turned out that Toumani and his manager had already been looking to hook a harpist themselves but hadn’t found the right partner. And above all, that old friendship, those old memories just made this project feel right. Toumani was on board and, with help from the Arts Council of Wales, that insis- tent genie was finally going to get its way.


Late on the evening of March 21st


2012, Toumani boarded a plane at Bamako airport bound for Paris and ultimately Wales. While he was in the air, a group of disgruntled Malian soldiers led by a hither- to unknown army officer called Captain Amadou Sanogo overthrew the democrat- ically elected president of Mali, Amadou Toumani Touré, and drop-kicked Toumani’s homeland into the worse crisis it has known since independence. When Toumani landed in Paris he called Bamako and heard shots being fired in the distance behind the troubled voices of family mem- bers. His home was only a short distance from the Presidential Palace on Koulouba Hill. He was worried.


All this made him averse to the idea of travelling on to Cardiff immediately. Each day that passed, Toumani’s manager was on the phone to John and Dilwyn, trying to find solutions. Each day Toumani was talking feverishly with his family back home and with Malian expats in Paris, dis- secting the situation and speculating about the future of their country. Each day Catrin Finch grew more and more con- cerned. Meanwhile rehearsal time began to disappear in the rear-view mirror.


At last, what seemed like a definite arrival date was scheduled for the Saturday 24th March, two days before the first show on the tour. Meanwhile, John took the pre- caution of inviting Seckou Keita to step in and help Catrin rehearse a repertoire. Seck- ou was in Rome when he got the call: Can you get your butt over here… rapido?!


Although he was a busy man, Seckou responded manfully to this request and flew back to the UK to join Catrin at Acapela, the studio that she’d built with her sound-engineer husband Hywel Wigley in an old chapel in the village of Pentyrch near Cardiff. “Seckou and Toumani spoke to each other about the repertoire,” John remembers. “And Seck- ou was just solid and professional. Between the three of us – myself, Seckou and Catrin – we put the show together in about six hours.”


T


hrough no fault of his own, Toumani didn’t make the Satur- day night flight. He managed to get on another flight the next day, but his kora managed to miss it. In the end, both finally arrived in Wales, separately but intact.


After emerging from his suite in that


Cardiff hotel late-ish on that Monday morning, groggy with lack of sleep but energised by the sweet music that had been burbling between his ears all night, Toumani came down to the hotel lobby where John was waiting for him. “Mmmm… right, John, mon ami!” Toumani declared, yawning and rubbing his hands together as he breathed in the cool morning air. “Time for some fish and chips don’t you think?”


The day was already past its prime. Catrin Finch was pacing the corridors of the theatre wondering how several days worth of rehearsals had scoped themselves down to just a few hours, and even those few hours were now in doubt. “I’m amazed she didn’t just walk out,” the theatre’s market- ing manager Tamsin Davies told me. The stress was almost unbearable but a steely courage and belief held things on course. John just wrapped his nerves in ice and kept going. “It was one of those times when I thought… you know… it’s not life or death,” he remembers. “I kept telling Dilwyn ‘It’s gonna be alright, trust me!’”


And so it was. Welsh faeries and West African djinns (spirits) took control of events. Toumani finally arrived at the the- atre, gracious as only the scion of 77 gen- erations of West African griots can be. There were a few precious hours of prepa- ration before showtime and then the greatest kora player in the world and finest young harpist in Britain took to the stage and something very special just clicked. At the interval, a member of the audience came up to Catrin and said, “That was beautiful! You must have been working on it for months!” “Er… well… a few hours actually,” she answered.


As the week progressed this shotgun wedding of the strings just got better. Toumani was flying high on the whole experience, driving through the emerald wetness of Wales with John listening to wicked tunes on the car stereo, just like old times. “We had a great week,” says John, “but respect to Seckou, he saved the day!” And it was in recognition of that fact that Seckou was asked to come along and do guests spots with the duo in Bre- con and Cardiff.


“Seckou’s guest appearance in Cardiff was magnificent,” John recalls. “He came on with great charisma but also humility, leaving enough room for Toumani, who was gracious and humble in return, show- ing respect for Seckou and giving him space to perform. Their elegant interac- tion was touching.” The whole traumatic affair ended on a blissful high and every- one was happy. “Yeah, it was a catalogue of events,” Catrin admits with the com- fortable smile of hindsight, “and that’s how Seckou and I met really.”


Everyone wanted to carry on. Talk of international tours, albums and seemingly limitless possibilities remained feverish for a while. But then the faeries and genies inter- vened again, steering fate down a side alley and onto a different trajectory, as they always do. Priorities. Commitments. Fate. It just couldn’t be. In the end, John asked Seckou to step in again, for good this time.


The road ahead was already well mapped out. A few dry runs in the spring of 2013. Then into the studio to record a new album. Then a UK tour. Then an inter- national tour. Then the world, the heavens and… the rest is for the djinns and faeries to decide. Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita were now entrusted with the delicate task of consummating this wedding… or maybe, this ‘reunion’ of strings.


The moment has come to step back a few centuries, perhaps even millennia. No one can possibly put a date on the moment when the hunter realised that the bow which he used to shoot his prey and feed his family could also be plucked to make patterns with sound and placate the spirits. No doubt voices and claps and hands on skin or wood came first, but after that, it was the tightened string. Like Lucy, our common African ancestor, that first huntsman and his bow were the progeni- tors of dazzling variety: the koto, kundi, enanga, mangbetu harp, ardin, yaal, veena, lyre, konghou, kafir harp, clarsach, crwth, guzheng, guqin, arpa jarocha, arpa llanera, arpa huayno, double harp, triple harp, concert harp, gravikord, cross-strung harp… the list is almost endless. What’s certain is that this is the oldest family of instruments in the world and that the Welsh harp and the kora are cousins, which, given six degrees of separation, is probably true of us all.


No one is 100 percent sure of how the kora came into being. Strangely, the first person ever to mention it was a Scotsman, Mungo Park, who, in an account of the life and culture of the “Mandingo” people of the Gambia river region which he wrote after his travels there in 1795-7, mentions “a large harp with eighteen strings” called a “korro”. Historians and ethnomusicolo- gists broadly agree that the kora evolved out of simpler lyres, less well-endowed in terms of strings and majestic sophistica- tion, about 300 years ago in the Manding Empire of Kaabu which spread over terri- tory now in the West African states of Guinea, Senegal and The Gambia. One thing that most local people also agree on however is that the kora was given to mankind by the djinns. Good music always comes to us from the other side.


The Gambian jali or griot Bamba Suso opens his rendition of the great epic of Sunjata Keita, the founder of the medieval Empire of Mali that stretched from Atlantic cost to Timbuktu and Gao, with the following lines:


“This tune that I am now playing / I learned it from my father / And he learned it from my grandfather. / Our grandfather’s name – Koriyang Musa. / That Koriyang Musa / Went to Sanimentereng and spent a week there. / He met the jinns, and brought back a kora. /The very first kora.”


Seckou Keita, born into one of the most eminent griot clans in Senegambia, but with a name that hints at a more regal ancestry, has his own take on the kora’s ori- gins. “There are a lot of versions of how the kora was discovered, or, in other words, passed down from the djinns,” he told me. “The first guy who received it was Jali Mady Wuleng – Griot Mady ‘The Red’. I’ve always tried to find out why that ‘red’? And the pillow of the kora, the pad that goes on top of the bridge on which the strings rest, is always called ‘the red’. I’ve been given a lot of answers as to why that it is, but I haven’t got to the truth yet.” Interestingly, the word ‘jali’ or ‘djeli’, meaning ‘griot’, is often claimed to have an etymological affinity


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