39 f Kora Connections
Toumani Diabate’s international career as the king of the kora got rolling as a result of early gigs in England. Elizabeth Kinder hears how it all began.
M
alian musicians with a new album out tend to make a beeline for Paris, where they’re quite likely to have rehearsed for it, recorded it
and mixed it. France, the former colonial power, has long been the first port of call for Mali’s creative citizens looking to carve out a career in the West. Not so, however, with legendary griot kora master Toumani Diabaté, who, though he learnt French and Arabic in Bamako, found his path to remarkable international success and worldwide acclaim lit up from London.
At the heart of this story is kora play-
er, award-winning producer, ex-World Routes presenter, SOAS lecturer and writer Lucy Duran who has done more than any other person in the UK to introduce the sparkling sound of the 21-string West African harp / lute to our ears. Along with Nick Gold, she produced Toumani & Sidiki, the latest addition to the Diabaté canon featuring beautiful, haunting and hypnot- ic duets from the father and son team.
I met up with them both in London to uncover the English connection, during a brief respite between their series of sell- out gigs around the UK. “Lucy went to Mali in 1986 and met my family. I wasn’t there,” says Toumani, outlining a perhaps discouraging start. “I was playing with Bouba” – legendary guitarist, Bouba Sacko, was his cousin, he explains and the first man to transpose traditional ngoni and balafon music to the guitar. “ Every day I would take my kora to Bouba’s house and play. He had a blessing from God, a gift from God, if any singer wanted to be Number 1 in Mali they had to have Bouba on their album! Kandia [Kouyaté] was in the Ivory Coast but came to Mali to make an album with him.” The resulting tour of central Africa took Toumani out of Mali as Duran’s train pulled into Bamako station, last stop on an epic train journey from Gambia that she’d undertaken with the writer James Fox.
Already a fan of guitarist / singer Ous- mane Sacko, Lucy was introduced to him by Toumani’s uncle, Amadou ‘Bansang’ Jobarteh. Later that year, when Sacko and his wife, singer Yiakare Diabaté, had a gig in Paris, Duran was invited. Toumani remembers: “Ousmane took me to Paris to play the kora in his band. Lucy and her friends were nice, she spoke to people here, they organised for us to play a con- cert here in the UK.”
Duran was in touch with Anne Hunt whose pioneering Arts Worldwide (that later founded the World Circuit label)
organised tours for musicians from across the world before ‘world music’ became a category. That concert, featuring Ousmane Sacko and Yiakare Diabaté, introduced not just the exquisite, uplifting sound of the kora and balafon (West African wooden xylophone) combo, but the brilliance of Mali’s extraordinary singers to a packed Camden Centre in November 1986. For Toumani it was a bit of a family affair, with uncle Bourama Kouyaté playing the exu- berant balafon rhythms. fRoots reported that “the people on the stage tonight are enjoying themselves so much that they should be charged to come in.”
“I was like Sidiki,”
Toumani smiles at his son, “exactly 22 years old at that time. We came from Paris on the ferry and the train and arrived in London. I was
happy to be here and meet people. We played a concert and stayed for a week. Then Lucy got us a concert in Amsterdam.” Here, Toumani was introduced to “people working for Womad” and returned to these shores to work with a band from England at the request of the Womad organisation. “We played 105 concerts in five months.”
And so began Toumani’s to-ing and fro-ing as he divided his time between the UK and Mali, a key figure in the burgeon- ing UK world music scene from the late ’80s onwards. “I was the first musician from Mali to live in the UK. When I came here there was only one African band, the Bhundu Boys. Youssou and Baaba Maal had started to be in touch with Peter Gabriel, but I was the first one.” He remembered his first ever solo gig – in Bris- tol – during his recent concert there with Sidiki, generously thanking those who helped him in his early days here.
Photo: Judith Burrows
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