Musicians from Bjork to Roswell Rudd have collaborated with acclaimed Malian kora player Toumani Diabate From Tuesday's Globe and Mail July 3, 2007 at 2:37 AM EDT Many of us can't trace our family lineage beyond our great-greats. Malian musician Toumani Diabate, on the other hand, can go back a jaw-dropping 71 generations. What's more, in each of those generations, a male Diabate has played the kora, the 21-stringed instrument typically translated to Western audiences as harp-like.
But the 71st-generation Diabate is the only one to collaborate with musicians as disparate as Bjork, Ali Farka Toure, Roswell Rudd, Taj Mahal and the Spanish flamenco supergroup Ketama. Diabate speaks with pride about these collaborations, and about his status as first kora player to win a Grammy Award (which he did in 2005 for In the Heart of the Moon , with the late Ali Farka Toure). But he demurs at the suggestion he's breaking from the previous 70 generations of tradition.
Toumani Diabate, left, with his Symmetric Orchestra: His current tour showcases the kora backed by big band. It's true I'm not playing exactly like my father, he says, speaking by phone from Amsterdam. But he wasn't playing exactly like his father either.
Diabate was born a , a hereditary position conferring the role of storyteller, keeper of history and genealogy through music. Or as he puts it: are the memory of the Mande empire. It's a memory with a long reach, including hundreds of songs and dating back to the 13th century when the Malian king Sundiata ruled much of West Africa.
For Diabate, born in 1965, life as a touring musician has provided irresistible opportunities to share aspects of that memory with audiences of other cultures. But he would never have had the impact he has were it not for his virtuosic playing, his technique that would seem almost an impossibility - bass lines, accompaniment and solos flying simultaneously from his fingers. On his current tour, he's showcasing another kind of kora sensation - kora as backed by big band, the innovative and majestic Symmetric Orchestra.
Diabate explains that the band hopes to achieve a kind of inversion of notions of tradition and modernity. If we take a sound from 400 years ago, we take the arrangement from today. If we compose a new song today [for the band], we use an arrangement from hundreds of years ago.
So you see it is the past meeting the present - for the future. It's a meeting that has been taking place for about a decade of Friday nights at the outdoor Hogon club in Bamako, where the band is adored. Everyone comes to the Hogon - locals, dignitaries, fans from across Africa and around the world, the crowd erupting when the Symmetric launches into the rollicking signature tune Toumani, heralding the kora player's arrival.
Diabate describes the regular Hogon gig as the Symmetric's laboratory. We have musicians coming to play from the Ivory Coast, from Senegal and so on, and they are all superstars in their own country. What we are doing is trying to rebuild the Mande empire.
This music has a history, a geography and a legend. Even with the addition of Pee Wee Ellis's horns on the group's 2006 recording, , the jazz, salsa and funk influences sound unquestionably African, the perfect vehicle for Diabate's kora in unfettered solo flight. As lead, he parcels out his usual bass lines to electric bass, accompaniment to rhythm guitar.
He hasn't lost sight of the instrument's one-man-band capacity though.
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