Enduring melodies: Malian kora legend Toumani Diabaté collaborated with the world

The untimely death of Mali’s Toumani Diabaté at the age of 58 has shocked the music world. The sheer number of tributes, including those from superstar African musicians Youssou N’Dour from Senegal and Salif Keita from Mali, is testament to the impact of Toumani’s mastery of the kora.

He played an immeasurable role in bringing the music of Mali and of the kora, the west African harp, to international audiences. He received many honours, including two Grammy Awards for his collaborations with Malian bluesman Ali Farka Touré.

As a musician and professor of music with a research focus on the kora, I knew and worked with Toumani. I was the music producer on seven of his albums. This is a personal tribute to a man who has left a legacy as enormous as the one he was born into.

Meeting Toumani Diabaté

In 1976 I travelled from London to Gambia to study with kora player Amadu Bansang Jobarteh, the great-uncle of Toumani Diabaté. I first went with him to visit Toumani’s family home in Bamako, Mali in 1986.

That same year the BBC was producing a classical music festival in London and wanted to include African music. The ensemble I put together for them included Toumani.

His playing was a revelation. There was something ethereal about his style that was different from other kora players. It was partly the resonant tone he got out of the kora, with its 21 nylon fishing-line strings arranged in two rows, plucked with just index fingers and thumbs.

His virtuosity was dazzling and intensely lyrical, though without vocals. His rapid-fire improvisations were laced with gorgeous, languorous melodies, as if they were being sung.

Mande music

It’s well documented that the kora did not originate in what is now Mali. It developed out of calabash harps somewhere in the territory that was once the Mandinka empire (The Gambia, southern Senegal and Guinea Bissau). Before independence there were very few kora players in Mali and they mostly came from The Gambia and Senegal.

It was really the Gambia-born fathers of Toumani Diabaté and neighbour Ballaké Sissoko – Sidiki Diabaté Snr and Djelimady Sissoko – who raised the profile of the kora in Mali. They mixed up Malian melodies with Gambian virtuosity, and passed on their approach to both sons.

The story of Toumani’s extended family is a window onto the inter-connectedness of the pre-colonial Mande region, and the role that jelis (hereditary musicians, also known as griots) played in this. They used to travel hundreds of kilometres in search of patronage, usually by foot, sharing stories and tunes along the way.

Toumani brought out the universal qualities of Mande griot music, faithful to his musical heritage, called jeliya. His father stated, during his last public performance, that the kora had been in his family for seven generations (contrary to the commonly reported 71 generations).

Early years

While he was recording his album The Mande Variations, I interviewed Toumani as part of my research. He told me about his childhood.

He was born in Bamako in 1965. His father was often absent because of his playing commitments and had three wives, two of whom, including Toumani’s mother Néné Koita, were singers in Mali’s Ensemble Instrumental National.

When he was a baby he contracted polio, his mother told me, losing all mobility in his right leg. He walked with a cane all his life.

At the age of five he started to play a seven-stringed kora, a gift from a friend of his father, and attended a Franco-Arab school:

“All my brothers went to the same school. And my children go there too. My school had a music ensemble, and we sang songs in Arabic.”

In 1978 he joined the Koulikoro regional ensemble. When he was 18, he was recruited by singer Kandia Kouyaté to join her ensemble. This was a vital learning experience. Her group included a visionary guitarist, Bouba Sacko: “I was trained by (him) to better understand how to accompany griots, and how to play kora together with guitar.”

Kandia sang at Toumani’s funeral on July 20 in Bamako.

Recording his debut

Toumani’s debut album Kaira was released in 1988. I was music producer, and my role was to work with Toumani on choice of repertoire and approach.

Kaira has only five tracks. One of them, Jarabi (Passion), his adaptation of a love song from Guinea, quickly became one of the most popular tunes in the kora repertoire. Aspiring kora players still copy it note for note.

My first challenge was to persuade him not to overdub himself with a second track on top of the original, as is commonly done in recording instrumentals. I had to persuade him that his textures were already so dense that it sounded like four hands were playing, not just two. He agreed. With sound engineer Nick Parker we recorded five stunning tracks, live, in one afternoon. The album received five-star reviews and Toumani was invited to play at festivals and concerts around the world.

As he toured, not only did Toumani put solo kora instrumentals on the world map, he also demonstrated the versatility of the Mande griot tradition. Classical musicians hearing his kora cited JS Bach, jazz musicians heard jazz and blues in the syncopation and riffs, Indian musicians heard tal and rag.

Only one of his compositions departs from kora traditions entirely: the remarkable piece Ali Farka Touré – an improvisatory tribute recorded in 2007 to the great bluesman who had just passed away. It appeared on The Mande Variations, Toumani’s second and last solo kora album after Kaira, with a 20-year space between the two.

Collaboration

Another pathway Toumani forged for the kora was that of cross-cultural collaboration with many different artists and styles, from blues to jazz, to Indian and Iranian, to flamenco, the western classical orchestra, Björk, and beyond. All these collaborations were effortless for him.

Bamako, Toumani’s home town, began to acquire a reputation as a musical mecca, attracting the likes of US and UK music stars Bono, Brian Eno and Damon Albarn. From 2000 until 2012, Toumani often livened up Bamako’s night life with his ensemble, the Symmetric Orchestra.

He put together the ensemble in 1992 and made two albums with them, in 1992 and 2006. His idea behind Symmetric was to bring together music from the four corners of what had once been the Mali empire. Symmetric attracted a devoted following as people danced to their versions of traditional Mande music, laced with Cuban and Senegalese rhythms.

Ultimately, the coup d’état of 2012 took its toll on the live music scene in Mali.

But Toumani would continue playing and collaborating around the world. His last recording, soon to be released, was with Youssou N’Dour. It was one of Toumani’s long-time dreams to perform with Youssou. How tragic that he did not live to see the album in print.

He is survived by two wives, Fanta Sacko and Sira Diallo, and ten children, two of whom, Sidikiba and Balla, have become successful kora players.

The legacy of Toumani is his exquisite playing and his enduring melodies. We are fortunate to have so many sublime recordings to remember this musical genius.

Lucy Durán is Professor of music, SOAS, University of London.

This article was first published on The Conversation.