MikePadgett.com

Toumani Diabaté

— The griots are the curators of West African history, storing thousands of stories and songs in their memory.”

For over 700 years, the griots have wandered the plains and villages of Mali, as much a part of the landscape as cottonfields and the Harmattan dust clouds. Griots (or “jeli” to give them their local name) are the curators of national history. They tell stories and sing songs drawn from a vast, unwritten repertoire held in memory.

Toumani Diabaté quietly informs his audience on this balmy evening in late spring that he can trace 71 generations of kora players from father to son. As this modern-day jeli begins to play, the surroundings of the Haden Freeman Concert Hall melt away and his audience is transported to a village square or a campfire somewhere on the African plain.

The sounds of the kora, a 21-string cross between a harp and a laoud, are delicate, colourful and wondrously beautiful. The bass notes set a gentle, rolling rhythm whilst the middle notes evoke the voices of people or animals and the treble notes sound like the song of birds or the flow of water. Toumani the kora master somehow manages to play all three ranges at once with only four fingers required.

In Bamako, Mali’s capital, Toumani grew up in the 1960s and 70s listening to his father Sidiki, a jeli and a particularly renowned kora player. Sidiki did not formally teach his son the instrument, but the young Toumani developed his precocious talent just by mere observation.

If Manchester couldn’t have been much further in spirit from Girona where last we saw him, then Toumani’s set was also a far cry from the hot dance band sound of his Symmetric Orchestra that played there.

This was a solo occasion and only now did it become perfectly clear what an extraordinary instrument the kora can be.