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. They tell stories and sing songs drawn from a vast, unwritten repertoire stored in memory. They deliver greetings and messages from far off acquaintances. In West Africa, griots (or jeli to give them their local name) are postmen, entertainers and solemn curators of regional history.

Toumani Diabaté quietly informs his audience on this balmy evening in late spring that he can trace seventy one generations of kora players from father to son.

Then, as this modern-day jeli begins to pluck out the first notes, the surroundings of the Haden Freeman Concert Hall melt away and his audience is transported to an imaginary village or campfire somewhere on the vast African plain.

Toumani’s kora, a 21-string cross between a harp and a laoud, creates delicate, colourful and rich sound. The bass notes set a gentle, rolling rhythm whilst the alto and treble suggest the voices of people or animals, birdsong or the flow of water. As a master of his instrument, Toumani somehow manages to play across the full range all at once with only four fingers. He is unique among his peers in this skill and he is justly celebrated for it.

In Bamako, Mali’s capital, Toumani grew up in the early days of independence during 1960s and 70s listening to his father Sidiki, a jeli and himself a renowned kora player. Sidiki did not formally teach his son how to play; the young Toumani developed his precocious talent from observation alone.

If the Manchester setting 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. This was a solo performance to support the release of his Mande Variations album and now, separated from the energetic African rhythms like night from day, it became suddenly clear what an extraordinary instrument the kora can be in the hands of a master.