2024-07-23 16:18:24
Malian musician Toumani Diabaté died at the age of 58 after a short illness. He played the 21-string kora lute, which is one of the symbols of Africa. The death was reported by the AFP agency, which describes the musician as the “king” of kora.
Senegalese singer and former minister of tourism Youssou N’Dour, for example, expressed his condolences to the X family on the social network. “The music world has lost one of its biggest personalities,” Malian singer Oumou Sangaré wrote on Instagram, according to which the performer combined tradition with modern sound.
The British newspaper Guardian notes that just as the Indian-born Ravi Shankar once radically changed the awareness of the possibilities of the sitar, Toumani Diabaté introduced the kora to a world audience when he found a way to combine tradition with modern techniques. His influence far exceeded the genre of ethnic music or world music, as it is often referred to in the West. In 2006, London’s The Independent listed him as one of the best African artists. A year later, he performed on the album Volta by the Icelandic singer Björk, who then invited him on stage during a performance at the British Glastonbury festival. Seven years later, Toumani Diabaté introduced himself there, when he was one of the main stars alongside, for example, pop singer Lana del Rey.
He also performed at the Womad festival in England, Roskilde in Denmark and Sziget in Budapest. In 1999, he recorded the album Kulanjan with the famous bluesman Taj Mahal, which was praised even by the US president Barack Obama. In recent years, he collaborated on recordings of The Ripple Effect with banjoist Béla Fleck or The Sky Is the Same Color Everywhere with Kayhan Kalhor, an Iranian Kamanche upright fiddle player.
In the game of Toumani Diabaté, traditional African influences were mixed with the music of Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding or Pink Floyd, according to the Guardian. According to him, Toumani Diabaté played bass lines and melodies on the chorus at the same time and improvised until he sounded like several musicians at once.
According to a British newspaper, he walked with a cane because he once had polio. “Music is a gift from Allah to me. Kora was sent to me by Allah,” Diabaté, who was a devout Muslim, once said. Nevertheless, it was some Muslims who complained in 2008 when Diabaté’s composition containing a quote from the Koran became part of the soundtrack of the video game LittleBigPlanet. Sony eventually delayed the release of the game by a week and sent a disc with an instrumental version of the song to shelves.
In 2006, Diabaté won a Grammy Award for the album In the Heart of the Moon, which he had already recorded with the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré. Later, Toumani Diabaté passed on the tradition of playing the kora, which sounds like a harp or a lute to Europeans, to his cousin Sonia Jobarteh, who became the first female star in the world to master this instrument. Czechs will hear her again on August 3, when Sona Jobarteh will perform at the Folk Holidays festival in Náměšt nad Oslavou.
Video: Toumani Diabate – The Best Of Toumani Diabate
On the 1989 recording, Toumani Diabaté plays Jarabi’s love song. | Video: Big World Café