Some bands score a few hits, some change the face of music and some end up defining a whole era. Les Ambassadeurs did all three.
LES AMBASSADEURS – Mali’s musical revolutionaries
Category: Griot
NEW BOOK – FINDING THE ONE: The strange and parallel lives of the West African kora and the Welsh harp
In this pacey readable book, Andy Morgan tells the stories of two emblematic instruments, the kora and the Welsh harp, and how they fell into the hands of two great musicians, Seckou Keita and Catrin Finch.
MALI RAP – Talking rhymes with Presidents and Putschistas
“Don’t be surprised if it explodes one day!” When I met Mylmo I knew nothing about him except that he was rapper who was performing on the main stage of the Festival on the Niger that very night. I interviewed him in an empty restaurant on the banks of the great river – most…
FINDING THE ONE (extract) – If your name is Keita, you’re still royalty
It was only after he’d started living in Europe and having kids of his own, that Seckou Keita started to wonder about his father. “I was in that mood,” he says, “I just wanted to find out.”
FINDING THE ONE (extract) – How the kora came to mankind
No one is one hundred precent sure of how or when the kora came into being. Strangely, the first person to ever mention it was a Scotsman by the name of Mungo Park, who wrote about it in his Travels In the Interior Districts of Africa, published in 1799. Park was commissioned by Sir Joseph…
TOUMANI DIABATE: The 71st generation bard
Son of the great Sidiki Diabate, the father of the modern kora, Toumani is 71st in a direct line of griots that stretches back to the reign of the great medieval Emperor Sudjata Keita.
