The Whole Music Experience

Mamadou Diabate Courage World Village The old year has barely turned over and already the stunning fifth recording, Courage by Malian kora master Mamadou Diabate, arrived on the scene. Following his Grammy Award winning Douga Mansa (2009), the new recording leans towards a fuller more contemporary sound. The kora pairs up with ngoni (Malian banjo), balaphone, calabash and djembe. The playing here is fiery one minute with rapid notes of the kora glimmering over the top of the other instruments, and ethereal on some tracks. Yet, even those ethereal moments find themselves locked in a West African groove.  A West African griot, Diabate walks the talk, and though the songs are instrumental, the musician punctuates his liner notes with morality lessons and tributes. On the track Bogna , Diabate offers these wise words about music in general, “Respect is the healing medicine of peace. Peace is the healing medicine of love. Love is the healing medicine of life. Life is the h...

Mamadou Diabate Douga Mansa World Village Regular readers of this blog will know about my fascination with West African griot music and instruments. I was quite pleased to receive a review copy of Malian griot kora player Mamadou Diabate's Douga Mansa . It falls into West African classical music with Diabate playing solo kora throughout. And yet, with this single instrument, Diabate coaxes a rich tapestry of moods from his harp, not to mention an array of striking rhythms. The press notes cited, "..in Diabate's hands, the kora proves capable of infinite variation, encompassing delicately articulated structures, swirling eddies of glissandi, pounding vertical rhythms and roaring cataracts of arpeggio." Which sounds a lot like a review of European classical music and why I am treating this CD as African classical music. West African is not short of virtuoso kora players, a category in which Mamadou finds himself. His cousin is Toumani Diabate, another fabulous ...