When we at Afropop Worldwide learned that the great Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté had died of kidney failure this past July (2024), we knew we had to find a special way to honor him. We had known him for nearly 35 years, and had many interviews and recordings with him. We also knew that we had to speak with Lucy Durán, his longtime producer and friend. Lucy wears many hats. She is a scholar, a writer, a seasoned BBC broadcast host, and a formidable music producer. Beyond all that, her knowledge of West African Mande culture, the world from which Toumani sprang, is second to none in the English-speaking world. So as we were preparing to honor Toumani with a special edition of our Planet Afropop podcast, "Celebrating Toumani Diabaté," Afropop's Banning Eyre reached Lucy in London for a good, long chat. This is an edited version of that conversation.
Banning Eyre: Lucy, let's start at the beginning. Tell me about Toumani's parents.
Lucy Duran: Toumani's father was the great Maestro Sidiki Diabaté. He was born in 1922 and died in 1996. His family came two generations before him from the region called Biriko. which is in between east/northeast Guinea and southwest Mali, by the way, Biriko is an extremely musical region where some of the most beautiful melodies come from in the whole Malian Mande tradition. In those days, back in the early 20th century, it was the beginning of colonial rule and the power of patrons to finance their musicians was diminished. Many of them were taken away from their traditional roles as chiefs. So the jelis, the Mande professional musicians, the griots, were sort of at a loose end, and so they traveled a lot looking for patrons.
The Gambia at that time was under British rule, but it was indirect rule. So it would be a local chief who would actually be running the region. but of course, following the advice of the British rulers who would be in Banjul or Britain. But since local people were running the local governance, they were better patrons for the jelis. So many jelis from Mali and Guinea made the trip, often by foot, into the Gambia, and this was the case of Sidiki Diabaté's grandfather, Jelifili, who was an ngoni player, not a kora player.
Jelifili went backwards and forwards, and eventually he was persuaded to settle in Tambasansang, in upper Gambia. He had several wives, and two of his sons were famous musicians. One of them was Amadu Bansang Jobarteh, who was my kora teacher, and who remained in the Gambia. According to Amadu Bansang, his own half-brother, Bala Jobarteh, (older son of Jelifili) was the first person in the family to play the kora. And Bala Jobarteh was Sidiki Diabaté's father.
[Note: The alternate spellings Jobarteh and Diabaté are simply a matter of French and English conventions; they are effectively the same name.]
Jelifili was very elderly when Amadu was born, so his older half-brother Bala became his substitute father, and they would travel around and play the kora together. At that time, in the French colonial region--Senegal, Casamance (southern Senegal) and Guinea--the balafon and drums were forbidden because they were loud. They could attract crowds, and the French were afraid of an uprising. But they allowed the kora because it wasn't loud. So my theory, and Amadu thought too, is that this explains the popularity of the kora in the Casamance, that whole southern region of Senegal.
So Toumani's father, Sidiki Diabaté was born in Bansang in 1922, and when he was about 25, after the Second World War, he had a hunger for going back to the region that his parents and grand grandparents in Mali. He went through Mali and ended up in Ivory Coast. Apparently, he was based in Abidjan for about 10 years, from about 1947 to 1957. He became good friends with Djelimadi Sissoko, who was Ballaké Sissoko's father, and who also came from the Gambia. During the dry season, they would go to Mali just before Independence, and play the kora.
The first president of Mali, Modibo Keita, fell in love with their music, because they were both fantastic virtuosi, and he asked them to stay in Mali. He gave them land underneath the presidential hill in Bamako, and they built there. They were founding members of the National Ensemble of Mali, which was an amazing orchestra of traditional instruments that performed at all kinds of official state occasions, and had some of the best female singers, two of whom became Sidiki's wives.
I see. So this explains how the family started in Mali, went to Gambia, and returned to Mali, all before Toumani was born.
Yes. In Toumani's case, we're talking about a family on his father's side who were backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards from the west of Mali into Gambia and Senegal, and eventually settled permanently back in Mali, their ancestral homeland. Sidiki Diabaté made an enormous contribution to the musical aesthetic of Mali. He brought repertoire there from the Gambia and made it more Malian. He also adapted Malian traditional tunes and made them more Gambian. It was the combination of a more rhythmic style in Gambia and Senegal, with a more mellifluous and melodic quality. It's a complicated and very rich story.
So this is the circumstance into which Toumani was born.
Toumani was born in July, 1965, at the height of the Modibo Keita era. Toumani's father Sidiki had been married before, but it was an unhappy marriage, and they divorced. And then he married Nene Koita who was a Malian with a very pretty, delicate voice, not a big, powerful voice like some of the big divas of Mali. Nene Koita was in the National Ensemble and Sidiki married her, and they had Toumani. He was born in Bamako and you know, in Mali, as in many other places in the world, women are often advised not to go out of the house for the first 40 days of a child's existence, because the baby is vulnerable. Until babies build up immunities through their mother's milk, it's better not to take them out.
But at this time Sidiki Diabaté, Toumani's dad was in constant demand to play at wedding and child-naming ceremonies, and when Toumani was only about 30 days old, Sidiki was invited to play at a big wedding party by one of his patrons in Kita, about 150 kilometers north from Bamako. He didn't want to go without his singer, without Nene. Nene said, "I can't go because I have a newborn baby." He insisted, and basically men rule the roost, or they certainly did then, and so she had to go with him. They sang at the wedding party, and he got lots of money, and they went back to Bamako, and Toumani got ill. He lost the movement of his left leg. What Nene Koita, Toumani's mom, told me was that he had had polio. She took him to the doctor. The doctor said it was polio and that he would never recover movement in his leg.
Toumani, on the other hand, told a different story. He said that a white female nurse gave him an injection at some point when he was a small child and the injection was badly placed. His leg was paralyzed. So we have two different stories, one of them where the white nurse is responsible and he has no agency. It was done to him. But in his mum's story he had been vulnerable and caught polio. Polio was very common there at the time, because there were no vaccinations.
So that's the story. He was unable to walk, and it was a very difficult childhood for him. This has an interesting parallel. You know the story of Sunjata, the founder of the Mali Empire. He had paralyzed legs, so he was dragging himself along the ground, and people would mock him, and he would be stealing the food from everyone else. And so that's why they called him "sun," which means "thief." Sunjata, the "lion thief."
Fascinating. I don't think I've ever heard that.
So there's Toumani having to pull himself on the ground. He had a little kind of chariot that he could sit in and roll. But while his then younger brothers were out playing football, he wasn't able to play any sport. So from a very early age, he had a little kora with seven strings. You know, the kora is made up of 21 strings, seven, seven, seven. And here are lots of stories about the number seven. There are seven holes in the head: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and the mouth. Seven is almost like a sacred number.
So while everyone else was playing football and running around in the sand, Toumani sat playing his little kora. He was clearly very musical. Both his mother and his father were amazing musicians and he was listening to great music because his father was such a strong character and so loved by the people in power in Mali. All the great musicians were always dropping by Toumani's house. From a very early age, Toumani developed an incredible musicality, which combined his father's dexterity with his mother's very beautiful melodies. Nene's wasn't a stunningly beautiful voice, but it was a voice that touched you. Toumani was always very devoted to his mother, and I think he felt a lot of anger and rivalry towards his father. I don't think he felt that his father was really very encouraging.
He told me that his father never taught him kora. He learned by listening.
I think he realized that the expectation in the West is that you have a teacher. So who taught you to play the kora like this? And he was like, "Nobody. My father didn't teach me. He was too busy."
But actually in that culture, there isn't a notion of, you know: It's your piano time, half an hour of piano before going to school. It's not like that. It's immersive. It's learning by osmosis, by listening, and by joining in. And there he was with his little seven-string kora, and he would pluck the relevant strings and join in. That's how he grew into being such a virtuoso.
So when he says his father didn't teach him, it's two things. First, his father had kind of written him off a bit and he was too busy with all his official responsibilities. But also, this is now how kora players typically learn. It's both.
That's right. But the other aspect of Toumani's tricky relationship with his dad has to do with this aspect of Mande culture called fadenya, which is rivalry between children by same father, but different mothers. Half-brothers are always rivals, and you always strive to do better. But it's also rivalry with your father. Your father is your first rival. And Sidiki didn't suffer fools gladly.
I knew Sidiki very well, and I had huge admiration for him, and he was always very gracious and hospitable with me, partly because I spoke pretty good Mandinka. Sidiki never really learned good Bambara. He spoke it with a Mandinka accent. So we nattered away in Mandinka about Amadu Bansang, my kora teacher, who was his uncle. I would see journalists coming in and say, "Can we interview you, Mr. Diabaté?" He just dismissed them, or he'd say, "If you give me €300, you can interview me." And then sometimes they did.
When I tried to interview him he was terrible. But instead, I sat with him every evening I was there, and he told me lots of stories, and I wrote them down in my notebook. And so that's how I know about Sidiki. But he was not an easy person. Very fiery. Wonderful sense of humor.
Now, this is all before Toumani came to Europe, right? When was that?
His first time in the U.K. was in December 1986, and then again in 1987, and then from then on, he was traveling all the time.
OK. What were your first impressions of Toumani? You knew Sidiki first, right?
Yes, because I first went with Amadu Bansang and Dembo Konte [Gambian kora players] and a friend, James Fox [journalist and writer]. We all rocked up at Sidiki Diabaté's house in Bamako in April, 1986, and it was after a long and arduous trip by car from Gambia to Tambasansang in Senegal where we picked up the train. We arrived there exhausted, and the very first night we were there, Sidiki and his wives Mariam and Nene did a concert for all of us. Ballaké Sissoko came from next door. Toumani wasn't there. He was in Gabon. He had gone to Gabon. He was part of Kandia Kouyaté's group of musicians. They had been invited by the President of Gabon to do a performance. But Sidiki told me many times, "You need to hear my son. He is an extraordinary musician."
Sidiki recognized Toumani's talent by then.
Oh, yeah, totally. And everyone else said so too, so my imagination of what Toumani might be like was constantly being fed by people telling me what an astonishing virtuoso he was, like the Paganini of the kora, and all of this kind of stuff. In those days, it was the beginning of the world music craze. I worked with a small company, and they asked me, "Who should we invite from Mali?" And I suggested the wonderful singer Ousmane Sacko from Kayes and said he should bring along Toumani Diabaté as kora player, because Ousmane sang and played guitar. So that's what happened. In those days you could do that kind of thing. We got them visas. We got them passports and they came, and of course, everyone was blown away by Toumani's kora .
You had not actually heard him play yet before then.
No, I hadn't met him. I was just doing this on the hearsay, because I believed Sidiki. Anything that Sidiki said was God's truth and Sidiki had said, "You like my kora playing? Wait till you hear my son Toumani." And indeed, Toumani lived up to his reputation, and on the basis of that first brief encounter in London with Ousmane Sacko, I then thought: Okay. I've got to find another way of getting him back.
BBC Radio 3, the classical music station, had a very forward-looking producer called Willie Robson and Willie was planning a big festival at the South Bank in London to celebrate musics of royal courts. He said, "I've got something from India. I've got something from Japan. But I know there's no classical music in Africa," and I go, "What!? Of course there is. There's the music of the royal court of Mali, which for centuries ruled the greatest empire in West Africa."
So I handpicked a group to include Sidiki Diabaté, his son, Toumani, Kandia Kouyaté, who was my favorite female singer, Mariam Kouyaté, Sidiki's wife Mariam with a big, big voice, whose child is the kora player Madou Sidiki Diabaté, and then a wonderful singer called Djelimady Sissoko no 2 and Belen Kouyaté on balafon. So there were six musicians, all from Mali who had never been in London before, except for Toumani, and they just blew everyone away.
Toumani had something that his father didn't, which was he had listened to so many different kinds of music. His father listened mostly to his own music and music of Gambia, while Toumani listened voraciously to the radio. And actually, Mali radio was pretty good. They had loads of albums by rock and pop musicians and Jazz musicians! A lot of Cuban music.
So Toumani had a very broad palette, not of styles, but of colors. So there was something about his music that just had a more universal appeal than his father's, or even other kora players who had been in the U.K. before, like Demo Konte and Kausu Kouyaté, both brilliant musicians. But there was something familiar about Toumani's playing, but it wasn't imitative or trite. He really got that marriage of the very powerful rhythms of Gambia and Senegal with all that syncopation, and then the more lyrical sound of the beautiful female singers that were in the National Ensemble of Mali.
The kora was not an instrument that was indigenous to Mali. The indigenous instrument was really the ngoni. The ngoni accompanies the voice and it gives a lot of space for the voice, which the kora doesn't do so well. All the great singers of the time, people like Fanta Damba, were just accompanied on the ngoni. And so that's the kind of thing that Toumani heard, and he had a wonderful way of bringing melody into that very contrapuntal and dense rhythmic texture that he inherited from his father. When I go back and listen to that very first recording that we did, Kaira, I still hear that. You listen to a piece like "Konkoba," and the richness of the melody and the development of the melody over these contrapuntal basslines. I think that was very specific to Toumani, and I would also say, with the possible exception of Madou Sidiki, I don't think there's any kora player who has reached that level of total fusion between melody and rhythm.
Tell me about the making of Kaira, his debut album, just solo kora. Was that the first album you produced?
No. I had been involved in the recording of an album by Amadu Bansang Jobarteh called Master of the Kora. And then I did two or three recordings of Dembo Conte, with Kausu Kouyaté.
Those were the albums that came out on Rogue Records, like Jali Roll.
Correct. But my understanding of production in those days was, I would persuade a record label to record them, get them into the studio, discuss repertoire and then help with the running order, but not any deeper level of editing or post-production. After that first album I did for Toumani, I took on more of a pre and post-production role.
So here's the story. After Music of Royal Courts, Toumani said, "I like it here in London. I'm not going back." He had a six-month or one-year visa, so Dad and Mariam and Kandia Kouyaté and the others left. I took them all out to the airport for a tearful goodbye. Sidiki wept. He was a very emotional person, Toumani's dad. And Toumani stayed.
That was in July, and then there was Womad. And by this time Womad had people working there who had got to know and hear Toumani, and they invited him with Amadu Bansang. They both stayed in my house, and they did a concert at Womad, great uncle with great nephew. I think Toumani learned a lot from his Gambian great uncle, my kora teacher.
By now, everyone wanted to work with Toumani. And Toumani wanted to do an album. I wanted him to do an album, but he had been introduced to the concept of overdubbing, double-tracking, and he decided that that's how he wanted to do his album. He was going to play accompaniment and then overdub the fast embellishments and melodies. I clutched my head in horror and said, "Toumani, you don't need to do that. First of all, with your thumb and first finger on both hands, with just those four fingers, it sounds like you're playing with 20 fingers because you're such a virtuoso. And secondly, when you get up on stage, and people have heard your album. How are you going to reproduce the double-tracking?"
He stopped there and thought, "Oh... you're right. Okay, I won't double track."
So then we then we spent a few days thinking about repertoire. What had and had not been recorded before. What was the Malian repertoire? So "Kaira" is very much a Mali/Guinea piece, not at all a Gambian piece. "Konkoba," Guinea. "Jarabi," Guinea. "Alla L'aa Ke," Gambia completely. And "Tubaka," a guitar piece, originally, from Guinea. So basically, there's only one Gambian track on that whole album, which is the least melodic of the five tracks.
And the dreaminess of "Tubaka," you know, a guitar piece played on the kora. It's so beautiful, and it's a love song. And "Jarabi," another song about love, also a guitar song originally. Both of those are 20th century pieces. They would have been written in the 1930s and 40s. The guitar was very, very popular in Guinea, and it still is.
"Kaira" was a piece that was associated with a movement for independence from colonial rule. It was a kind of a pacifist way of showing solidarity with those who were against the rule. And so "Kaira" became a movement. Musicians would go from one village to another playing "Kaira," mainly on balafon and guitar. So in the pieces on the album Kaira, you hear much more of the Malian side of the music, and the way that Toumani in particular adapted those pieces to the kora.
At the time, I knew only the Alhaji Bai Konte album on Rounder Records, and that was completely different, as you say, that fast, driving Gambian sound.
Completely different. I mean, Bai Konte. Totally brilliant, wonderful! Madly virtuoso. He had also made a pact with the devil. And you know, when he played pieces like "Alla L'aa Ke," it was unbelievable! I had spent a decade listening to kora players, over and over again, including a lot of Bai Konte, who I knew quite well. So when Toumani was living in my house for seven months, I played all of those recordings for him. I played recordings that had been made by the person who first introduced me to the kora. His name was Anthony King, and he'd spent a year recording kora music in the Gambia and learning to play the kora. It was one of his recordings that showed me that there was this incredible instrument called the kora, and then from then onwards, I never looked back.
So we just listened incessantly to lots of different recordings of the kora, and Toumani just soaked in everything, different styles of playing, different personal styles, different regional styles. He was just so thirsty for knowledge. We spent quite some time thinking about how to record the album and what pieces to include. It's only five pieces, and "Konkoba" is 10 min long. But somehow we got Radio 3 and Charlie Gillett on Capitol radio to play it. There was one other crucial thing about that album, and this is thanks to Joe Boyd, who I persuaded to record, Toumani Diabaté.
For his Hannibal label.
Yes. I mean, I didn't know anything at that point. As far as I was concerned, recording was making a copy of what was played so that I could listen afterwards. I didn't think about things like the beauty of the sound, the aesthetic of the sound. And so Joe said, "Look, BBC Radio 3 is just beginning to realize that there is classical music from Africa. Let's record it as a classical album." Joe had worked with someone called Nick Parker who specialized in recording things like organs in Germany, the classical repertoire, Bach on the organ and so on. So he said, "Why don't we get Nick Parker in?" That was a very good idea, because Nick really understood how to make Toumani's kora sing.
Kaira was the first solo instrumental kora record. But there was the album Cordes Anciennes, Ancient Strings, with duos by Sidiki Diabaté and Djelimady Sissoko. What year was that?
1970. And actually, it's not just the duo. There were four kora players on that album. Batourou Sekou Kouyaté and M'fa Diabaté are also on that album.
But it is all instrumental.
Yeah, I think it was the first, but it wasn't solo kora. It was kora duets and trios. One of them would be doing the riff and the other could do the variations, a kind of double tracking, if you like, but live. That album was part of the anthology of Malian music that was issued by the new government in Mali because there had been a coup d'etat in 1968. Modibo Keita had been deposed, and Mousa Traoré came in. He was a military dictator, but he had a visionary idea of the importance of culture and music in Mali. So he commissioned those albums, and they have wonderful sleeve notes. The other thing about Cordes Anciennes was that pretty much until then the kora always used the buzzer on the end of the bridge. And the recording engineer in Mali insisted that they remove the buzzer.
Was that controversial? Because Toumani never used the buzzer, right?
No, he didn't. When we were doing the Toumani and Sidiki album, with his son Sidiki, for World Circuit, I was the music producer. I begged Toumani to bring his father's rattle, the nyenyemo. I said, "Just do one piece so that we could hear what it sounds like." And he said, "Oh, what a good idea!" So I was all fired up, and then he arrived, and there was no buzzer, and I said, "But Toumani, you promised."
"Oh dear! I'm so sorry! I completely forgot."
But I don't think so. Basically, when you take the buzzer off the kora, it becomes a harp. The kora becomes a harp, which is why you have someone like Sekou Keita working so well with Catrin Finch, because essentially the kora is a harp. But if you have the buzzer on, that's different. Do you know what the purpose of the buzzer was? It was like a natural amplifier, and it was also used on the bolon, the big bass instrument. So if you were far away you wouldn't hear the notes of the strings, but you would hear that buzzing. It was like the voice of the gods or the jinns. So my guess is that Toumani didn't want his father buzzing around his kora.
Interesting. You know, there's been a whole discourse about buzzing with the Shona mbira and the bottle cap buzzers they use.
Yes, of course.
And you know, our late Zimbabwean friend Chartwell Dutiro was horrified by the fact that so many players had taken the buzzers off the mbiras. He wanted to put them back when we recorded with him. There was a lot of buzz there, and the engineer was like, "Do you really want this?" He really did. Anyway, after Kaira, you produced New Ancient Strings, Toumani's duo album with Ballaké Sissoko. What year was that again?
We recorded in 1997. But it wasn't released until 1999.
So it's 10 years after Kaira. And he's had all these adventures in the interim with flamenco musicians on the Songhai albums, the Symmetric Orchestra, his Djelika trio... And now New Ancient Strings. Talk about how that came about.
Well, I had listened a lot to Cordes Anciennes, Ancient Strings, before going to Mali. I didn't find it quite as moving as I found Toumani's playing, but it was brilliant. It's a very kind of classical album, and there are moments where you feel it's J.S. Bach. You feel it's a harpsichord or two people duetting on a clavichord. I wanted to do a new generation of ancient strings.
So my first idea was Sidiki with his son Toumani, to play on the rivalry between father and son. Toumani was terrified and didn't like the idea. But his dad really liked it. He said, "This is a very good idea. It's really important, for legacy. It's important to have this duet." So he was right up for it, and then Toumani had no choice but to agree. I think he was a little apprehensive because of the whole rivalry thing with his with his dad
We started planning it, and Joe Boyd said he thought it would be a good idea to record in Mali, and that we would record again with Nick Parker, the same guy who had recorded Kaira, so that we would continue with this kind of classical sound. And then in 1996, which was the year before we recorded, Sidiki went to the Gambia and Senegal. He gave a concert at the French Institute in Dakar, and then he went to Bansang, where he'd been born, to say hello to his family, and he died. It was early in the morning. He was doing his early prayer, and he just fell over and died, and we assume it was an aneurysm or something like that. But one never knows
This was out of the blue? He wasn't sick?
He'd been perfectly healthy. I mean he was 74, which is a pretty good old age, you know, in that part of the world at that time, but I think he was a healthy man. He smoked a lot of cigarettes, so sometimes he was a bit short of breath, but his death was unanticipated. Mali gave him a state burial. They flew his body back to Mali, which was pretty remarkable. It shows the esteem that they held him in, despite the fact that he had died in his birth town.
But then I was stuck, because I wanted to do this New Ancient Strings. So I thought: Well, okay, what about next door neighbor to Toumani, Ballaké Sissoko, whose playing was wonderful? Toumani agreed. Ballaké agreed. It must be said that Toumani could be very tricky and mercurial. He had developed quite a reputation for doing things like canceling tours and not showing up to things. You never knew until the very last moment whether he was actually going to turn up. No one ever got to the bottom of why he did that. My feeling was it was a bit of a power game. I think Toumani suffered so much as a disabled child unable to walk except with a cane. And Bamako is not a good city to be disabled in because there are no concessions for it whatsoever. Disability is not tolerated very well, so I think he suffered a lot and maybe this was his way of showing his power.
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Anyway, until the very last moment, the night before we were going to travel, it was still touch and go. Nick Parker and I had hired all the equipment, two Nagras, very good microphones and so on. But Toumani kept changing the contract, scratching out names and things like that. And so the night before we were due to leave early in the morning, Joe said, "Look. Forget it. Let's just write off the tickets and forget it." And I said, "No, no, we're going to do this." And so we went.
Then I had to get Toumani to sign a new contract, because as soon as you scratch something out on a contract it is no longer valid. So the contract deal was no royalties for Ballaké. He would get the fee, but no royalties. Ballaké had no choice but to agree and then we had to find a studio. We went from one studio to another. We went to Studio Bogolan. We went to Salif Keita's studio. We went to various studios, and Nick Parker, classical music recordist, just said, "This will not do." He wanted something with a natural reverb. He said, "I don't want any additional reverb. We're going to record it in a place where nothing has to be added, just as if it were a church and an organ."
I liked that idea. So we went from place to place to place, to place to place, and finally someone said, "Have you tried the new Palais de Congres?" That's the Congress Palace, which was built by the Chinese. It's entirely marble.
I remember it well.
So we contacted the director of the Palais de Congres, which is on the north bank of the Niger River, a big white building with a sloping roof, and they were very gracious. They took me around with Nick, and they said, "There's this hall, and then there's this conference hall, and there's that conference hall." And Nick said, "No, no, no." And then we came out of one of the conference halls, and it was just a lovely kind of a vestibule, like a corridor, a big, wide corridor with very high ceilings, marble floors, marble walls, marble ceilings. It had this wonderful natural reverb. and Nick said, "This is where we record it."
It happened to be the 22nd of September, which is Mali's Independence Day when Mali celebrates independence from French colonial rule. So there was a very exciting atmosphere. There was also a lot of noisy traffic, so we had to wait until about midnight when it became quiet enough to record. And then there was a very noisy cricket hopping around from one place to another, which we finally chased out of the vestibule. And then they started playing, and it was sublime, really sublime. It was all recorded in one night, and mostly two takes, each one 15 or 20 minutes long.
Yes, I recall you had some editing to do.
I had to be ruthless because of time. We still have all the originals in the National Sound Archive of the British Library. So anyone who really wanted to follow up could do so. But what went on the record is just incredible playing. They really listened to each other, because there was no separation. They sat side by side, looking at each other's hands, just listening. Toumani mostly takes the lead. But Ballake is a fantastic rhythmic player, and his thumb work on the bass strings is just amazing. And of course, there was the fadenya rivalry between them too. That worked to our favor because each was trying to be better than the other. It was full of soul. There were moments when Nick Parker and I were both in tears. And you know, it was all recorded with just four microphones.
We finished at dawn, the 23rd of September. And then we got this wonderful designer for the cover. He did this representation of the green calabash, with the titles of the all the tracks dripping down as if they're the kora strings. It's very clever. I think it's one of the albums that I'm most proud of. Chrysalis has just reissued it on vinyl and CD and it's doing very well.
That's wonderful. Joe Boyd was telling me that he's trying to get Chrysalis to release that album that was recorded in Athens, Georgia, during the Kulanjan sessions. That was another amazing Duran-Boyd production. At one point, Taj and you had to leave for a day or so, and the Malians went at in the studio on their own. But we've never heard it.
Yes, it's lovely. And now three of the musicians have passed away. Kasse Mady, Ramata Diakité the wonderful Wassoulou singer, and now Toumani. Kasse Mady is really my all-time favorite singer. Kasse Mady means "Mady who makes you weep." He had such a beautiful voice. So it's an important and historic album.
I gather there are rights issues, but hopefully that will all get sorted out one day. Maybe the last thing we should talk about, since we've focused on these kora specific albums, is the one Toumani made with young Sidiki for World Cirtuit.
Oh, his son! Sure. Well, I think it's a wonderful album. If you compare the four microphones that Nick Parker used with like 15 or so that Jerry Boys used, you can immediately see, just from the photographs, that it's a very different concept. Sidiki the son is a brilliant musician. But I mean, if I'm absolutely frank, I don't think it has quite the soul of New Ancient Strings. I don't think it's got the kind of the lyricism. It's very proficient and beautiful. But it doesn't quite have the melody. I'm not moved to listen to it again and again and again. Every time I listen to New Ancient Strings, I'm hearing it for the first time again, and it's not that I was a producer, because I was a producer for 26 albums. It's because of the music.
One thing I didn't mention is the touch of the string. Toumani managed to get the sound out of the strings that was so beautiful. I don't know. It was a combination of flesh and fingernail, but he got the ring of the tone that was much nicer than anybody else's. Later on, he used harp strings, but this had nothing to do with that. It was the actual touch of the string. I don't think any other kora player quite has managed to make a kora sound like that. And I think that's one of the things that made Toumani such a special musician. Just that. Just that beautiful touch.
Thank you, Lucy. This is, as always, an education, and it's very nice to see you and to hear all these stories.
Okay, Banning. Nice talking to you.
