As you listen to the song ‘Sakonké’ (Appearance), the guitarist alternates between strong, question-like statements on an acoustic guitar and then longer, discursive interludes with a swaying rhythm and wonderfully sparkling finger-picking flourishes on the strings. There’s a flexible groove that swings throughout. This is clearly a master at work. Yet the 48-year-old Malian musician Boubacar ‘Badian’ Diabaté is still an unknown name on the international scene. 

He appears on the debut disc from a new label called Lion Songs, set up by American guitarist and Afropop Worldwide radio producer Banning Eyre. The opening track, ‘L’Amour’, is just solo guitar and feels like a musician experiencing the sounds in his head, not playing for an audience, but just living the essential repertoire. 

Like many West African hereditary griot musicians, Badian started playing percussion, tama (talking drum) and then ngoni (lute) before graduating to guitar and studying at the Institut National des Arts in Bamako. 

He’s worked with some of the greatest musicians in Mali, including the singer Kandia Kouyaté, and was a protégé of the late Bouba Sacko, one of Mali’s leading guitarists until his death in 2011. The style Bouba Sacko and, now Badian, play is known as bajourou, literally ‘big string’ and it incorporates a lot of techniques from the ngoni and kora. It developed in the post-independence period of the 1960s as guitars started to be used in place of traditional instruments. The style is frequently played at Bamako weddings, usually on electric instruments, but artists like Bouba Sacko and Rail Band’s guitarist Djelimady Tounkara liked to play acoustically, at home or for small private gatherings.

Eyre first heard Badian when he was living in Bamako in 1995, writing his excellent book on Djelimady Tounkara, In Griot Time (reviewed in the Autum/Winter 2000 issue, #8). And he sold Badian his Hohner electric guitar for next to nothing because he so admired what he was doing. 

Eyre has now set up Lion Songs, a record label dedicated to contemporary African music. Badian’s album was recorded at the Afropop Worldwide studio in Brooklyn, with his brother Manfa Diabaté on second guitar and percussion on one track by Baya Kouyaté. It’s an intimate and acoustic session showcasing his guitar mastery. 

If anyone outside Mali has a thorough understanding of the guitar styles of Mali it is Banning Eyre. What is it that he particularly admires about Badian’s playing? “He has his own riffs that are very special. He’s a uniquely creative player within this beautifully creative tradition that I’m so into. So when he turned up in New York saying ‘I want to record,’ it seemed somehow like fate and I have to also credit his persistence. And that comes across in his playing. It’s really self-possessed.”

Apart from Ali Farka Touré, Djelimady Tounkara and Boubacar Traoré, few of Mali’s guitarists have been internationally recognised in their own right, but new artists are worth hearing. Certainly, Badian’s improvisational playing is fluid and fascinating. It’s clearly coming from deep roots, but still surprising and innovative. American guitarist Bill Frisell says, “this recording of Boubacar ‘Badian’ Diabaté blows my mind. He’s doing things I’ve never heard anyone do before.”   

Read the review of Mande Guitar: African Guitar Series, Vol 1 in the Songlines Reviews Database 

This article originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today