Mamadou Diabaté: master of the balafon

When we think of the music of West Africa, it’s often the sound of the kora that comes to mind. But that sophisticated harp-like arrangement of calabash, skin and strings is a relatively recent invention. Going back to Mali’s golden age of Sunjata Keita and the Mali Empire in the 13th century, the kora was still an instrument of the future. The instruments of Sunjata’s time were drums, the ngoni (lute) and the balafon – the West African xylophone. The balafon, or similar ‘fixed key’ xylophones are found in all the Mande areas of West Africa (Mali, Guinea, the Gambia, Burkina Faso), where it is thought to have originated. But similar instruments – with different names and tunings – are found across West Africa. Sonically, it makes a delicate backbone to the music and adds a percussive bounce. The Senegalese national anthem, with words by poet and president Léopold Senghor, says ‘pluck your koras, hit the balafons.’

“When I started aged four, I didn’t want to learn, I wanted to play football,” says balafon player Mamadou Diabaté. “But my father said come to the school and my school was the balafon. By the time I was eight I could play really well and I realised it was a great thing to do.” Certainly in balafon families boys are simply expected to follow the tradition.

Mamadou Diabaté was born in one of the heartlands of balafon playing in Burkina Faso. He now lives in Vienna, from where it’s easier to tour, and he’s one of the most popular balafon performers at festivals around the world. His seven-strong group Percussion Mania includes two balafons; the second one is played by his brother Seydou Diabaté.

The original balafon

In the Sunjata Epic, the national myth that tells of the creation of the Mali Empire by Sunjata Keita (approximately 1217-1255), the balafon plays a key role. Sunjata’s rival Soumaoro owned and played the original balafon, an instrument shown to him by spirits. It was called the Sosso Bala, the balafon of the Sosso kingdom, and he forbade anyone else to play it. In one of his battles, Soumaoro captures Sunjata’s griot who defies Soumaoro and plays the balafon. But Soumaoro is so astonished by what he hears that he names him Bala Fasséké (the balafon player) and makes him the guardian of the Sosso Bala. In some versions of the story Sunjata finally kills Soumaoro and liberates Bala Fasséké and the balafon. In other versions, Bala Fasséké steals the balafon and returns with it to Sunjata. Either way, Sunjata ends up with the balafon prize. So it is no surprise that the music conservatoire in Bamako is named after Bala Fasséké Kouyaté, the supreme griot. More surprising perhaps is that the Sosso Bala still exists and is still kept by a guardian from the Kouyaté family in Niagassola in the north of Guinea. The guardian, called the balatigui, is the only person allowed to play it and only on special occasions.

When making her film about the Kouyaté griot family Dò Farala a Kan: Something Has Been Added (www.bit.ly/growingintomusic) Lucy Durán visited Niagassola and saw the balafon, which is kept under lock and key. She wasn’t allowed to film it, although she did film a replica. But can the balafon really be over 800 years old? “As one key gets broken, it has been replaced by another exactly the same and the frame hasn’t been altered,” she says. “Even if nothing actually remains from the 13th century, there’s no reason to believe the balafon has changed in size or sound.” It’s bigger than most contemporary balafons with a heavy buzzing sound.

A balafon usually has around 21 keys, often fashioned of rosewood, which are attached to a frame with leather or string. Beneath the keys are resonators made from calabash gourds. The gourds each have a hole with a membrane traditionally made of spiders’ egg-sacs, although now it’s usually very thin plastic. These are amplifiers which also create the buzzing sound. The keys are tuned by shaving wood off the underside to lower the pitch and shaving it off at the ends to raise it.

Across the region, tunings and scales vary. But, broadly speaking, there are pentatonic (five-note) balafons, which are usually curved (this is what Mamadou Diabaté plays), and heptatonic (seven-note) balafons, which are flat (as played by Lassana Diabaté, one of Mali’s leading players). The traditional tuning is with seven equally-spaced notes, but nowadays they are often tuned to a Western diatonic scale.

The Mande repertoire on the seven-note instruments tends to use longer, more lyrical melodies, while the music of the pentatonic balafons, of the Senufo and smaller ethnic groups such as the Sambla, Siamou, Tusia and Lobi in Burkina Faso, is more percussive, with short rhythmic motifs and patterns. In all the traditional music, the balafon is often accompanied by other percussion or the bolon, a simple calabash harp. The balafon is frequently used at funeral ceremonies.

Mamadou’s story

Mamadou Diabaté was born in the village of Torosso Sambla, about 30km west of Burkina Faso’s second city of Bobo-Dioulasso. His father, Penege Diabaté, was a balafon player of the Sambla people, a sub-group of the Mande. “I grew up in a big family. My father married five women and I have 45 brothers and sisters. So the compound is like a village, and they are all balafonists; they travel everywhere to play at marriages and parties – to Bobo-Dioulasso, to Ouagadougou and to Mali. Each year there’s a big annual fair and baptisms where the balafon music never stops.”

In this small region of Western Burkina Faso there are three ethnic groups – the Samba, Tusia and Siamou – each with their own pentatonic tuning. In the Sambla tradition they use a small portable balafon with 19 keys, played solo for people working in the fields, as well as a large balafon with 23 keys for weddings and funerals, which is played by three people.

According to Mamadou, the pentatonic notes of the balafon relate to the five vowels of the Sambla language, which is tonal. Whole volumes have been written on the subject, but he says it’s possible to speak with the balafon: “Without opening the mouth, we can tell our stories, report on current events, chat with the people around, mock people who annoy us, and even flirt.” The senior player plays the melody in the upper register, “which speaks to the audience,” he says. The second player, to his left, plays in the low register and adds to the solo, while the third plays a sort of ostinato or repeated accompaniment on the other side of the balafon. The sound is a complex interlocking texture. Mamadou has recorded this repertoire playing all three parts.

Mamadou didn’t want to play balafon in the fields, so aged 11 he left the village and went to Bobo-Dioulasso, sleeping in the streets and looking for work as a musician. He won a prize in a competition aged 12 and in 1988 was invited to perform in one of the National Groups for Traditional Music, who would play for visiting dignitaries and tourists and tour to Europe.

Aged 22, Mamadou decided to move to Austria, and to internationalise his sound. He still plays a pentatonic balafon (D, E, F#, A, B) but one that can fit in with the Western diatonic scale. “The pentatonic balafon in Burkina Faso is tuned according to the language and to other people it sounds out of tune, so you can’t play with other instruments. I recently played with Toumani Diabaté. He couldn’t play with a traditional balafon made in Burkina Faso because it doesn’t work with the kora. But I need to play internationally and play with musicians greater than me and learn from them.”

So he now plays a customised balafon (costing €8,000), which was constructed in Burkina and Switzerland, by Balafons.ch.
“The wood in Burkina Faso is good and it works with the temperature there, but in Europe it changes. So we found a suitable wood in Cameroon which stays stable and can travel. And when I travelled with natural calabashes they would break every trip. Also a flight case for natural calabashes weighs 57 kilos and festivals don’t want to pay for that. So I looked for a solution and make my calabashes out of cardboard and paint them to look natural. They are lighter and do not break.”

Like many marimba and vibraphone players, Mamadou often uses four sticks, two in each hand, but the traditional players in West Africa usually just use two.

Other masters of the balafon

In Mali the big name of balafon playing, until his death in 2012, was Kélétigui Diabaté. He was asked to start the first National Orchestra in Guinea under president Sékou Touré, and was a founder member of the Malian Orchestra National. He accompanied many of Mali’s leading singers including Ami Koïta, Salif Keita and Habib Koité. But he was also to be found regularly performing in Bamako nightspots. He started playing two seven-note instruments, one a semitone higher than the other, so he could play a complete chromatic scale.

Now Mali’s leading master of the balafon, playing in the same style, is Lassana Diabaté. He is a member of the group Trio Da Kali, who have an album with Kronos Quartet due out on World Circuit next summer. Coming from the heart of the tradition, the trio are great performers of the Sunjata Epic alongside more contemporary repertoire.

The leading player in the pentatonic tradition of the Senufo is Neba Solo from Sikasso, Mali. And it’s here where the biggest balafon competition is held, the Triangle du Balafon. Mamadou Diabaté and Percussion Mania were winners in 2012.

This article originally appeared in the December 2016 issue of Songlines (#123) magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today

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