Toumani Diabaté and Ballaké Sissoko: 21 Strings

Let’s start where it really begins. Not in Joe Boyd’s London office, negotiating the terms of engagement with fast-rising star Toumani Diabaté; nor when a young Lucy Durán walked into Grove Music on Bedford Square one morning, entered the office of Mr Anthony King, Grove’s recently appointed ‘advisor for African music’ and heard the kora for the first time; nor in the cavity of a mighty baobab tree on Gambia’s coast, where a djinn [spirit] first dreamt of an instrument with 21 strings, not the six of the hunter’s lyre. No, where it really begins is in the headphones of producer Nick Parker, who was used to recording harpsichords and chamber ensembles, not two West African griots sat in the vestibule of a conference centre on the ‘north bank of the Niger.’ Marble floor, marble walls, high marble ceiling; two players – Toumani Diabaté, Ballaké Sissoko, two Nagra recorders, four mics. And, as Parker was about to start recording, the chirrup of a lone, unseen cricket.

“Nick was the one with headphones, and was the only who could hear it, so we spent at least an hour chasing it around the vestibule,” recalls producer and broadcaster Lucy Durán. “We couldn’t kill it – that would be a bad omen.” They finally got it out, using broomsticks.

If you go to the British Library, where the original, unedited tapes of New Ancient Strings are stored, perhaps you can hear that cricket, picked up on those four mics set around the two young players before they started playing on that balmy night of September 22, 1997, the anniversary of Mali’s independence. They would go on to record eight pieces, including one of the oldest in the kora repertoire, ‘Bi Lamban’, thought to date from the 13th century. Durán and Parker would later choose from the three or so takes they did of each – usually the second or last take – and aside from a few editorial snips, where they were noodling around with a riff for too long in preparation for those take-offs into transcendent realms for which the kora seems to have been devised and divined, what you hear is what they played. “There’s nothing additional,” says Durán of the album, which after many years of being out of print, has been remastered for reissue by Chrysalis, with new notes by Durán. “There were no overdubs, no added reverb,” she adds. “But there was something in the simplicity in the way we recorded. They were very relaxed, unselfconscious. It wasn’t a studio. They weren’t wearing headphones. They were listening to each other, sat next to each other. I think they went into a zen moment, where they weren’t even looking at each other. They were just listening and going for it.”

Durán first met a 19-year-old Ballaké Sissoko in 1986, on her first trip to West Africa, with the writer James Fox. Their trip was paid for by a generous commission from House & Garden, even if it involved arduous travel by road and on a goods train through Senegal before a 2am arrival in Bamako.

“We finally came to the house of Toumani Diabaté,” recalls Durán. “He and Ballaké were living either side of one wall,” she adds. Their fathers, Sidiki and Djelimadi, had been gifted land by Mali’s first president right there under the presidential hill. Their 1970 recording, Ancient Strings, had been issued by Mali’s ministry of culture, and was the inspiration for the album their sons would record that September night, 27 years later, and which is now back in print, 25 years after its release.

Durán’s first ambition had been to bring Toumani to the studio with his father, to strike new gold from those ‘Ancient Strings’. That dream ended with Sidiki’s unexpected death, aged 73, in Gambia.

“That’s when I thought of Toumani and Ballaké,” says Durán. “The same generation but quite different styles and histories.” Comparing them, you have Toumani’s filigree flights into the ether, while Ballaké holds the guy ropes of rhythm. “His role was to keep the riff going,” says Durán. “He is brilliant at very funky basslines. Listen to ‘Bi Lamban’, which is in praise of music itself. Two minutes in, something changes and Ballaké really goes into it. That was his forte.”

Today, Ballaké can elevate and fly between the sun and moon just as Toumani could, and it could be argued that his current standing on the global stage is as high, if not higher, than his old friend’s. So it seems right that it was to Ballaké that Durán turned when she began Kora Tales, her film about the history and journey of the kora, co-directed with Laurent Benhamou.

“I wanted to do it with someone from the culture, a player who would really look at the trajectory and history of the kora,” says Durán. “There are a thousand stories about it, and there’s no one truth. So, I wanted to tell that story through Ballaké.”

As one kora maker says in the film, “Every family will tell you a different story to authenticate themselves.” And through the fog of make-believe, in truth it probably dates to the 18th century, emerging from much older instruments such as the six-string hunter’s harp. “When did that happen, and how, we don’t know.”

Ballaké and the film travel down through Senegal, and the Casamance, before reaching the semi-mythological source of the kora and its many tales of origin, Sanementereng, a sacred coppice of baobab trees overlooking the many-plaited waves riding the currents and tides of the Atlantic, near the beach town of Brufut. “It was an emotional experience. Ballaké had been talking about it so much,” recalls Durán. “We filmed him in front of the baobab” – in legend, the tree from which a djinn revealed the secrets of the kora – “and he was visibly moved.”

Durán and the crew were, too, as Ballaké knelt for ablution, a blessing of water from the sacred well at the foot of the baobab coppice, the camera slowly rising up to meet the majestic enormity of the ocean playing its deep, resonant strings of currents and waves, of the moon-heavy tides on which the cruel trade in human beings, as well as the wonders of so much African music, plied their ways back and forth across the world.

New Ancient Strings is being reissued by Chrysalis on CD and vinyl (both with 16-page booklet) on March 15. Ballaké Sissoko: Kora Tales is currently being screened at select festivals and cinemas.

This article appears in the April 2024 issue of Songlines (#196) magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today

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