Kelena Fôly

Grand pianos are not heard much in West African music, but Cheick Tidiane Seck has been playing for more than half a century, since the nuns at the Catholic convent in Mali where he boarded taught him classical theory. On moving to Bamako to study at the National Institute of the Arts, he played piano by day and organ by night with the legendary Rail Band, influenced by the American jazz legend Jimmy Smith. In the mid-1980s he moved to France and has since played mostly electric keyboards with everyone from Manu Dibango and Salif Keita to Dee Dee Bridgewater and Ornette Coleman via Damon Albarn and Carlos Santana.

Kelena Fôly (‘expressing oneself in music’ in Bamana) finds him sitting solo at a Steinway grand in a Parisian studio, playing semi-classical pieces, exercises in American jazz such as ‘56 Walker Street’ and the blues standard ‘Motherless Child’ to which he adds a verse in Bamana for his own mother. Digging into his roots and singing in a deep bass voice, on ‘Kana Kassi’ he recounts a story about the founder of the Wassoulou empire. The results are as striking as they are unexpected.