New Ancient Strings

Reissued to mark the 25th anniversary of its 1999 release on Joe Boyd’s Hannibal label, New Ancient Strings remains a landmark in West African music and helped to put the kora on the world stage as firmly as Ravi Shankar made the sitar a globally recognised instrument. Bringing together the two finest young kora virtuosi of their generation, the record echoed the ground-breaking Ancient Strings album released by Toumani and Ballaké’s fathers Sidiki Diabaté and Djelimady Sissoko in 1970, but propelled their combined 42 strings into new and more adventurous spaces while maintaining the elegant classicism of acoustic Mande tradition. Recorded in a single live take in Bamako on the night of Mali’s national independence day in 1997, there were no overdubs and hardly any editing, just spontaneous instrumental genius at its most intuitive. This re-release of New Ancient Strings will be the first of two reissues being made by Chrysalis of the Hannibal catalogue, with another album from 1999, Taj Mahal & Toumani Diabaté’s Kulanjan, set to be released later this year. The reissue of New Ancient Strings comes with a new essay and photos by Lucy Durán, who co-produced the original, and also sees the album’s first ever release on vinyl.