The preceding contributions to this issue, by Chérif Keita and Lassana Diabaté and Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté of Trio Da Kali, reveal the deep roots of both the Sunjata epic and the griot tradition in Mande culture. As the interview with those two musicians also makes clear, however, the survival of that tradition faces increasing challenges. The present article, after briefly reviewing the basic elements of the griot tradition, places the activities of Trio Da Kali—both within the Cape Breton Sunjata Project and beyond—as creative responses to those challenges within the larger context of the global phenomenon of “world music.” Both the continued success of these artists and the further survival and development of their tradition is bound up in this changing world of musical performance and marketing.

Mande culture, centered in Mali, West Africa, maintains the strong, centuries-old tradition of the “griot” or djeli. The griots are musicians, historians, and the keepers of the ancient stories of the Mande, and the tradition is carried on through several hereditary families that pass the stories on from generation to generation. Traced back to the thirteenth century and the era of the Mali Empire, the griots are key figures in cultural events—including rituals around births, weddings and other family occasions—singing praises of individuals and families, and also acting as advisors and intermediaries in the event of societal conflict. Defining the role of the griot in Mande society is not an easy one. As Thomas Hale has written:

Because the term historian and storyteller reveal only part of the story of griot, translators and scholars have often adopted another word from the list of griot activities to describe the profession: praise-singer. The choice of such a term to designate what griots do comes from the fact that the praise-singing function is by far the most obvious and audible manifestation of their profession (Hale 1998:18).

Hale goes on to delineate the various functions of the griot in modern Mande society: genealogist, historian, advisor, spokesperson, mediator, interpreter and translator, musician, composer, teacher, exhorter, warrior, witness, praise-singer; in these roles they participate ceremonially in namings, initiations, courtship, marriages, installations and funerals (22–55). Although these roles persist, however, Fode Lassana Diabaté and Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté make clear in their interview in this themed issue that the musical practices of the past have been challenged by omnipresent guitars, synthesizers, and other musical imports and developments. But social and cultural changes have also brought opportunities: like a number of other West African musicians, they have now also moved onto the international stage, travelling the globe, recording and concertizing both on their own, and with new musical collaborators. These developments, too, helped create the possibility for events like the Sunjata Project as part of the Singing Storytellers events in Cape Breton in the fall of 2014.

Trio Da Kali

The goals of preservation and dissemination are basic to the existence of Trio Da Kali. The group, consisting of Lassana Diabaté, Hawa Diabaté and Mamadou Kouyaté, was created in 2012 by balafon master and griot Lassana Diabaté and British ethnomusicologist and producer Lucy Duran, precisely in order to encourage the older traditional repertoire of the Malian griot. The group’s founding was instigated by the efforts of David Harrington of the renowned American string ensemble, the Kronos Quartet. Harrington was looking for a musical collaboration with Malian musicians. With the financial support of the Aga Khan Music Initiative (AKMI) a program of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Duran worked with Lassana Diabaté and supported the founding of Trio Da Kali to record and perform this older repertoire. Following a series of meetings and rehearsals in San Francisco, the Kronos Quartet and Trio Da Kali developed a series of ten songs from Mali, based upon Mande griot songs, and one adaption of the 1930s recording by gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. An additional important collaborator was arranger Jacob Garchik, who has worked with the Kronos Quartet for many years. Garchik was brought into the project by Harrington, and provided the arrangements to the Mande songs for the Ladilikan recordings (Gray 2017:34).

Lucy Duran describes why she selected the musicians for Trio Da Kali:

I’ve known Hawa Kassé Made (sic) and Lassana for many years. And have worked with them both on other projects. Hawa was in the chorus of her dad’s album Kassi Kassé which had a Grammy nomination, back in 2004. I believe it had a Grammy nomination. Lassana was also on that album but he—the first time I met Lassana was back in 1999 when we recorded the album Kulanjan with Taj Mahal. Lassana was but a mere slip of a boy and a wonderful, already a fantastic musician. So he blew us away with his improvising and his fantastic playing. And his very sensitive accompaniment. And so [...] we’ve remained very good friends since then, and [...] from 2009 to 2012, I’ve spent about four months every year in Mali, two or three separate visits doing a project called Growing Into Music, which was looking at how children acquire musical skills in the big griot families, important griot families, and Lassana was my advisor. So, he was my advisor, my kind of mediator, he was the one who did the translating from Bambara into French. And he – he’s a very good – he makes things happen.

And, of course Hawa is the daughter of Kassé Mady, and I first started working with Kassé Mady in 1989 when the BBC did a film in Mali called – it was part of the Under African Skies series. And Kassé Mady was also sort of a focus in that. So, [...]the three of us worked together a lot from 2009 to 2012. (Duran, personal communication 2014)

And Duran also comments on why she decided on this unusual trio line-up for the Da Kali group:

In the process of doing [...] that project Growing into Music1 and working with both Hawa and [...] Lassana, first of all I realized more and more what an exceptional voice Hawa is. She is [...] really an extraordinary singer. So I wanted to find a way of showcasing her voice because I—in my mind she’s the best of the female singers of her age. [...] And, you know, she mainly performs the wedding circuit, [...] that's how she earns her money. And [...] Lassana is such a brilliant and sensitive accompanist and knows the repertoire so well, you see I feel that these two musicians demonstrate a side of Malian music and music that is really increasing[ly] becoming lost as virtuosity and the djembe, and instrument music, you know—improvisation at the expense of melody is taking over, because that's the side of music that's the easiest to understand in the West... (Duran, personal communication 2014)

As Duran here describes, she first recorded Lassana Diabaté while producing Kulanjan in Athens, Georgia in 1999. Kulanjan brought together the noted American blues musician Taj Mahal with a group of Malian griots led by kora player Toumani Diabaté, along with singers Kassy Mady Diabaté (Hawa’s father) and Ramata Diakite, ngoni player Bassekou Kouyaté, and a second kora master, Ballake Sissoko. Lassana Diabaté has a long history of working with Toumani Diabaté, most notably with his large Symmetric Orchestra which released the album Boulevard de l’Independence on Nick Gold’s U.K. based World Circuit Records in 2006. British producer Nick Gold also created the collaboration between Malian and Cuban musicians—AfroCubism—in 2012, which again included Lassana Diabaté, Toumani Diabaté, Kassé Mady, and Bassekou Kouyaté. In addition, AfroCubism also included Malian guitar legend Djelimady Tounkara, and Cuban guitarist Eiiades Ochoa and his son Eglis Ochoa’s group, whom Gold had recorded in 1996 in the very successful Buena Vista Social Club. Clearly, Lassana enjoyed playing in these collaborations, yet wanted to return to more traditional settings and repertoire.

Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté grew up around well-known griot singers and musicians in Kela, Mali. Her father Kassé Mady has been a leading singer in Mali since her membership in well-known electric bands in the 1960s and 1970s, including Les Marvaillas de Mali, and later National Badema. Recording under his own name with producer Ibrahim Sylla in 1988, he established himself as one of Mali’s leading singers in a series of solo recordings, most notably with the Lucy Duran produced and Grammy nominated album Kassi Kassé in 2003. That year’s release led to an international concert appearance at the WOMEX festival in Essen, Germany when Kassé Mady brought his daughter Hawa with him as a back-up singer. Over the past fifteen years Hawa has been working primarily in Mali as a performer at traditional Mande events including wedding performances. The creation of Trio Da Kali in 2012 has brought her to the attention of international audiences for the first time.

Lassana and Hawa in Cape Breton and after

This, then, was the larger musical context in which Lassana Diabaté and Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté came to Sydney, Nova Scotia in early October, 2014 under the auspices of the Singing Storytellers Conference at the University of Cape Breton, organized by Marcia Ostashewski. The third member of Trio Da Kali, ngoni player Mamadou Diabaté, was unable to attend, as he was busy performing with his father’s group Ngoni Ba on a European Tour. In this unusual duo setting, they performed a concert at the University of Cape Breton, and a workshop performance with other musicians for the Celtic Colours Festival. They were interviewed along with their producer Lucy Duran following these performances. It is worth noting that at this time, they had rehearsed and made a couple of preliminary performances with the Kronos Quartet, but had yet to record Ladilikan, which they completed during the summer of 2015 in Switzerland, following a performance together at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

Following a July 2015 performance together at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, Trio Da Kali and the Kronos Quartet went into the recording studio nearby with producers Nick Gold of the World Circuit label in London, and Lucy Duran, and recorded the ten songs that were released as Ladilikan on September 15, 2017. With Duran’s extensive liner notes including song translations (Duran 2017), this commercial recording met with universal critical acclaim and debuted on top of the European World Music Chart on the October 2017 chart.

Lassana Diabaté and Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté, along with their third musical collaborator Mamadou Kouyaté, toured extensively in the Fall of 2017, through Europe and North America following the release of their Kronos Quartet collaboration Ladilikan. This included concert appearances in London, Atlanta, Seattle, Vancouver, Albuquerque, Toronto, Amsterdam, and many other cities. In October 2016 they had the opportunity to showcase the group at the international WOMEX Festival in Santiago de Compostela, which has also led to extensive touring in North America and Europe. They have taken part in radio recordings, university classes and workshops and a number of other activities to help communicate the role of the griots and their music in today’s Mali. They perform their ancient traditions to new audiences and bring their Mande voices into a new international community. Clearly, the original intentions of Duran and Lassana Diabaté have been realized: the group has brought an increased awareness of the earlier griot traditions to a wider audience around the globe. This has come both through numerous international performances and a very successful recording with the Kronos Quartet which has led broadcasts of their music at radio stations around the world.

The release of the Ladilikan recording has also led directly to further international media attention to Trio Da Kali. The two major world music magazines in the United Kingdom – Songlines and fROOTS – both published extensive features on the group in the Fall of 2017. The cover of the November Songlines issue lists the story as “Trio Da Kali & Kronos Quartet: A truly epic alliance”. These stories were published to coincide with their October 2017 London concert, and other performances in the U.K. in the Fall of 2017.

Since the Singing Storytellers events of 2014, both Lassana Diabaté and Hawa Diabaté have further expanded their international outreach efforts beyond their involvement with Trio Da Kali. Working again with Lucy Duran, they traveled in 2015 and 2016 to Oaxaca, Mexico to participate in a collaboration with Mexican musicians in this southern region of Mexico. With support provided by funding from the British Arts Council, they have worked with local musicians in a little known Afro-Mexican musical style, resulting in a new collaborative recording Forontó Afroaxaca, released in 2019 on the Mexican label Xquenda.

Trio Da Kali toured in the United States and Canada in the Fall of 2017, which included a radio session on KEXP in Seattle which is featured as a video on the station’s popular YouTube channel. In April 2018, the trio performed in concert with the Kronos Quartet at the annual Kronos Festival in San Francisco, as well as concerts on their own in other cities in the United States. In May they performed together at several European festivals and the Barbican concert hall in London. A tour in France followed in 2020 and in 2023, Trio Da Kali performed with the North Sea String Quartet at the North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands, followed by a European tour on their own.

Balafon player Lassana Diabaté of the trio has joined the Kronos Quartet commissioned composers as part of their 50 for Future group of composers, with his Sunjata's Time composition, inspired by the Mande Sunjata epic. Singer Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté has also contributed to the 50 for the Future program, with her composition Tegere Tulon, based upon the children’s hand clapping songs of her childhood in Mali.

In early 2016, Lassana Diabaté returned to Sydney, Cape Breton to participate in workshops and classes held in conjunction with the Afro-Canadian communities of the region. These workshops further enhanced the ties between Malian musical culture and the local communities which have not had close cultural connections with their familial roots back to Africa.

From local to global griot

As these worldwide activities make clear, Lassana and Hawa are taking part in a larger change in the lives of Mande griots, to that of the “global griot.” Griots have been a professional musician class in the Mande world for many centuries, yet their pattern of patronage has changed dramatically over the past fifty years. When the djeli or griot emerged, they were associated with the royal families, and received their entire financial support from them. Their praise singing required them to learn about and exclaim in their performances the lives of these families in great detail. Over the years this system of patronage moved to a more general group of wealthy individuals in their society, which the musicians would praise in a variety of ritual contexts—births, weddings, funerals, and other important occasions. With the independence of the countries from their colonial rulers in the mid-twentieth century political leaders and candidates were added to this more general list of djeli patrons, as songs were written and performed for political campaigns and parties. This would also include songs for national government sponsored radio and television stations.

The development of the recording industry added a new source of support and financial reward, as did nightclubs and other commercial concert venues. Groups such as Super Rail Band at the rail station club in Bamako, which included djeli musicians such as guitarist Djelimady Tounkara, played from the 1960s through the 1980s in the Malian capital. But it was the discovery of these musicians and singers by international audiences, including music fans and academic scholars and their students, that led to an entirely new system of patronage for the griot.

Lucy Duran, in her role as record producer and radio host on the BBC, is an important figure in this development. Duran first studied Mande music in the Gambia in the 1970s, and was responsible for bringing her teacher, Gambian kora player Amadu Bansang Jobarteh to the U.K. in the 1980s, including teaching at a summer program at Cambridge University in 1983. She recorded the highly regarded solo kora recording by Toumani Diabaté, Kaira, in 1987, released by the British label Hannibal Records. This recording introduced many on the West to both the kora and the music of the djeli, and was followed by a number of additional recordings by Toumani, including the Songhoy collaboration with the Spanish group Ketama (Songhoy 1988), and a duet with fellow kora player Ballake Sissoko, New Ancient Strings (1993). The success of these recordings has led to the recording of many other notable Malian griot musicians, including Bassekou Kouyaté (his first two albums produced by Duran), Kassé Mady Diabaté, and the Super Rail Band.

Thirty years later, the music of Mali clearly dominates the “world music” marketplace, and at the core of these recordings is the music of the Mande griots. They perform on a regular basis at international music festivals, concert halls, and cultural events. The life of the griots in Bamako has been radically transformed by patronage that comes to them from sources outside of Mali. The success of Trio Da Kali and their collaboration with the US-American Kronos Quartet further expands the griots’ world and the corresponding shift in their support system.

To be clear, many of the musicians that have gained international recognition over the past three decades, during which Mali’s music has risen to international prominence, are not griots from these familial lineages. Examples of such artists are Ali Farka Toure, Oumou Sangare, and Salif Keita—but these artists most often feature griot musicians prominently in their groups. Salif Keita, for instance, comes from a noble lineage but has always included djeli musicians as key members of his group, including guitarist Kante Manfila, and in recent years kamele ngoni player Harouna Samake.

It should be noted that the griots of the English speaking country of Gambia were the first to travel to North America. In 1973, the Gambian kora player Alhaji Bai Konte traveled to the United States to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival, and released recordings on the Rounder and Folkways labels produced by Marc Pevar. Ethnomusicologist Roderic Knight wrote his dissertation on the kora and on Mandinka music after field work in the Gambia in the late 1960s (Knight 1973). Knight brought Gambian griot Nyama Suso to the USA to teach at the University of Washington in 1970–71, where fellow Gambian kora player Amadu Bansang Jobarteh also taught from 1986 to 1987. Another Gambian kora player, Foday Musa Suso, moved to Chicago in 1977, after a period teaching at the University of Ghana, and recorded a series of kora-based recordings with US-American musicians as the Mandingo Griot Society on the Flying Fish folk label in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Over the last several decades a number of griots from the Gambia, Senegal, Guinea, and Mali have relocated to the USA, Canada, the UK, France, Denmark, Norway and other European countries, and brought their traditions to new audiences, creating local musical fusions in new collaborative ensembles. Foday Suso recorded with African-American jazz musician Herbie Hancock and composer Philip Glass, Seckou Keita in the U.K. with Welsh harpist Catrin Finch, and Ballake Sissoko with French cellist Vincent Segal, and with Malagasy musician Rajery and Moroccan oud player Driss El-Maloumi as “3MA”, just to mention a few examples of these recent collaborative international efforts.2

Conclusion

Through the community based work of Marcia Ostashewski and her partners in the Singing Storytellers Conference, both Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté and Lassana Diabaté of the new group Trio Da Kali were further brought forward into the ranks of the “global griot.” Bringing their centuries-old Mande traditions to new audiences and into new contexts, they have successfully reached the immigrant communities of Cape Breton, as well as a more cosmopolitan audience attending the Celtic Colours Festival. Their artistic creativity and musical talents enabled them to communicate their own traditions to these new audiences.

The performances of Lassana and Hawa in Cape Breton brought their music and traditions to Sydney and the Maritimes for the first time. The unique multimedia performance in concert of the Sunjata epic, with translation provided by Professor Chérif Keita, provided a more complete understanding of the griot tradition and its meanings, while the intercultural sharing of storytelling traditions expanded the participants’ appreciation of their own music and stories. Their public performances at the university and local schools has resulted in an increased awareness of the Mande griot tradition, and appreciation of this ancient cultural treasure. These performances, workshops, and interviews are an excellent model for future endeavors in “applied” ethnomusicology, which bring previously unknown or little understood musical traditions to the West. The results are positive in both directions, as the musicians themselves appreciate and acknowledge the resonances with their own music, which lead to new and exciting opportunities for them.

References

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Diabaté, Lassana, and Hawa Diabaté
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Duran, Lucy
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Duran, Lucy
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Taj Mahal and Toumani Diabaté
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Trio Da Kali
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