CD Review: Mamadou Diabate – Douga Mansa

The expat Malian kora virtuoso’s fourth cd, his first solo album, takes its title from his father Djelima N’fa Diabate’s instrumental that served for many years as the theme to the six o’clock news on Radio Mali. Perhaps ironically, it was written to evoke the West African vulture, representing patience…as it waits for the death of its prey. Yet the piece is hardly macabre: like the rest of this cd, it’s a briskly optimistic, glimmering thicket of spiky kora textures. While Diabate fils plays his West African harp solo throughout, he frequently sounds like a whole orchestra of them. In another stroke of irony, since emigrating to the US, he’s been able to explore the work of previous kora virtuosos that would have been next to impossible to view in his native land via sites like youtube. Perhaps as a result, Diabate has picked up the pace: if it can be said that a kora player can shred, Diabate shreds here. Lightning-fast glissandos, trills and clusters of triplets everywhere, and the effect is absolutely, viscerally adrenalizing. Where he comes from, this is party music. As Diabate plays it here, the kora is tuned so that its intervals work in the western major scale – this is fun, upbeat stuff. Western ears will notice that most of the melody appears in the lower registers, with all that lightning-fast freneticism further up the scale. 

 

Depending on the placement of the note, the interval or the attack that Diabate uses on the strings, his kora will sometimes take on the plunk of a banjo, the clink of a kanun or cimbalom or even the round tone of a note on the piano. Perhaps the most dazzling display here is the cd’s ninth cut, Kora Mali, a traditional number that was especially popular in the 60s. The most memorable tune is the following cut, Segou Tara, a stately, striking ode to a late 19th century Fulani warlord. Fans of the more upbeat Windham Hill catalog will love this, as will adventurous bluegrass fans (check Jayme Stone and Mansa Sissoko’s Africa to Appalachia collaboration, reviewed here recently, for a smashingly successful kora/bluegrass hybrid). Or for that matter any fretted instrument player with the ambition to wrap his or her fingers around Diabate’s blazing licks. If the cd is any indication, he ought to be sensationally good live: watch this space for info on upcoming New York area appearances; his next scheduled US show as of this writing is at Loynd Auditorium in Conway, New Hampshire on Saturday, April 4, 2009 at 8 PM.