Stars pay tribute to late Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté

According to French news agency AFP, Diabaté died at a private clinic in the capital Bamako after a brief illness.

“My dear dad is gone forever,” the Malian great’s son Sidiki Diabaté is quoted by AFP as writing on Facebook.

Diabaté has been hailed as a master of the West African stringed instrument, and some of the leading artists from the region took to social media to pay their tributes.

Senegalese music legend Youssou N’dour praised Diabaté as “a virtuoso of the kora and an unmatched musical arranger”, while Malian singer Oumou Sangare called him “a bridge between our ancestral traditions and modernity.” Salif Keita described his death as “the loss of [Mali’s] national treasure.”

Diabaté was born in 1965 to a family of griots – traditional storytellers who are the guardians of Mali’s traditions and oral histories.

A self-taught musician, Diabaté has been described as one of the most creatively prolific and successful musicians on the African continent. He enjoyed recognition for his contributions to the development of the kora and African music in general.

According to WOMEX, despite growing up in a musical environment, the artist never learned directly from his father except by listening. He began playing the kora at the age of five and at 13, he made his public appearances, before later joining Malian female griot Kandia Kouyatéin 1984.

In 2004, he received the Zyriab des Virtuoses, a UNESCO prize awarded at the Mawazine Festival in Morocco and the same year, he began working with World Circuit on a trilogy of albums recorded at sessions in the Mandé Hotel in Bamako.

The first release was In the Heart of the Moon album, recorded with Mali desert blues maestro Ali Farka Touré, which won the Best Traditional World Music Album Grammy Award. Second in the trilogy was Boulevard de l’Indépendance by Toumani Diabaté’s Symmetric Orchestra. The third was Ali Farka’s final solo album Savane. Diabaté accompanied Ali on his last concert tour in the summer of 2005 during which they spent three days in a London studio recording Ali and Toumani, the follow-up to In the Heart of the Moon, which also won a Grammy in 2011.

In March 2014 SOAS (the School of Oriental and African Studies awarded Diabaté an honorary degree of doctor of music in recognition of his influential work in raising awareness of the kora and the traditional music of Mali around the world. The award also recognised his contribution to the Mande scholarship, which Diabaté and his family have been involved with since the first Mande Studies Conference at SOAS in 1972.

Diabaté served as president and director of Mandinka Kora Productions, who actively promoted the kora through workshops, festivals, and various cultural events. He was also an instructor of the kora and modern and traditional music at the Balla Fasseke Conservatoire of Arts, Culture and Multimedia in Bamako.