For
almost half a century Kassé Mady Diabaté has been recognized as one of West
Africa’s finest singers. He is a descendant of the most distinguished griot
family of the ancient Manding Empire, the Diabatés of Kéla, and his name,
alongside other griot legends Toumani Diabaté and Bassékou Kouyaté, is
equivalent to musical royalty in Mali. The Manding Empire was founded in the
13th Century by the emperor Sunjata. It swept from one end of West Africa to
the other, from Casamance on the Atlantic coast all the way to Burkina Faso,
thousands of miles to the east. Sunjata used a hitherto unheard of weapon to
bind all his disparate peoples together: music.
Music
became a formidable political tool and turned the hereditary Manding musicians
or djelis (griots) into a powerful caste. Today, having survived centuries of
change and turmoil, that caste is still flourishing. Drawing on themes as old
as the empire itself and melodies learned in childhood, the modern griots still
mediate for social order. It explains how an artist such as Kassé Mady Diabate
can rise to such a degree of excellence and become a national treasure in Mali.
Kassé
Mady was born in 1949 in the village Kéla. His aunt was the great griotte
Siramori Diabaté, while his grandfather was known as ‘Jeli Fama’, which means
‘The Great Griot’, thanks to the gripping quality of his voice. When Kassé Mady
was 7 years old (a significant age in Manding culture), the elders of the
family, including Siramori, realized that he had inherited his grandfather’s
vocal genius. They schooled him and encouraged him, until he was able to launch
his own career. He would go on to play a role in the most innovative moments in
Malian music over the next five decades, first in his own country and later
with landmark international collaborations.
In 1970
he became lead singer of the Orchestre Régional Super Mandé de Kangaba. With
Kassé Mady’s remarkable singing the group won the nationwide Biennale music
competition in the Malian capital Bamako. The festival had been set up by the
government, as part of a Cultural Authenticity initiative across all of the
newly independent West African states, encouraging musicians to return to their
own cultural heritage. At the Biennale Kassé Mady caught the attention of Las
Maravillas de Mali, a group of musicians who had studied music in Cuba, and
returned to Mali to perform their interpretations of Cuban classics. The
Government was putting pressure on the group to incorporate a more Malian
repertoire and so they invited Kassé Mady to join them as lead singer. With
their young vocalist at the helm, the Maravillas, later known as Badema
National, achieved huge success throughout West Africa, with songs sung in a
Cuban style, but with a new Manding touch.
In 1988
Kassé Mady left Mali and the Badema National behind and moved to Paris, where
he recorded his first solo album for the Senegalese record producer Ibrahima
Sylla. He spent the next ten years in Paris, recording Fode, then Kéla
Tradition, an acoustic album of Kéla jeli songs. Moving back to Mali in the
late 1990s, several collaborations followed, many of which have become landmark
recordings: Songhai 2, the album he made with the flamenco group Ketama and
Toumani Diabaté, and Koulandjan, on which he collaborated with Taj Mahal and
Toumani Diabaté, an album which was famously cited by Barack Obama as one of
his favorite albums of all time. Collaborations with Toumani continued and he
starred in the Symmetric Orchestra and Afrocubism projects, both recorded by
World Circuit.
Solo
projects during the past decade have included the acoustic album Kassi Kassé,
produced in 2002 by Lucy Duran, and Manden Djeli Kan, released on Universal
France in 2009 and garnering 4 and 5 star reviews: ‘the star is always the
brilliant vocalist’, said The Times reviewer, while the 5 star review in the
Financial Times said simply ‘Time stops still’.
The new
album Kiriké (out in the US on January 6, 2015 on Six Degrees Records) has
provided a platform for Kassé Mady to celebrate his position as one of Mali’s
greatest voices in distinguished company. The album is the third in a series
born out of the friendship between the young Malian kora maestro Ballaké
Sissoko and the iconoclastic French cellist Vincent Segal. Already this
friendship has resulted in two beautiful albums, Chamber Music (2009) and its
follow-up At Peace (2012), both released on Six Degrees Records in the US. Kirike,
like the other two albums in the series, exemplifies a more intimate musical
current that has been emerging in Bamako, one that’s closer to the acoustic
sound of tradition.
Having
long been admirers of Kassé Mady, Ballaké and Vincent dreamt of assembling a
royal ‘cast’ around him and making an album worthy of his extraordinary voice.
So it was that three virtuoso soloists came together, childhood friends,
one-time members of the National Instrumental Ensemble of Mali, and scions of
Mali’s great griot dynasties. Ballaké Sissoko is the son of Djelimady Sissoko,
the musical giant who recorded the album Ancient Strings, a cornerstone of
modern kora music. Balafon player Lansiné Kouyaté is the son of Siramori
Diabaté. (and so related to Kassé Mady). And ngoni player Makan Tounkara, aka
‘Badié’, grew up in the heart of the Instrumental Ensemble, his father being
one of its directors.
The
centerpiece is Kassé Mady’s voice. He sings in Bambara, the dominant language
of southern Mali, and in doing so ‘the man with the voice of velvet’ reveals an
altogether different personality: an old man of the soil grumbling at the
margins of his field in a language infinitely rootsier and more flavorsome than
the grand Malinké of the classic griot praise-songs. A fifty-year long career
hasn’t blunted his high-notes, but rather added richness to the astonishing
gentleness of his baritone, making his voice better suited to this ‘chamber
music’ than to the brilliant sheen of fusionistic pop. It is a sound attuned to the modern ear, a
consecration of one of Mali’s greatest voices.
Meanwhile
the trio represent three major elements in Manding music: the kora music of
Casamance, the balafon of the central zone and the more bitter sounding ngoni,
so reminiscent of the northern deserts of Mali. And the music on Kiriké keeps
faith with that contemporary acoustic Bamako sound; the subtlety and simplicity
of Vincent Segal’s approach allows the musicians to pour out their art with
liberated ease, and show new facets of their talent. The ngoni, at once melodic
and percussive, takes pole position, its stunning improvisations (‘Douba
Diabira’) promising to dazzle amateurs of both Bach and jazz, of the gnaoua of
Morocco and the trance music of Madagascar. The balafon and the kora conjure up
novel moods, as in the liquid accompaniment they provide on the song ‘Sadjo’.
And drawing all the sounds together is the stunning voice of Kassé Mady,
dazzling with its range and power.
A griot
to the core, Kassé Mady expresses himself almost entirely through his music,
transcribing all of the nuances of the human soul into song. He is not
especially at ease with the spoken word, and is known to all who come across
him for his modest and peaceful character. But when he sings, his delivery
embodies the power of his message it is this that cements his position as “the
greatest singer in Mali”, as described by fellow countryman Salif Keita.
