Toumani Diabaté

Toumani Diabate is one of the finest contemporary kora players. Diabate teams with Ballake Sissoko for New Ancient Strings, a collection of African harp duets. Recorded in one take in Diabate's native Mali, New Ancient Strings is at once ethereal and earthy.

Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté come across like the Odd Couple of Malian music. Touré is the tall, bespectacled veteran with the long fingers and a wide grin, looking very relaxed as he settles down to play a loping riff on his acoustic guitar. Diabaté is younger, shorter, more intense, arranging himself in front of his kora, the ancient, multi-stringed west African harp. When you see him on video, you can’t quite believe just how quickly his fingers dance around all those strings.
The guitarist is from the north of Mali, one of the breakthrough world music artists of the 1980s and 1990s, whose “African blues” alerted a generation of guitar-loving rock fans to the treasures that lay outside the Anglo-American faultlines of rock’n’roll. And Diabaté is from the south - a Mandé griot schooled in a tradition that can be traced back to the 13th century.
The music they make together on In the Heart of the Moon is subtle but relaxing. In the pampered first world, it makes ideal Sunday afternoon music, laid-back and gentle, largely based on the Mandé tunes of the “Jamana kura” or “new era”, when Mali broke free from its colonial past. (Mali became an independent republic in 1960.)
We’re used to world music hybrids between east and west; between electric and acoustic; and between the head and the heart. One of the distinctions of this album is that it is a hybrid of two Malian traditions that rarely meet. Though Diabaté and Touré have known and admired each other for many years, they have hardly ever played together. This gives their collaboration a special quality: it is simple yet richly detailed, spontaneous yet courteous…..-

John L Walters - Guardian
Friday June 24, 2005

Full review HERE