Toumani Diabaté, the Malian virtuoso of the 21-stringed instrument known as the kora, who brought the rich traditions of West African music to audiences around the world through collaborations with a wide range of genres, from American blues to the London Symphony Orchestra, died on July 19 at the age of 58.
His family announced that he died of kidney failure in hospital in Bamako, the capital of Mali.
Diabaté took on the dual role of ambassador and historian of millennia of music-making traditions stretching from the western Sahel to the Atlantic coast, and his projects often explored how music flows across borders and regions, particularly the echoes of African rhythms that enslaved people brought across the seas.
“This is the past meeting the present for the future,” Diabaté said.
His connection to the kora and music of the Mande people goes back more than 70 generations as part of a clan known as a griot, who act as custodians of the region’s songs, stories and instrumental styles. The kora, a combination of harp and lute, has been an essential instrument in West African classical music for centuries.
The kora’s plucked strings create a dulcimer-like range, with an interplay of low notes and cascading, light melodies. “When you listen to it, it’s like three guys playing at once,” he told Songlines in 2018. “That’s how I learned the kora.”
Mr. Diabaté’s family were highly skilled musicians in the griot tradition, playing the guitar-like n’goni and the kora, and Mr. Diabaté was a prodigy, never receiving formal lessons but learning the kora by listening to his father and grandfather play.
Music was also therapy. As a child, Diabaté contracted polio and had a long recovery period. For the rest of his life, he walked with a limp and often used a cane. At age 13, he performed for the first time with the Koulikoro Ensemble at the Mali Biennale, a national cultural festival. A few years later, he was touring with the band of renowned Malian singer Kandia Kouyaté.
Through the group’s concerts in other West African countries and in Mali’s former colonial power France, Diabaté saw firsthand Africa’s overlapping musical traditions and the eclectic experimentation of 1980s Western pop, and he became fascinated with the idea of blending different styles.
But first, he helped introduce the kora to many Western ears, much as Ravi Shankar’s sitar helped popularize Indian music in the 1960s. In London, Mr. Diabaté recorded a solo album, “Kaira” (1988), the first of many projects with the record producer and ethnomusicologist Lucie Durand.
The songs are performed in a traditional style by Diabaté on the kora, without backing chorus. The album’s name refers to the anti-colonial cultural movement led by griots before Mali’s independence in 1960. “If you think of West Africa as a body, the griots are its blood,” Diabaté told The New York Times in 2006. “We are the guardians of West African society. We are communicators.”
The interest generated by his debut album paved the way for more than 20 collaborations across the decades, including with Spanish flamenco trio Ketama and American blues guitarist Taj Mahal on Kulanjan (1999), which features folk-blues standards such as “Queen Bee” and “Take This Hammer,” and then with jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd on 2002’s MALIcool.
Diabaté said the musical hallmark of blues, including its call-and-response chord progressions, was a tangible connection to West Africa. “Playing with the Taj Mahal means the blues is coming home,” he told Australia’s Daily Telegraph newspaper.
He later explored the banjo’s African roots on Throw Down Your Heart (2009), a compilation featuring virtuoso American banjoist Bela Fleck and various African musicians, and The Ripple Effect (2020), also featuring Fleck.
On several tracks on “Slow Down Your Heart,” which express the lamentations of slaves leaving the shores of Africa, Fleck plays the acconting, a precursor to the American banjo. “You still hear slave music sometimes. … When I listen to acconting music, it really sounds like the music of that time to me,” Fleck told NPR’s “Morning Edition” in 2009.
Diabaté’s concert with the London Symphony Orchestra was released as an album, “Kôrôlén,” in 2021. Diabaté said the performance was a reminder that “our music is older than Beethoven.” For one of Diabaté’s final projects, he collaborated with Kayhan Kalhol, a virtuoso of the Iranian bowed instrument kamancheh, on the album The Sky Is the Same Colour Everywhere (2023).
“When I play with other musicians, I don’t play their songs,” Diabaté told Uncut magazine in an interview in 2011. “I play my songs, and I don’t let them play my songs. I say, ‘Play your songs, and I’ll play my songs.’ When we play together, new music comes from the heart.”
Founded in 1990, the Symmetric Orchestra has performed all over the world for decades. But the group has established a musical home in Mali, where it plays regularly at Bamako’s club Le Ogon. Diabaté has also earned acclaim for his work with Malian musician and guitarist Ali Farka Touré. Their albums, In the Heart of the Moon (2005) and Ali and Toumani (2010), each won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional World Music Album.
“Kora is a gift from God to me,” Diabaté said.
“Times are changing”
Toumani Diabaté was born in Bamako on August 10, 1965. His father was a famous kora player and his mother was a singer.
After Mali’s independence, his parents became members of the country’s top musical group, the National Ensemble, and the country’s first president, Modibo Keita, paid tribute to the family by allowing them to build a house near the presidential palace in Bamako.
Diabaté’s breakthrough came in 1987 when ethnomusicologist Durand visited Bamako looking for musicians for a festival in London. Diabaté and his father were selected. Diabaté stayed in London to record his debut album and began working with European musicians such as British jazz bassist Danny Thompson and Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk.
“My father didn’t play the kora like my grandfather, and my grandfather didn’t play like my father,” Diabaté once said. “Times are changing. The world today is different.”
Diabaté often called his kora a “spiritual instrument” that was a force for peace, and joked about a legend that playing the kora after midnight could summon mischievous spirits, djinnis. His performances in Bamako often lasted until nearly dawn.
Diabaté passed on the griot tradition to his son, Siddiqui, on two albums featuring French singer-songwriter Mathieu Chedide, “Toumani & Siddiqui” (2014) and “Lamomari” (2017). (Diabaté’s son has also become a hip-hop star in Malia.)
Complete information about survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Diabaté once described playing the kora as like “talking to a woman” because in the medieval West African Empire of Mali, female singers often joined kora players to help set the atmosphere. “The kora is a true spiritual instrument, a magical instrument,” Mr. Diabaté said.
