CANCELLED: Concert: Madou Sidiki Diabaté

Unfortunately, this concert has had to be cancelled. We currently plan to reschedule this act!

Join us for an evening with West African Kora virtuoso Madou Sidiki Diabaté, accompanied by Salif Bamakora.

Madou Sidiki Diabatè started playing the kora at age three. By the time he was six years old, he was playing his first concert as a representative of the 71st generation of kora players in his family. He learned his art under his father, Sidiki Diabaté, a man generally referred to as the “King of the Kora”.

His elder brother, Toumani Diabaté is also a famed korist and Grammy Award winner. If Madou Sidiki Diabaté’s lineage is formidable, then so is his talent. In his element, as he was during the Amarrass Desert Music Festival at New Delhi, he evinces astonishment, amazement and gasps of wonder from the audience. In this 30-year-old’s hands, the kora is full of deception: it looks like a simple, even rustic instrument capable of basic sounds. But close your eyes and you hear many musicians in harmony.

Madou captures that traditional sound and infuses his own jazz sensibilities in his first live solo kora album. Recorded at the Amarrass Desert Music Festival held November 26 and 27, 2011 in New Delhi, India, this is the music of his forefathers of the Griot community—West Africa’s historians and storytellers, his roots embedded in every chord.