Bassekou Kouyate Biography

Bassekou Kouyate was born on the 7 August 1966 in Garana, a small and multi-ethnic village 60 km from Segu located at the banks of the Niger river. Garana is at the nexus of several villages with deep griot traditions, and a long history. Only a few kilometers away is the grave of the legendary buffalo woman, Do Kamissa, who precipitated the founding of the Mali Empire. (She was the aunt of Sunjata Keita who founded the empire in 1235). Several centuries later these same villages provided many of the celebrated griots of the Bamana empire (1712-1861), and the songs of that period are the constant inspiration behind Bassekou’s music.

Bassekou is descended from a long line of griots on both sides. He is the son of Moustapha Kouyate, who played the ngoniba, or large lute, and Yakare Damba, a singer. Moustapha Kouyate was married twice and had 13 children with Yakare (of whom eight are still alive, all of them musicians) and 5 with his second wife Oumou Damba. His ancestors originally came from the Mande heartland (Kangaba) but moved northeast into Segu a few generations ago and adopted the Bamana style of music as their own.

Brilliant though he was, Bassekou’s father never made any recordings; he believed that God would punish him if his recordings were played after his death. He also refused to play live on the radio or on television, although Radio Mali tried on several occasions to record him. Neither would he allow his wife Yakare to record, despite the fact that she was a well known singer on the traditional griot circuit in the region of Segu, with a powerful voice much in demand at wedding parties. “Weddings were postponed if I wasn't free to sing at them, a wedding was not a wedding without me!” she says proudly. To this day Yakare remains a stern matriarch and musical mentor of Bassekou’s entire family, teaching her grandchildren how to sing before they can even speak.

Bassekou was taught the ngoni by his father, who used to hold group classes with all the boys in his household in Garana (only boys learn to play the ngoni). But Bassekou did not study hard and often preferred to wander off into the village with his friends to play football. One day his father got annoyed and told his older brother to bring him to class. When Bassekou turned up, to his father’s surprise he was able to pick up in just a few minutes the tunes that everyone else had been struggling hard to learn the whole day. His father then understood Bassekou’s potential and told Bassekou’s mother Yakare not to force the boy any more to attend the lessons, predicting that “one day he will be a great ngoni player.”

Nevertheless, Bassekou continued to be a bit of a rebel at home, spending more time on football than on music, until finally his dad decided to teach him a lesson by sending him to live with a very strict marabout (Muslim teacher and cleric) in Bamako. Bassekou’s job (he was about 12 at the time) was to shine shoes in the street. At the end of every day he had to bring home to the marabout 1000 CFA (then equivalent to about 4 euros). His main post was in front of the Amitie (one of Bamako’s main hotels, at that time a regular haunt for Bamako’s most famous musicians), and when he didn't bring home enough money, the marabout punished him by beating him. But most often he was able to earn the 1000 CFAs, and as a reward would cross town to visit his grandfather, the great old musician Banzoumana Sissoko, who regaled him with vivid tales about the Bamana empire, and taught him many things on the ngoni.Banzoumana was blind; they called him the “Old Lion”, and he was a fearless critic of Mali’s corrupt military government. “If you want to sing for people who really deserve your praises”, he would say, “go to the cemetery. Our rulers of today don't know true dignity and honour”. Bassekou would turn up at his grandfather’s house unannounced and walk quietly into his grandfather’s room; the old lion would grab his hand and know it was Bassekou just from the feel of it. Eventually, Bassekou was allowed to go back home to Garana where he consolidated his dexterity and knowledge of the Bamana repertoire, becoming a really outstanding young performer. Moustapha and Yakare were regularly invited to play at weddings and private gigs throughout the region and into neighbouring countries as well. But Moustapha became ill in the late 70s, and was unable to travel any more, so he ordered Bassekou to take his place on Yakare’s next tour, in Burkina Faso. Bassekou was only 16 years old and didn’t want to leave Garana, but his mother persuaded him to go with her, by promising to buy him a motorbike as soon as they returned home. She did buy the bike – but then gave it to Bassekou’s older brother!

On tour, people in Burkina doubted that this boy was capable of accompanying his mum for a whole evening, but they soon realized that he was an exceptional player. This was a formative experience for him. Not long afterwards, his father died. Moustapha Kouyate may not have left any recordings, but his style of playing lives on in his sons who constantly pay tribute to him.

After this, Bassekou moved to Segu (capital of the Segu region) in order to join the guitar player Cheikh Oumar Diabate and his wife Nainy Diabate, then one of Mali’s most popular young female singers. Cheikh Oumar’s group was made up of young virtuosi who were experimenting with new ways of playing griot music, and Bassekou began to develop his own techniques on the ngoni.(It was while he was living in Segou that he first met the very young singer Amy Sacko, whom he later married and who is now the lead singer in Ngoni ba.)

This was in the mid 80s, Bassekou was in his late teens, and it was a period in which wedding parties held in the streets had become the musical hothouse of Mali. Young female griot singers were all the rage at such events, called sumu. These women became Mali’s new stars, overshadowing the once-famous dance bands whose popularity was now in decline. There was money to be had, and the opening of Malian TV in 1983 also created a new space for women to show off their dance styles and dress fashion, borrowing from Congolese and Caribbean sounds. Nainy Diabate and her band including Bassekou, lured by the bright lights of the capital, left Segu and settled in Bamako, and soon the word was out that a new and daring ngoni player had arrived in town.

Bassekou started playing the traditional sumu circuit, which soon put him in touch with another extraordinary musician of the new generation: the kora player Toumani Diabate, who at that time was part of the group that accompanied the singer Kandia Kouyate. Toumani and Bassekou recognized kindred musical spirits in each other: their goal was to advance their style of playing and to transform their ancient traditions for the modern world; to open the music of the griots towards the rest of the world by expanding the scope of their instruments to accommodate elements of western harmony and jazz. Bassekou began adding strings to his ngoni to give him a wider melodic range. His father Moustapha had played with 4 strings. His paternal grandfather Djelimoussa Woulen Kouyate had played a 3 string ngoni. Now Bassekou’s ngoni had up to 7 strings.

Around 1985 Bassekou played a concert with Nainy Diabate at the Buffet de la Gare, the legendary hotel bar at the Railway station in Bamako, where the Rail Band used to entertain visitors as they arrived off the long train ride from Senegal (you can see the train station and the hotel on the back of his second album). In the afternoon before the concert he decided to add metal pins to his ngoni to which he could attach a strap around his back, holding it like an electric guitar. In the evening he was playing with members of the Rail Band, seated at the back of the stage, when he suddenly walked to the front of the band and started playing his ngoni standing up. Some thought he was crazy, but many ngoni players soon followed his example playing their instrument standing up. This boosted the image of the ngoni as an instrument that could compete with modern guitars (which until then had been threatening to eclipse the ngoni). Around this time he also experimented with different ways of plucking the strings. Traditionally, the ngoni player only uses a downwards stroke (what the banjo players call “frailing”), but Bassekou introduced the technique of plucking upwards as well, which allowed for faster runs and more versatility.

At the end of the 1980s, Bassekou became a founding member of Toumani Diabate’s Symmetric Orchestra, which then included among others a young Habib Koite as lead singer. Their concept was quite revolutionary in Mali; until then, traditional instruments like kora and ngoni had stayed firmly in the domain of life cycle ceremonies, and were not included in the dance bands that performed at concert halls and bars. The Symmetric’s 1990 album, “Shake the whole world”, released by Sony in Japan, was Bassekou’s first experience of the recording studio. The Symmetric Orchestra were invited to play a concert at the French Cultural Centre, (the CCF), which was rapidly becoming Bamako’s most influential new venue, a way to reach a wider crowd than just local Malians.

After the huge success of that night, they were asked back to perform again but this time as a trio: Toumani Diabate on kora, the veteran musician Keletigui Diabate on balafon, and Bassekou Kouyate on ngoni. There was an extraordinary chemistry between these three great virtuosi. Their idea of a purely instrumental trio was quite novel for Mali. The voice has always been considered the most important part of Mande music, but the Symmetric Trio dispensed with the singers and gave the instruments the role of both accompaniment and melody. As with a jazz trio, each one took it in turns to perform extended solos; Toumani also had been influenced by the Indian concept of “jugalbandi” or musical conversations that he had encountered when touring in the UK with Indian musicians. The Symmetric Trio had an enormous impact in Mali; this type of formation has since become very widespread in West Africa but it all started with the Symmetric.

The trio’s reputation grew quickly, and they recorded the acclaimed albums ‘Djelika’ (Rykodisc, 1995) and ‘Songhai 2’ (Rykodisc/Nuevos Medios 1994), a project in collaboration with the Spanish new flamenco group, Ketama. This was Bassekou’s introduction to the flamenco concept of “falseto’ (improvisation). It was the Symmetric Trio that brought Bassekou to Europe for the first time to play at the festival in Dranoute in Belgium in 1990. Later that same year, in November 1990, Bassekou made his first trip to the USA. He had been invited to participate in the annual get-together of banjo players at the Tennessee Banjo Institute in Cedars of Lebanon, Tennessee. 400 or so players of all kinds of banjo were there to exchange information and play; one of them was the African American blues musician, Taj Mahal. Taj recognised immediately Bassekou’s talent, and later said that he had a strange feeling that they were related. “Meeting Bassekou I began to think that my ancestors were Kouyates, they were griots of Mali. There was such a strong family resemblance and I felt a great affinity with him” Taj said. He invited a somewhat terrified young Bassekou to join him on stage, and they wowed the crowd with their musical dialogue. This was Bassekou’s first exposure to the blues, and he was struck by just how close they were to his own Bamana tradition from Segu. He learnt that the banjo is descended from West African lutes of the ngoni family. He visited museums of African American history and was greatly impressed by exhibits of early banjos, which resembled the type of instruments he knew from his youth back in his village, Garana.

Bassekou has remained in constant touch with Taj Mahal ever since, and in 1999 they had the opportunity to work together with Toumani Diabate on the album ‘Kulanjan’ (Rykodisc), recorded in the REM studio in Athens, Georgia. The encounter between Taj Mahal’s blues and Malian music prompted Taj to say: “that’s a circle of 500 years just being closed… I’m the oldest musician here, but I play the youngest instrument”. Much later, in 2008, they were all delighted to learn that Barack Obama, while running for president, had selected ‘Kulanjan’ as his favourite CD [for Borders], describing it as “a beautiful melding of traditional blues and music from Mali”.

In the mid 1990s Bassekou married Amy Sacko, a fine griot singer originally from northwest Mali who had studied music at Bamako’s Institut National des Arts. She was conversant with all the different griot styles of the country, including Bamana music from Segu, where her father worked as a civil servant and where she had first met Bassekou. As a couple, they produced a number of popular cassettes and were in constant demand on the wedding circuit and on Mali television, where Amy was nicknamed “the Tina Turner of Mali”, partly because of her looks and partly because of her powerful soaring voice.

In 1995 Bassekou started his own group Samaguera – named after one of the praise names of the Kouyate lineage - together with Amy Sacko and the singer Kasse Mady Diabate. The line up included balafon, drum kit, electric bass, guitar and ngoni. They played numerous tours in Europe and even concerts in Japan. At the same time he continued to play with Toumani Diabate’s Symmetric Orchestra, now expanded to a 20-piece band that included with four singers. But however important the ngoni was to the sound of these groups, it was still not in the lead - as it had not been since the days of the Bamana empire.

In 2005 he was invited by Mali’s “desert bluesman” Ali Farka Touré to play on his album ‘Savane’ (which was released posthumously) and to join Ali on stage for his final tour in the summer of 2005. Ali was already very ill with cancer, but no one would have known: these last appearances were electrifying. Bassekou’s remarkable solos on stage with Ali brought him to the attention of many new audiences. Ali had always supported Bassekou Kouyate since they had first met, and used to encourage him to start his own band, telling Bassekou that “you and your music are a raw black diamond”. The pentatonic Bamana style of Segu had some deep resonances with Ali’s own desert music from Niafunke on the Niger bend, and Bassekou was gradually realizing that it was time for him to begin to play his own native style, from Segu.

When Ali died in Feb 2006, Bassekou was distraught; not only had he lost his friend and mentor, but he was now seriously worried about which direction he should take his career into. Ultimately, this precipitated the formation of his own group, Ngoni ba. Bassekou’s decision to create Ngoni ba came out of discussions in that summer of 2005 with old friend Lucy Duran who had produced several of the albums that featured Bassekou. They talked about how Bassekou could step out from the shadows of the other Malian musicians he had shared the stage with so often. They talked about how the ngoni had become intertwined with the sound of the kora and Malian guitar, so that people didn't actually know what the ngoni sounded like on its own. Bassekou emphasized the special qualities of the ngoni, such as its ability to “bend” and play in-between notes with slides and other techniques. All these years, the ngoni had remained the definitive instrument of Bassekou’s family, both back home in Garana, where some of his brothers and sisters still lived, and in Bamako, where Bassekou was training his nephews on ngoni and had other students as well. And so Bassekou decided to create a new type of ensemble: a quartet of different sized ngonis.It was a novel idea, but it was also very old – the rulers of precolonial Segu sometimes had bands of up to 30 or 40 ngoni players, all playing together. So once again, Bassekou was making something new out of something very old, which is how Mande griots have kept their music alive for centuries.

Ngoni ba’s first album, ‘Segu Blue’, came about by chance. In early 2006, Jay Rutledge from Munich (Germany) who runs the record label Out Here records, went to Bamako to report on the release of Toumani Diabate & the Symmetric Orchestra’s album ‘Boulevard de L’independance’. Just before Toumani’s concert, Jay met up with BBC presenter and record producer Lucy Duran to watch Bassekou play a small informal concert at the pizzeria ‘Chez Thierry’. That evening, Bassekou was playing alongside Lassana Diabate on Balafon, Kassemady and Amy Sacko were singing. Lucy Duran mentioned that she thought that someone really should record an album with this guy. “But you need to see his new group – no guitars or kora there, just ngonis –and they really rock” she said. The next day, she took Jay to Bassekou’s house in the part of Bamako called Hippodrome. Seven musicians playing amplified ngonis with calabash percussion crowded into the small atmospheric livingroom, and Amy Sacko began to belt out the song ‘Poi’, which sounded like an ancient blues. Not knowing what outhere records would be getting into Jay Rutledge agreed: “If we do it together I’m in.” The decision was made. Only five months later Lucy Duran and Jay Rutledge were back in Mali to record what later became the album “Segu Blue”, one of the most celebrated African releases of 2007. It was nominated 3 times for the BBC 3 awards for world music and was awarded twice: best album 2007 (by the critics) and best African artist. Since then Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni ba have toured extensively all over Europe, Africa and even the Caribbean, and have become fixtures on the Mali festival circuit. Bassekou was appointed the patron of Segu’s Festival on the Niger in 2009, in recognition of his role in promoting awareness of the region’s musical heritage.

In Mali the success of the group has led to a revival of an instrument that had been neglected in the last years, and to a renewed interest in Bamana music. Today in Mali not a week passes without Bassekou being approached by some young musician who wants to take up the ngoni. Ngoni ba has become one of Mali’s most influential bands of the 21st century – sending an important message to the youth of just how much life and soul there still is in their own ancient musical traditions.

In 2009 outhere records released the follow up album “I speak Fula” to Bassekou’s celebrated debute album ‘Segu Blue’. The album was picked up by Next Ambiance the newly founded sublabel of US alternative rock label Subpop. 2011 ‘I speak Fula’ collected a Grammy nomination. Meanwhile Bassekou Kouyate was awarded one of the highest Malian honours and made a chevalier de l’ordre national du Mali. He has been featured on numerous albums by Amadou & Mariam, Youssou N’Dour & countless others and has become one of the stars of the Grammy nominated project Afrocubism that brings together musicians from Mali with Eliades Ochoa from Buena vista Social Club on a quest for the African / Cuban roots in each others music.

In only 5 years Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoniba have toured the world playing 100rds of shows from NY Central Park to Roskilde or Glastonbury. Bassekou Kouyate has become a musical icon of worldmusic. Or as Songlines puts it in 2011: “Bassekou has revolutionized the way the ngoni is perceived, transforming it into a lead instrument.” In different words: The ngoni is here to stay. Lately Bassekou performed on Africa Express train trip through UK performing on stage in London with the likes of Sir Paul McCartney, John Paul Jones, Damon Albarn and many more. His third album ‘Jama ko’ was released in spring 2013. It means 'big gathering of people'. Any important event in Mali be it birth, marriage or death has been accompagnied by the music of the griots and Bassekou and his family are at the heart of this tradition. Jama ko is a call for unity, peace and tolerance in a time of crisis. “Jama ko, c’est pour tout le monde”, says Bassekou Kouyate, griot and celebrated ngoni player, explaining the title of his third album, “There are over 90% Muslims in Mali, but our form of Islam here has nothing to do with a radical form of sharia: that is not our culture. We have been singing praise songs for the prophet for hundreds of years. If the Islamists stop people music making they will rip the heart out of Mali.” The recording of Jama ko took place in March 2012 in Mali's capital Bamako. It was recorded with an entirely new line-up including Bassekou's two sons Madou and Moustafa Kouyate, ngoni ace Abou Sissoko and a number of other young talented musicians from Bamako. It became political by accident. In the afternoon of the first day in the studio the military overthrew the president Amadou Toumani Toure (ATT). It was a shock for Bassekou as the former president was a great supporter of his music. Somewhere between power cuts, fuel shortages and the uncertainty of daily curfews the recording went on. Meanwhile the situation in the north of Mali was getting worse and worse by the day. In the studio a musical answer started taking shape: Instead of keeping quiet Bassekou plugged in his wah wah pedal, cranked up his amp and let loose: Ne me fatigue pas: don't wear me out.

The album features Kasse Mady Diabate on the Latin-flavoured Sinaly singing about Sinaly Diarra, a Bamana king famous for resisting forced Islamisation in the 19th century. In the song Kele Magni Amy Sacko and Khaira Arby from Timbuktu, sing for peace. Poye 2 features an incredible jam between Bassekou and Taj Mahal (vocals / electric guitar) and ends with the touching song Moustafa by Bassekou’s son Moustafa dedicated to his parents thanking them for all they have done for him. The album was co-produced by Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Godspeed you! black emperor, Coeur de Pirate) it also features Andrew and Brad Barr (Barr Brothers) and Mocky Salole playing organ and drums.