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Mali

Born into the wrong caste to sing

Nahawa Doumbia

Nahawa Doumbia was born around 1961 near Bougouni in southern Mali. Her mother died shortly after childbirth and her grandmother raised her, yet by Doumbia's own account it was her mother who predicted, before dying, that she would become a singer. That was an unlikely fate. The family belonged to Mali's blacksmith caste, not the hereditary jeli lineage that normally produces professional musicians. Civil servants from the Ministry of Culture discovered her voice, and in 1980 she won Mali's National Youth Week competition. She built her career on the didadi rhythm native to the Bougouni region and, alongside Oumou Sangaré, became one of the founding voices of Wassoulou music, direct and danceable and frequently outspoken on women's rights.

A first guitar made from an oil can

Tinariwen

Ibrahim Ag Alhabib formed Tinariwen in 1979 among Tuareg exile camps around Tamanrasset, Algeria. His father had been executed in an earlier Tuareg uprising, and as a boy he built his first instrument from an oil can, a stick and bicycle-brake wire. The band sang for the ishumar, the displaced and unemployed young Tuareg men of the Sahara's refugee circuit, and played weddings and gatherings long before any recording existed. International attention came through the French group Lo'Jo in the late 1990s, and by 2012 Tinariwen had won a Grammy for Tassili. They made 2014's Emmaar in California's Joshua Tree after Islamist militants occupied northern Mali, burned instruments and briefly abducted one of the band's own guitarists.

70 generations of kora players

Toumani Diabaté

Toumani Diabaté was born in Bamako in 1965 into a griot family that, by its own reckoning, had passed the kora from father to son for some seventy generations. His father, Sidiki Diabaté, recorded the instrument's first-ever solo album in 1970. Toumani followed in 1988 with Kaira, the first solo kora record by anyone else, and then spent decades taking the kora into unlikely company. He made two Grammy-winning duet albums with Ali Farka Touré and recorded with Björk, Taj Mahal and the London Symphony Orchestra. 2008's The Mandé Variations, a Grammy-nominated return to solo acoustic kora, came two decades after his debut. He died in Bamako in July 2024, at 58, and was still widely called the king of his instrument.

The Collection