Seengwa

Born into a griot family in Burkina Faso in 1973 and a master of the balafon, Mamadou Diabaté released his first album after moving to Austria some 20 years ago. He’s since collaborated on record with Toumani Diabaté (no relation) and with European jazz musicians, and toured with his cousin and fellow balafon player Yacouba Konaté and the wonderfully-titled group Percussion Mania, building a reputation for promoting Burkinabe art and culture on an international stage, earning him the National Order of Burkina Faso.

Seengwa is a tribute to the traditions of the Sambla people of the south-west of the country and the ten tracks brim with breathtakingly virtuosic balafon runs, executed with lightning speed and precision. Underpinned by djembé and calabash percussion and enriched by the polyphonic singing of two female backing vocalists, the sound is in places augmented by strings, piano, kora, electric guitar, bass and the jazzy saxophone of long-time collaborator Wolfgang Puschnig. We all know about West Africa’s talking drums, but Mamadou attempts to translate the tonal language of the Sambla people on the balafon as a form of surrogate speech, while on the song ‘Duniya Banaba’ the Sambla language is rendered into French by the Burkinabé poetry slammer Malika la Slameuse.