Why settle for a recorder when you could wield a contrabass clarinet – or something you invented yourself? Meet the players drawn to the unusual In the 2022 film Alice, the titular heroine – a slave ...

As a boy in Mali, Balla Kouyaté remembers playing the balafon to motivate workers on a farm. He was so small, he had to stand on a large rock to be seen by the crowd. An opportunity like that would ...

Mamadou Diabate and Percussion Mania is known for its virtuosic balafon playing and rhythm and is characterized by two balafons as lead instruments. This ensemble is the only one of its kind worldwide ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. El Hadji Sékou Kouyaté, Balla's father, playing the Sossa-Bala in 2017 - Credit: Ursula ...

Côte d’Ivoire’s Aly Keïta returns to South Africa for the Moshito Music Conference. Audiences are in for a treat At the 2009 annual Bushfire Music Festival in Swaziland I witnessed one of the finest ...

In conversation with balafon player Mamadou Diabate ahead of his performance in the city Born into a Griot family in Burkina Faso, known for their tradition of practising storytelling and music-making ...

For the first time, an association was officially established, on Wednesday 30th March, 2005, to promote the balafon, a musical instrument played in several regions of the world, notably in Africa, ...

The balafon of the Senufo communities of Mali, Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire is a pentatonic xylophone composed of eleven to twenty-one keys of varying lengths arranged on a trapezoidal frame with ...

The tumbling, tonkling bright tones of the balafon – Mali's ancient, rustic equivalent of the xylophone – were the speciality of Keletigui Diabate. For many years he was the number one go-to man for ...

With the continuing flood of current releases in creative improvised music, it’s sometimes easy to overlook artists who rarely receive or accept the opportunity to record. Mallet-maestro Khan Jamal is ...