XALIMANEWS- The pianist and leader of the Kora Jazz Trio Abdoulaye Diabate has died. This is sad news for Music and culture.
Renowned instrumentalist, Abdoulaye Diabaté, who has just bowed out, was one of the greatest musicians on the continent.
With his death, Africa loses a high-ranking artist. Coming from a long tradition of griot, Abdoulaye Diabaté, whose father was a balafonist in the national orchestra of Sorano, preferred to learn the piano. He will enroll at the conservatory and will very quickly assimilate the most complicated workings and techniques. Passionate about jazz, he wonderfully combined traditional sounds drawn from his family heritage and jazz, blues…he would become an undisputed master of this marvelous blend of tradition and modernity.
« I won first prize at the conservatory and subsequently I was lucky enough to have a scholarship from French cooperation to carry out my higher studies in Paris » he confided during an interview.
Abdoulaye Diabaté was for 10 years at the head of the national orchestra of Senegal at the Dakar Conservatory and directed sacred monsters like the late Korist Soriba Kouyaté… whom he will meet again when he created with Moussa Sissokho the Kora Jazz Trio.
When his death was announced, tributes from the music world multiplied.
The singer Woz Kaly with whom he had worked on the song Use from the latest Kora Jazz Trio album Part IV wanted to remember the great gentleman who has just left us.
«We have just lost a great man. It’s a huge loss for music. Abdoulaye Diabaté played his part masterfully and generously. May God welcome this great man to Paradise.” reacted the singer to the nightingale voice.
For Fodé Sylla, a politician and cultural actor very close to the deceased with whom he co-founded the international baobab festival, Abdoulaye Diabaté was a Song of Africa.
“Abdoulaye Diabaté taught us to love Africa, to celebrate its diversity and to open our minds to new sounds.
Your absence is not an absence because your music will continue to resonate within us, reminding us that beauty can be born from the fusion of cultures.
Abdoulaye Diabaté, more than a musician, was a smuggler. With his fingers dancing on the piano keys, he weaved a bridge between the ancestral rhythms of Africa and the harmonies of jazz. A unique alchemy that transported us, with each note, to the lands of his ancestors. Abdoulaye Diabaté East eternal like the Baobab” concluded Fodé Sylla.
Abdoulaye Diabaté was also a formidable ambassador of Mandé culture and a worthy son of the continent. With Kora Jazz Trio, created in 2002, he has brought his music to all continents. In 20 years, he has traveled around the world no less than five times. Full of projects in his head to popularize African folklore that he considered inexhaustible, the pianist will leave a big void.
A few years ago in Paris (in 2008 precisely) I met Abdoulaye Diabaté. At the time Part III had just come out. An explosive and magnificent album. We do an interview and the flow passes very quickly. He is disconcertingly humble for his status.
His desire to highlight traditional instruments like the kora through jazz is astonishing. Each of our meetings were lessons on the sounds of the world. He liked to discuss the possible exchanges between South America and Africa and those, always between jazz and Africa. When Part IV was released in 2018, I interviewed him for Pan African Music and the same year as part of the music festival, I asked him how did he see the world without music?
“A world without music would be an unrealistic world, a world devoid of feelings of any kind; music as they say is the art of combining sounds in a way that is pleasant to the ear, but also music and art in general is a means of expressing feelings whether it be happiness, love, sorrow in addition to being a means of direct expression,” he replied.
Abdoulaye Diabaté was a defender of African culture and he encouraged musicians from the continent to go to the source. He continually invited them to take an interest in research in order to offer quality music. While one day I was pointing out the absence of promising singers among the younger generation, Abdoulaye Diabaté cut me off:
“The country is full of very good singers, make no mistake. What is missing are instrumentalists with a certain stature, capable of imposing a musical direction that could be exported. Senegal lacks instrumentalist-Leaders, all the good instrumentalists live abroad, me included. Everyone is complicit in the decline of Senegalese music: the media, journalists and also and especially the presenters. It’s very easy to become a star ins a country where there are so few music criticse” he pleaded.
Diabaté leaves us, after having been an exceptional instrumentalist and passer but unfortunately, without having had the time to set up his pianist school which was close to his heart. Nevertheless, he will remain in the annals of the history of African music. Rest in peace maestro.
