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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Local balafon player Balla Kouyaté joined WBUR's Morning Edition to talk about his family's legacy with the ancient instrument. He first picked it up as a child in his native Mali and played alongside ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

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 ...

First new artist release through Chrysalis Global, an imprint of Chrysalis Records Produced by an A-list team: Dudu Sarr, Lucy Durán + Pape Armand Boye “Three outstanding Malian and Guinean griots….

Aly Keïta is testament to the adage of an apple not falling far from a tree. Brought up in a family of griot musicians, the award-winning Ivorian grand master of the balafon could not resist adopting ...

The balafon, a musical instrument from West Africa, is being considered for inclusion on Unesco's Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The instrument is built up from 17 to 21 wooden slats on top of two ...