Kasse Mady Diabate, Purcell Room, Southbank Centre | reviews, news & interviews
Kasse Mady Diabate, Purcell Room, Southbank Centre
Kasse Mady Diabate, Purcell Room, Southbank Centre
Hypnotic acoustic Malian grooves for the closing day of the EFG London Jazz Festival
Kassé Mady Diabaté is one of the great singers of West Africa, a member of Toumani Diabaté's Symmetric Orchestra and, more recently, the Afrocubism all-star line-up.
The concert, on the closing day of the EFG London Jazz Festival – which has programmed some superb World Music sets into a remarkable ten days – featured all of the new album, but in extended, enriched renditions of palpable, almost touchable beauty. There's a langorous, timeless air to it, the buzzing balafon pinning the rhythmic underlay, Diabaté reciting verses and declaiming over the top, a persistent, distant, focusing signal from each instrument creating a shimmer or web more than a wall of sound. The voice seems to emit light; it is always rising.
This is a cosmic African quartet that plays with time and space
There is a discombobulating aspect to this music, because its complex, constant interweaving gives you the sense of there being no top and no bottom. You know your body's the same solid mass it always is but you're floating in this music like it was some kind of amniotic fluid. You feel you're in defiance of the laws of physics. There's a wealth of pleasurable filigree woven in to it, passages as ornate as the ceremonial costumes they wear for their performance. They're properly serious – it feels like a crucible, not a stage. Miles and Coltrane were as serious back in 1959, making timeless music. This is a cosmic African quartet that plays with time and space on the same epic scales, making music that runs deeper and locks tighter than any algorithm.
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