Toumani Diabaté & Vieux Farka Touré @ Bonnaroo 2009...

Vieux Farka Touré's show at The Haunt April 11 [in Ithaca] turned Sunday into anything but lazy. The Malian guitarist and singer -- son of famed guitarist Ali Farka Touré -- and his excellent outfit charmed the crowd last Sunday with his unique melodies and unbounded enthusiasm. Hippies swayed, hipsters nodded and ultimately the music proved irresistible too for the audience to refrain from frenetic dancing that broke out towards the end of the set. Touré and his band were even gracious enough to share the stage with a particularly ... enthusiastic member of the crowd.

Cornell Daily Sun: Your music clearly has many influences, how would you describe your musical style?

Vieux Farka Touré: My mentor and godfather Toumani Diabate baptized my music "koroboro rock" -- "koroboro" means "black African" in our main dialect. I guess that kind of sums it up -- my music is basically African but I mix it up with a little reggae, some salsa, some rock, some m'balax, some blues -- all the music I listen to, like people my age everywhere in the world -- and it comes out my own cocktail. I'd like to think that everyone who listens to my music finds something that pleases them.

Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Touré's latest US tour is underway - he continues with an April 15th show in Chicago, and finishes in NYC with a show at (Le) Poisson Rouge on April 27th. Soul reggae band Meta & the Cornerstones open, and tickets are on sale.

Videos and all tour dates are below...

Continue reading "Vieux Farka Touré on tour - 2010 dates & some videos "

Bela Fleck throws down his heart...

Béla Fleck will continue exploring African music this summer on two separate, celebrated tours: the ³always adventurous² (USA Today) banjo master will join Oumou Sangare and her band, and revive his acclaimed duo run with Toumani Diabate. Sangare, the great Malian singer known as the ³Songbird of the Wassoulou,² is considered Fleck¹s gateway to African music and prominently featured in his renowned documentary and album Throw Down Your Heart. Toumani Diabate, a 71st generation Kora master, collaborated with Fleck throughout 2009, including performances at Telluride and Bonnaroo.

Throw Down Your Heart is the 11-time Grammy winner's most ambitious project to date and has earned some of the best reviews of his career...

The NYC stop on the Bela/Toumani tour is the previously-announced, free show at Central Park Summerstage which happens tonight (Monday, August 3rd). The movie trailer and all dates below...

Continue reading "Béla Fleck & Toumani Diabate - 2009 Tour Dates (free show @ Central Park Summerstage TONIGHT/Monday) "

Bela Fleck & Toumani Diabate, Savannah Music Fest '09 (Savannah Grandfather)

Celebrating its twentieth anniversary, City Parks Foundation is pleased to announce the 2009 season schedule of its flagship free performing arts festival, Central Park SummerStage. Internationally acclaimed for presenting world-renowned and emerging talent from around the globe and New York City's own backyard, the Central Park SummerStage season promises to be as electrifying as ever with a calendar chock-full of culturally diverse programs in multiple disciplines including music, dance, word, film, and comedy.

The 2009 Central Park SummerStage season is marked by innovative collaborations and will open on Friday, June 12 at 8:00 PM with a performance by the critically acclaimed singer/songwriter Josh Ritter and his band for the evening, The New York Pops.

City Parks Foundation also welcomes The Metropolitan Opera for the first time ever to Central Park SummerStage as The Met launches its free Summer Recital Series of outdoor concerts in neighborhood parks on Monday, July 13 at 8:00 PM with a special performance of opera arias and popular songs headlined by the Tony Award-winning baritone Paulo Szot and featuring Lisette Oropesa (soprano), Alek Shrader (tenor), and Vlad Iftinca (piano).

Central Park Summerstage will host 31 free programs this summer. Musical highlights include M Ward, Josh Ritter, Juana Molina, Q-Tip, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Bettye Lavette, Béla Fleck and Toumani Diabaté. The whole schedule is below...

Continue reading "Central Park Summerstage - full 2009 concert schedule "

by Andrew Frisicano

Toumani Diabaté @ Stuyvesant High (more)

Over the last decade, Diabaté and his Symmetric Orchestra have performed almost every Friday night at Bamako's Hogon club. They have become one of the most popular bands in the city's vast music scene, celebrated across West Africa and beyond. Like the title [of 2006 album Boulevard de l'Indépendance] -- taken from the main road that bisects Bamako -- the group's name refers to a balance between tradition and progress: music preserved from the Mandé Empire that once connected West Africa and contemporary dance-music styles. The Symmetric Orchestra comprises players from Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, and Mali, and its instrumentation includes electric guitar, bass, and drums, as well as the more traditional kora [Diabaté's instrument of choice], ngoni, and balafon.

Fifty-fourth in a hereditary line of master musicians and griots, Toumani Diabaté is at once revered as the guardian of an ancient musical tradition and as a bold, boundary-crossing experimentalist. He has earned acclaim for inventive solo records as well as collaborations with Björk, Blur's Damon Albarn, Dee Dee Bridgewater, American bluesman Taj Mahal, and jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd, among others. Diabaté won a Grammy in 2006 for his collaboration with the late Ali Farka Touré, In the Heart of the Moon.

Toumani Diabaté is on tour across North America through May. Right now, he's traveling with Béla Fleck's The Africa Project (a tour that stops by the NYC-area Tarrytown Music Hall on 3/29 - tickets are on sale). Diabaté then joins the Symmetric Orchestra for more dates that include NYC's (Le) Poisson Rouge on Saturday, April 18th (tickets) and Sunday, April 19th (tickets). Pianist Jenny Lin and Burkina Electric, respectively, open.

All tour dates and Toumani Diabaté with the Symmetric Orchestra video below...

Continue reading "Toumani Diabaté - 2009 Tour Dates"

Crystal Castles @ MHOW - New Years Eve (more by Ryan Muir)

Al Green @ the Wellmont Theater - Nov 2008 (more by Eric M Townsend)

Superfly Productions and A.C. Entertainment are excited to announce the initial lineup for the 2009 Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival. The eighth annual four-day camping and music festival will be held on June 11 - 14 on the same beautiful 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee, 60 miles south of Nashville. Every year Bonnaroo seeks to make history by offering unique and exclusive performances by rock's greatest legends as well as its most significant newcomers. A full list of confirmed acts follows, and more will be announced in the coming weeks. The final Bonnaroo 2009 lineup will total over 120 bands and over 20 comedians performing on 13 stages over four days. Tickets go on sale exclusively through www.bonnaroo.com on Saturday, February 7 at 12:00 PM Eastern.

As rumored, Bruce Springsteen (who just played the Superbowl Halftime show) and Phish (who just had some trouble selling tickets to other shows) are headlining this year's Bonnaroo. Nine Inch Nails (who played Lollapalooza last year), Beastie Boys, David Byrne (who has two shows coming up at Radio City), Wilco, Al Green, Erykah Badu, TV on the Radio, Yeah Yeah Yeahs (who are also playing Coachella), Andrew Bird (who just played Carnegie Hall), The Decemberists, Bon Iver, Animal Collective (who are very popular right now), Neko Case, Jenny Lewis, Santogold, Grizzly Bear (who have a new album coming out), St. Vincent, Ted Leo, Crystal Castles, and many others are also on the bill according to the now-officially announced initial lineup.

Coachella announced their initial lineup less than a week earlier.

Metallica played Bonnaroo in 2008. Metallica played NY & NJ this past weekend.

Full (initial) 2009 Bonnaroo lineup below...

Continue reading "Bonnaroo announces initial 2009 lineup (Bruce Springsteen, Phish, Beastie Boys, NIN, Wilco, Animal Collective...)"

TD @ Other Music, NYC - Jan 31, 2008 (OM)

I only ended up posting one of the pictures I took last time Toumani Diabate visited NYC. This post is partly to fix that problem, and partly to point out that Toumani will be back in NYC on January 31st - at Bowery Ballroom to be exact, and tickets are still on sale. The show is part of a tour to promote an album.....

Grammy-winning artist Toumani Diabaté and his pan-African Symmetric Orchestra return to the U.S. this winter for a series of live dates. In addition, World Circuit/Nonesuch Records will release The Mande Variations this spring, Diabaté's first solo kora recording in two decades.

The tour kicks off in Seattle on Thursday. All dates, and more photos, below...

Continue reading "Toumani Diabaté - 2008 Tour Dates, Stuyvesant High pics"

I wouldn't call their music life-changing or anything, but I love it on CD, it sounded great live, and you should definitely go check out Toumani Diabate @ Metrotech during lunch today if can. It's not every day he and his kora make it out of Mali. In fact, as TOUMANI HIMSELF TOLD US at least two times during last night's show (July 18, 2007) at (the rain location) Stuyvesant High School, we are very luckly to be in the presence of a kora master such as Toumani Diabate. Like a lot of "world music", the show was as much a cultural experience as it was a musical experience. That's especially true when you have entertainers as outgoing as Toumani and crew. I'll post more about that, and more pics later, but for now here's one of Toumani explaining to the crowd what a kora is...

Bjork collaborator, kora master, and all around good guy, Toumani Diabate is here from Mali to grace NYC with two free shows today and tomorrow. Please note:

Due to threat of inclement weather Toumani Diabates Symmetric Orchestra at Rockefeller Park will be moved indoors to the Stuyvesant High School auditorium. Located at 345 Chambers Street. Just east of Rockefeller Park.

The event will start at its regularly scheduled time of 7PM, but due to indoor capacity restrictions, tickets are limited and will be distributed two per person on a first come-first served basis starting at 5PM. Doors open at 6PM.

That refers to TONIGHT's show (July 18, 2007). Tomorrow's show is also free, but in Brooklyn at Metrotech @ NOON. All tour dates below....

Continue reading "Toumani Diabate is here! (in a new location) + Tour Dates"