At the Courtyuard presents Derek Gripper 12 Sep

Fifteen years ago, Derek Gripper did what everyone said was impossible: he recorded the works of Mali’s greatest virtuoso, Toumani Diabaté, on solo classical guitar. What followed has been an unusual career. A discography of nearly thirty albums moves from Diabaté to Bach to Arvo Pärt to Keith Jarrett-style improvisation. His collaborators include Diabaté himself, classical guitar legend John Williams, and most recently, kora master Ballaké Sissoko. His string-quartet arrangements of Diabaté’s music were premiered by the Kronos Quartet.
Derek’s original impulse had been to make a point: Classical audiences had long accepted African rhythmic ideas as raw material for European and American composers, but the complete works of the African oral tradition remained outside the “classical” canon. By transcribing and recording Diabaté, Derek was arguing that the classical world could credit Africa’s music in it’s original sources, and that the word “classical” should belong to Mali as easily as it belongs to Europe. But somewhere along the way, performing and teaching and writing down this music, Derek became a first-language speaker of this musical language. This added a new element to his interpretations and performances of these compositions.
On this tour Derek focuses on kumbengo — the cyclical variations that sit at the heart of the West African tradition. These small, ancient kernels, are music that focuses the mind, soars to melodic heights, moves the body and aches the heart. Toumani Diabaté once showed the world that the virtuosity of Bach and modern jazz could live inside the Malian kora tradition. On this tour, the same richness arrives on a single guitar — one that has travelled from the recital hall into the wide and open fields of spontaneous musical creation. While these new performances continue to be attributed to their sources, the delivery now enters into the spirit of provisionality that was always inherent in the original music, and perhaps all music before writing fixes it.