Tag "music"

Updates and work in progress

24 January, 2019

The lost balafon of Samorogouan

Lacole Traoré tells the story of how a balafon typical of Guinea arrived in his village of Samorogouan, in Western Burkina Faso, and entered the history of his family. The story is one of circulation of musical knowledge and defies most accepted wisdom on griots and musical traditions in West Africa. This music is now…

11 January, 2019

Munumunu [walkabout]

Munumunu [walkabout] is a 45 minute-long sequence shot created in collaboration with donso musician Adama ‘Kanké’ Sanou. Kanké lives in Bolomakoté, Bobo Dioulasso, and makes a living as a musician playing at festivals for the local hunters associations. He asked me to record a ‘music video’ and I accepted – little did I know that…

11 April, 2015

Donso Funeral in Karankasso

Today is the first day of this year’s cycle of funerals in Karankasso Sambla. Music has played all night yesterday, and today in the early afternoon there is more music and various rituals are performed. I have joined the hunters who gathered to honour the mother of one of them, Karim Ouattara. Karim is the…

10 April, 2015

Bringing Kalanda back Home

One of the main aims of my April 2015 trip to Burkina Faso is to screen my documentary Kalanda – The Knowledge of the Bush to the hunters who are its protagonists. But the trip is also an opportunity to meet again, after three years, my fellow students in donsoya. As far as the group…

21 November, 2014

The Speaking Balafon

In the past two weeks I have been presenting some video fragments from the footage I am working on for the documentary The Sambla Baan. First for a presentation in Italy and later for my course on West Africa here in Manchester, I selected two short scenes that show interactions between the musician playing the…

2 September, 2013

Radicazioni Festival in Alessandria del Carretto

Radicazioni is a three-days music festival that sees on stage various groups inspired to folk music in Italy and abroad. Musicians perform on stage and later until early morning in the narrow streets of Alessandria del Carretto, a small village in northern Calabria, Italy. But it is also an important gathering for local musicians and young…

17 July, 2012

The Maana of Adama Sogo Traoré

After about a week of delays due to the massive rain that keeps falling on my research area, I managed to have Diakari Traoré and Bakari Ouattara playing at the compound of my teacher Adama Traoré. My idea was to realise a special recording, that of the maana of my teacher, performed by his own…