Derek gets to Grips with the kora
WHEN Malian kora player, Toumane Diabaté, heard Derek Gripper’s 2012 recording, One Night on Earth: Music from the Strings of Mali, he at first questioned his producer, Lucy Duran, about whether it really was one person playing a guitar.
Upon her confirmation that it was indeed one person, Diabaté invited the Capetonian to play at the Festival Akoustic Bamako earlier this year – the first international music festival held in Mali in four years.
“I’m having amazing shows and wonderful opportunities like the (upcoming) Cape Town International Jazz Festival, and we had the World Music Festival last year, that was fantastic.
“Things have definitely shifted for me in terms of people knowing what I’m doing and coming to watch,” said Cape Town-based Gripper in an interview.
He recently returned from the “lifechanging” Mali trip with the realisation that he is now part of the kora scene: “I have been specialising in playing Malian music, but as an outsider and a reader of texts.
“I have created the texts from recordings and interpreted them like a classical musician,” he explained.
Gripper played solo on his last night in Bamako after a week spent with the very people who are the source of the kora music he has been fascinated by for years, coming to an understanding of how they create.
“Where I relate to the music now has completely changed. I’m inside the text now, part of it. I’m making it with them and they kind of gave me that permission.
“I think my journey of presenting Toumane and other composers will now be continued by other people. I have been arranging for string quartets and things like that, and now I’m done with my apprenticeship.”
While traditional Malian music apprenticeships consist of learning a massive repertoire of music from a teacher before you even think of creating your own, Gripper instead transcribed the kora music expressly, explaining “this is not the piece that has been handed down for generations, this is a composition based on that piece, by this particular individual.”
He did it not only because he wanted to play the beautiful music, but also to upend the definition of Western classical music: “We still have this ridiculously outmoded idea around ethno music and traditional music and classical music, so in a way I was hoping to dissolve the idea of classical music into something that is much more rich. I think I got some clues about how that could be possible while I was there. This is a learnt music; it’s not improvisation like jazz, it’s something that is very different and much closer to text-based music.
“That’s my access point, I’ve suddenly realised, ‘oh, these guys are composers’.
“But, the way the text is performed is really interesting and much closer to what would have been done in earlier times.”
He uses the example of Bach being an improviser and never playing the same version of a piece twice, but since he’d only write down one version, that is the version we now play 250 years later.
The title of the next album Gripper has just finished recording – Libraries on Fire – references the idea that when an older kora player dies it is like his whole library of music has burnt down. It features kora duets reinterpreted on a single guitar.
He will play tunes from this album at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival solo one night at the beginning of April, and is looking forward to working out just exactly how he and Felix la Band are going to collaborate on the second night.
After the jazz festival he will travel to London to play a third time with guitarist John Williams at the Songlines Encounters Festival in June.
Their second collaboration featured tunes arranged by wildly talented Reza Khota, while their next encounter might reference some old kora music recording he did a long time ago but “I have learnt that I have an access point to do something with it”.