Toumani Diabaté, a virtuoso of the kora, a 21-stringed West African instrument, which he often put into dialogue with other musical traditions from around the globe, died on Friday in Bamako, Mali. He was 58.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by kidney failure, said his manager, Saul Presa.
Born in Mali to a line of griots, or traditional West African musician-historians, that he traced back more than 70 generations, Mr. Diabaté was devoted to celebrating the heritage of Mandé-speaking peoples throughout West Africa, and to sharing that history with the world.
“If you think of West Africa as a body, then the griot is the blood,” he told The New York Times in 2006. “We are the guardians of West Africa’s society. We are communicators.”
He believed that music could transcend national borders set by colonialism and restore ancient ties, even as it embraced the changes of a globalizing society. That mission inspired him to create his flagship ensemble, the Symmetric Orchestra.
“I started building this band to rebuild Manden empire in a cultural way,” he said in a 2011 interview with Uncut magazine, referring to the Mali Empire that once covered the Upper Niger River basin from present-day Mali to Senegal. “The musicians are all from West African, Manden countries. I took the best from Senegal, Ghana, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mauretania, and I put them all together.”
Mr. Diabaté reached perhaps his widest renown with a pair of duet albums he made with the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré: “In the Heart of the Moon” (2005), which was certified gold in Europe, and “Ali and Toumani” (2010). Both won Grammy Awards for best traditional world music album.
Mr. Diabaté also engaged in high-profile collaborations with international artists, including Björk, Taj Mahal, Damon Albarn and the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as with prominent Malian artists like Ballaké Sissoko and Salif Keita. He performed for world leaders as diverse as Jimmy Carter and Muammar el-Qaddafi.
“There is too much misunderstanding between people, between nations and cultures,” Mr. Diabaté told Uncut. “We need to come together and play together.”
Toumani Diabaté was born in Bamako on Aug. 10, 1965, to Sidiki Diabaté, a kora player, and Nene Koita, a singer. His father’s family had been part of the griot class going back centuries — first as players of the ngoni, a kind of West African guitar, and then as masters of the kora, generally considered West Africa’s most sophisticated classical instrument.
Sidiki Diabaté was credited with elevating the kora as a solo instrument and helping to raise its profile around the world, ambitions that he passed on to his son. In its traditional context, the kora usually accompanies the singing of praise songs or epics and can be played in ensembles. But Sidiki Diabaté believed it was worthy of a solo spotlight, as the piano is in Western classical music or the sitar in Hindustani classical music.
But he did not compel his own children to play. “I taught myself,” Toumani Diabaté later told The Guardian, “listening to my father and grandfather and different musicians.”
He remembered his father’s virtuosic style, “putting the three functions together: bass line, melody and improvisation,” he told Songlines magazine in 2018. “When you listen, it’s like three men playing at the same time, and I learned the kora that way.”
As a child Toumani contracted polio, which left him with a limp for the rest of his life, but he quickly established his bona fides as a kora prodigy. He gave his first performances at 13, with a band from a small town outside Bamako; at 19, he joined the famed Malian singer Kandia Kouyate’s group.
When Mr. Diabaté was in his early 20s, he briefly moved to London, where he had been invited to perform. He was living there when he recorded his debut album, “Kaira” (1988), the first known to consist entirely of solo kora. Without overdubs or accompaniment, Mr. Diabaté wove a complex tapestry of hypnotizing bass lines, motifs and improvisations.
“Kaira” was his first of many collaborations with Lucy Durán, a British record producer and musicologist who became Mr. Diabaté’s lifelong champion. The title tune refers to a griot-led cultural movement of the 1950s and ’60s in Mali, which resisted the impositions of French colonialism and, after independence, charted a course for Mali’s modern identity, and in which Mr. Diabaté’s parents were active.
In Europe, Mr. Diabaté developed a partnership with Ketama, a Spanish flamenco trio, and Danny Thompson, the British double bassist, resulting in the album “Songhai” (1988), his first major cross-cultural collaboration.
In 1990 he founded the Symmetric Orchestra, mixing instruments from throughout West Africa as well as Europe and driving home the idea that the descendants of the ancient Mali Empire were still one people. For years, Mr. Diabaté and the orchestra held down a weekly residency at Le Hogon, Bamako’s leading music club.
Starting in the late 1990s, Mr. Diabaté released a string of collaborative albums with artists at home and abroad: “New Ancient Strings” (1998), a suite of kora duets with Mr. Sissoko; “Kulanjan” (1999), recorded in Athens, Ga., with Taj Mahal and a band of Malian musicians; and “Malicool” (2002), with the jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd.
In 2008 Mr. Diabaté put out “The Mandé Variations,” his first solo kora record in 20 years, displaying an even more refined virtuosity than he’d shown on “Kaira.”
Also that year, he was appointed a good-will ambassador with the Joint United Nations Program on H.I.V./AIDS.
In 2016, Mr. Diabaté helped organize the three-day Festival Acoustik Bamako to promote peace and solidarity in the wake of the deadly attack, backed by Al Qaeda, on a Bamako hotel the previous year.
He released two albums in this period with his son, Sidiki, who had also taken up the kora (and who was also largely self-taught): “Toumani & Sidiki” (2014) and “Lamomali” (2017), which also featured the French singer-songwriter Matthieu Chedid, who uses the stage name M.
Information about Mr. Diabaté’s survivors was not immediately available.
A dedicated Muslim, Mr. Diabaté resisted the popular perception that African music was mostly about dancing and chasing a throbbing beat. “We have all types of music, including spiritual, mystical or meditative music,” he told Pan African Music magazine in 2021.
And he never stopped putting the kora in touch with music from around the globe. In the last five years of his life he released projects with the American banjoist Béla Fleck (“The Ripple Effect”), the London Symphony Orchestra (“Korolen”) and the Iranian musician Kayhan Kalhor (“The Sky Is the Same Colour Everywhere”).
“When I play with other musicians, I don’t play their music,” he told Uncut. “I play my music. And I don’t let them play my music! I say, ‘Play your music and I’ll play mine.’ We put it together and it becomes a new music, from the heart.”
