Category: Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita

Finding The One – Songlines Review ***** (17/07/2014)

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You don’t pair the greatest young harpist in Wales with one of the most innovative kora players from West Africa for the purposes of relaxation. Their music is too deep, full-blooded and fragile for that.

Here’s a selection from a series of photo sessions I did in 2013 of Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita live in concert in Nottingham, Cardiff and Cardigan.

The summer 2013 Welsh photo sessions with Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita that produced the cover image for the award winning album ‘Clychau Dibon’

NEW BOOK – FINDING THE ONE: The strange and parallel lives of the West African kora and the Welsh harp

In this pacey readable book, Andy Morgan tells the stories of two emblematic instruments, the kora and the Welsh harp, and how they fell into the hands of two great musicians, Seckou Keita and Catrin Finch.

FINDING THE ONE (extract) – If your name is Keita, you’re still royalty

It was only after he’d started living in Europe and having kids of his own, that Seckou Keita started to wonder about his father. “I was in that mood,” he says, “I just wanted to find out.”

FINDING THE ONE (extract) – Meths, gunpowder and the revival of harp making in Wales

The news of Aberfan shocked him into a new awareness. What was the fire that had destroyed his workshop compared to the river of slurry and filfth that snuffed out the lives of 116 children? Not forgetting the 28 adults. Nothing. “People can loose more than I’ve lost,” he thought. Granted, his livelihood had been…

FINDING THE ONE (extract) – How the kora came to mankind

No one is one hundred precent sure of how or when the kora came into being. Strangely, the first person to ever mention it was a Scotsman by the name of Mungo Park, who wrote about it in his Travels In the Interior Districts of Africa, published in 1799. Park was commissioned by Sir Joseph…

CATRIN FINCH & SECKOU KEITA – The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff, 20/03/2013

This was only a first taste but it was already golden, despite occasional rawness and hesitation, easily forgiven. With albums to be made, tours to be done and an inevitable maturing yet to come, the marriage of harp and kora seems blessed to be long, warm and fruitful.