Last year, the Festival on the Niger had been cancelled at the last minute. French transport planes full of soldiers and hardware had landed in Bamako only two weeks before the festival was due to start. Now peace was back. So was music. The jihadists tried to ban all music except Quranic chanting in the north of Mali. But it just came back like Whack-a-mole. How could it not?
In February 2014, I was invited to The Festival on the Niger in Segou, Mali. This is a selection of some of the photos I took. I also wrote an article which is posted on this site. In a nutshell, those four days on the banks of the old Niger were a blessed chance to renew my love for Mali, with eyes and mind as open as I could make them to the full gamut of joy, pride, frustration and struggle that I saw. Many thanks to Mamou Daffé, Marisa Segala and whole team at the Festival for giving me this unforgettable gift.
The summer 2013 Welsh photo sessions with Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita that produced the cover image for the award winning album ‘Clychau Dibon’
Some bands score a few hits, some change the face of music and some end up defining a whole era. Les Ambassadeurs did all three.
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.
The best thing about drinking wine from a hollowed out ram’s horn is that you can’t put the thing down. You have to keep holding onto to it otherwise it’ll topple over, and if you’re holding it, you might as well carry on drinking. Inevitably, with a ram’s horn goblet in hand, the wine keeps…
“Don’t be surprised if it explodes one day!” When I met Mylmo I knew nothing about him except that he was rapper who was performing on the main stage of the Festival on the Niger that very night. I interviewed him in an empty restaurant on the banks of the great river – most…
In the early years of that epic conflict known as the cold war, an Irishman wrote a funny-sad piece of theatre, a kind of excruciating fairy tale about a pair of old tramps who sat around waiting for this guy called Godot. Except that Godot wasn’t a person of course; he was an idea, a…
“As soon as people say ‘Toure’,” Sidi tells me, “they have a vision of a man with his head in Qu’ranic books.” Strange. For me, the vision is of a man in billowing blue robes dispensing liquid gold from a Gibson, a Taylor or a Takamine.
Portraits of Niger Musicians including Bombino, Etran Finatawa, Mamane Barka and Alhousseyni Anviolla taken in around Niamey in 2013
