Oh Bembeya!

Photo: Banning Eyre
Bembeya horns, Angoulême Festival,
May 2002

Sekou was born in 1944 in the region of Faranah, near the border with Sierra Leone. "Music," he said, "was a family affair, from generation to generation, from father to son. My father played the balafon and the acoustic guitar in the traditional Manding griot style, with fingers, without chords. Then you'd put the capo on to change the key. My father [El Hadj Djeli Fode Diabaté (d.) 1988)] was among the first to introduce the guitar to Guinea." Sekou said that there was never a time he didn't hear guitar music. "It was in the cradle with me." His father sent him to Koranic school, but when he asked for a guitar, the old man ordered one from France, a steel resonator guitar, which Sekou began playing in 1954. In that way, Sekou avoided the typical African guitarists' struggle against parents mortified by the idea of a career in music, but he and his father did not always see eye to eye. "He wanted me to play music," said Sekou, "but he also wanted me to be strong in the Koranic spirit, and to become a griot, able to find the words to council people in the spirit of Islam - all that. That was his desire, but as it turned out, my destiny was to go toward the modern."

Sekou first heard electric griot guitar recordings when he moved to the capital, Conakry, in 1959. His cousin Kerfala 'Papa' Diabaté was playing guitar with the national orchestra at the time, and gave Sekou his first lessons. The next year, Sekou was invited to play in Kissidougou, far in the south of Guinea. His stay was brief. "The reason I left Kissidougou is a bit of a story," he told me. "You know that I had been to Koranic school. Well, I was a bit of a fanatic, and I had gone into a boutique where they sold alcohol. One day, I was angry and I broke a lot of bottles."