Hopkins Center for the Arts

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TOUMANI DIABATÉ & THE SYMMETRIC ORCHESTRA

Tuesday, April 28 • 7 pm
Spaulding Auditorium
$26 • Dartmouth students $5
18 & under $14

Toumani Diabaté is an acknowledged genius of the kora, the 21-string West African lute, and one of a line of great Malian musicians that extends back 71 generations. His peerless and soulful playing can be heard on pristine and meditative solo albums and in collaborations with Taj Mahal, Peter Gabriel, Björk, the late Guinean master guitarist Ali Farka Touré, and countless jazz artists. But Diabaté also knows how to cut loose. On Friday nights since the early 1990s, in Club Hongo in the Mali capital of Bamako, Diabaté and his supercharged dance band, the Symmetric Orchestra, have delivered time-honored West African songs laced with jazz, flamenco and electro-funk in a genre-bending frenzy of hot dance rhythms and improvisation. With some of the finest instrumentalists and vocalists from Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso and Mali, the Orchestra includes electric guitar, bass, keyboard and trap drums as well as the djembe, ngoni, balafon and others traditional to the region. Since their first world tour in 2006, Diabaté and Symmetric are in high demand, wowing concert-goers worldwide with a “musical coalition that raises the roof…deeply rooted, tradition-stretching and utterly kinetic” (The New York Times).

This performance is funded in part by the Expeditions Program of the New England Foundation for the Arts, which receives major support from the National Endowment for the Arts with additional support from the state arts agencies of New England.

Family Friendly