Mali-Cuba: Bamako rehearsals 2

On January 5, 2012, children of eight different musical families from Bamako, Kita, Ségou and Garana joined forces to put on a remarkable and unprecedented concert in front of an enthusiastic audience of several hundred people in Bamako’s National Park. Most of these children, who had been the protagonists of Growing into Music in Mali for the last three years, met each other for the very first time only three days before the actual concert, during a collective rehearsal supervised by our team-member, balafon player Lassana Diabate. After a rather shy and tentative start, the children soon discovered common musical ground. The rehearsal ended with a playful and lively jam session involving the children dancing, shouting, singing, and swapping instruments, to the accompaniment of one of the oldest tunes in the griot repertoire.
Camera and editing: Michele Banal
Project led by Lucy Durán and Geoffrey Baker
Mali-Cuba: Music Across Generations. Funded by AHRC - Beyond Text
2012