Eric Charry
“How come we’ve never heard of this beautiful instrument until now?” This was posted by a first-year college student to my world music course discussion board recently. He voiced what many of his peers probably felt after watching the extraordinary documentary Ballaké Sissoko, Kora Tales.
The film, available for free online, follows Sissoko, a world class musical artist, from his home in Bamako, Mali to a sacred well and baobab tree in The Gambia on the Atlantic coast. In the film, the award-winning Sissoko revisits his childhood homeland and traces the origins of the instrument that became his destiny.
Sissoko is a jeli (called a griot by outsiders) – a hereditary oral historian and musician attached to the ruling class. Like generations before him, he plays the kora, a unique kind of harp that’s indigenous to the western African savannah. It has 21 strings and is played with
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