Growing up in the West African country of Mali, Bassekou Kouyate recalls the tradition of the Ngoni running through the veins of his culture since he was a child. An instrument dating back nearly ...

Bassekou Kouyate knows exactly what his place is in this world, and he knows where he came from and where he wants to go. That existence is inseparable from the instrument he plays, the ngoni. It is ...

Aziz Sahmaoui is a virtuoso of the stringed instrument known as the gimbri — the main sound of the North African trance music known as gnawa. He’s also pretty darn good at playing the ngoni, a lute ...

The banjo is a key instrument in Western folk music -- from US bluegrass to Irish trad -- and over the past 20 years, research into the roots of this three-stringed instrument have revealed its west ...

When a leading London daily, the Independent, tags Mali’s Bassekou Kouyaté and Ngoni Ba as “the best rock and roll band in the world”, you know there’s something very special about the seven-piece ...

The ngoni isn’t much of an instrument to look at. Four strings, traditionally cut from lengths of fishing line, are pulled across a hollowed-out, canoe-shaped piece of wood with dried animal skin ...

Malian musician Bassekou Kouyate is a master of the the ngoni, and in his hands this very ancient fretless lute has all of the colour and versatility of any modern stringed instrument. He first picked ...

From the moment he picked up the ngoni (a stringed lute popular in Mali) at age 12, Bassekou Kouyate was destined for greatness. Originally from Garana, he moved to the capital Bamako in the late ...

A recent Monday, 12:33 p.m.: Wherever Yacouba Diarra plays his music, he says, he is home. Which is why, despite being born into the Bouaba tribe in the West African nation of Burkina Faso, he's ...

The Malian lute master is back with a harder sound that makes his previous recordings sound positively polite, says Mark Hudson Bassekou Kouyaté: the Malian master of the five-string ngoni Credit: ...