New Ancient Strings

New Ancient Strings is a studio album by the Malian musicians Toumani Diabaté and Ballaké Sissoko, released on 22 June 1999 by the British label Hannibal Records. The album comprises eight instrumental duets composed by Diabaté for kora, a stringed instrument of West African music. Diabaté and Sissoko are esteemed as the best and the second-best kora players of their generation, respectively. Their duets were recorded in a single live take within a marble hallway of Bamako's conference centre on the night of 22 September 1997, coinciding with Mali's Independence Day. New Ancient Strings was inspired by the 1970 album Ancient Strings, a landmark kora album featuring the musicians' fathers, Sidiki Diabaté and Djelimadi Sissoko. By the mid-1990s, Toumani Diabaté had accrued a significant international profile after recording several crossover collaborations. Having brought the kora to wider attention with these genre fusion projects, New Ancient Strings represented his return to his roots in acoustic Mande music. The music balances elements of traditional and modern styles. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Anc...) under Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...)