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Fodé Lassana Diabaté

Composer, balafon

 
Photo : Lucy Duran

Fodé Lassana Diabaté

Composer, balafon

Fodé Lassana Diabaté, better known as Lassana Diabaté, is an internationally acclaimed musician, virtuoso balafón (22-key xylophone) player, artist-researcher, composer, culture-bearer, and balafón maker, who comes from a well-known griot family of balafón masters in Guinea.

He has collaborated with myriad international musicians and across many genres, including jazz, blues, and Latin music, and has participated in several Grammy-nominated albums. Lassana’s style of playing balafón is highly dexterous and contrapuntal, with an extraordinary independence of left and right hands, a great range of expressive tone and lyrical melodies, and rich sonic resonance. Lassana has developed a unique practice of playing two balafóns that are tuned a semitone apart, which enables him to perform chromatic scales and to play with Western instruments and eclectic ensembles such as the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet.