In 1987, the singer and kora (21-stringed African harp) player Mory Kante released his fifth studio album, Akwaba Beach. The Guinean-born musician included a number of interesting songs including an Islamic song, Inch Allah, but it was the 12-inch single from the album Yé Ké Yé Ké that caused a sensation as it became the first single from Africa to sell more than a million copies. The song swept into the charts across Europe, and if you were walking around the bars and clubs in Bangkok during that period, you could hear the song everywhere.
Yé Ké Yé Ké was remixed for the UK club scene and German techno duo Hardfloor remixed the song for further chart success. Akwaba Beach went on to become the best-selling African album of the 1980s.
Mory Kante, who died aged 70 on May 22, came from a deep musical tradition; he was born in Conakry, Guinea, into a griot (hereditary musician) family and both his parents were well-known traditional musicians.
"I received an education that prepared me from childhood to be a griot, artist and musician," he said in 1990.
Kante learned the Mandinka griot tradition and over the years became a master on his instrument. In the mid-1980s, when the first so-called "World Music" boom was at its height, and the kora was an exotic instrument on international stages, it was Kante who popularised it in modern dancefloor bands. He noted that it was very difficult to tune the kora to instruments in a modern, electrified band (a problem molam musicians have with the khaen, to which all the other instruments must be tuned).
While he was in Mali's capital Bamako, he was invited to join the legendary Super Rail Band of the Buffet Hotel de la Gare, better known as the Rail Band, as the second vocalist -- the legendary Malian vocalist Salif Keita was already the lead singer; both of them would create a storm in Bamako (Keita later left to join yet another amazing West African dance band, Les Ambassadeurs). Keita and Kante and outstanding musicians like guitarist Kante Manfila would help define the Rail Band's sound -- an irresistible mix of local Bambara and Malinke music spiced with Cuban rhythms.
"I was the first one to play a balafon [traditional African xylophone] in the Rail Band," Kante said. "And after Salif Keita left for Les Ambassadeurs, I sang as well."
Kante continued to fuse traditional and modern African music with the release of his first solo album, Courougnegne, in 1981 (well worth checking out). In fact, he told me that when he released it, so much Western popular music had its roots in African music, he decided to prove his point through the album. Kante has never been given much recognition for his efforts to write about history and the importance of democratisation in Africa.
"It's time for us to act, time to move. Like in Eastern Europe, it's time for us to get democratisation in Africa. In a way, it's time for us to ask, 'What is the voice of Africa?'. "
But many listeners just want to dance to Yé Ké Yé Ké. I know this from my DJ nights; this song always fills the dancefloor and I always get one or two enquiries about it.
Even a confident man like Kante was surprised at the runaway global success of Yé Ké Yé Ké. I had been talking with my friends and colleagues about how the song seemed to pop up in colourful covers from the strangest places. I got some surprising results. The photographer Brenda Turnnidge, then resident in Hong Kong, sent me a cassette of Hong Kong singer Priscilla Chan's Cantonese language version (it was weird), which I gave to a very amused Kante. I told him that his song had turned up as the soundtrack to a Japanese car advertisement.
He reckoned that the African "house" mix of the song had driven the success and he told that he had dozens of legitimate and pirated versions, with his favourites being a Hebrew language version from Israel and one in Portuguese.
Kante was in poor health during his final years but in keeping with the man's commitment to making the world a better place, he joined some of the continent's top musicians in 2014 on the recording Africa Stop Ebola, which sold 250,000 copies and raised money for the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres.
Mory Kante, African master musician and pioneering artist, 1950-2020. RIP, your music will be missed.
John Clewley can be contacted at clewley.john@gmail.com.
