Ramata Diakite grew up in one of Africa's richest musical environments, the Wassoulou region of southern Mali. Renowned for its ancient spiritual traditions, magic, and hunters' lore, Wassoulou has also produced the bluesiest, funkiest traditional pop music in modern Mali. Ramata broke onto the scene in the wake of singer Oumou Sangare's spectacular rise in the early 90s. Oumou's bold fusion of roots and pop, and her willingness to sing honestly about the challenges facing African women marked a generation. In her own time, Ramata set out to go further, edging towards hip-hop on her first international album, and going on to create music unlike anything heard before in Mali or elsewhere. A soulful, standout singer in a nation of standout singers, Ramata is now poised to share her path-breaking music with a worldwide audience.
Ramata says Wassoulou was "a big village," and it was in the village milieu that she began singing at her mother's side. Her parents were farmers, and she started singing in the fields. Her first gig was a harvest party she went to with her grandmother. Ramata soon attracted the attention of Siaka Sidibe, the most renowned djembe drummer in the region, and he began inviting her to join him whenever he played. This background explains the deep, African authenticity in Ramata's voice, but from the start, she was also a modern girl, determined to do things her own way. She began visiting the capital Bamako when she was eight, and recalls that her decision to devote her life to singing actually came to her in the movie theatre where she would go to watch dramatic films from United States, and musicals from India. "American films gave me hope," recalls Ramata. "Hindu films gave me melodies. In Wassoulou, we play pentatonic melodies [using a five-note scale]. Hindu music also uses pentatonic melodies. So I was always listening to Hindu cassettes."
In the 1980s, Wassoulou music became a sensation in Mali. The emerging sound featured the deep-toned, 6-string harp called kamelengoni, and most of the time, women singers. Coumba Sidibe, with her robust, tenor voice was the first to garner widespread public attention. "Coumba Sidibe was big in Wassoulou before she was big in Mali," recalls Ramata. "I was always listening to her, always at her side. That's why I started singing Wassoulou music. Often she sang about the history of Wassoulou."
At 17, Ramata began singing backup for Wassoulou music star Djeneba Diakite in Bamako. Ramata quickly began to find work accompanying other artists recording in a variety of styles at the city's busiest studio, Studio Bogolon. Able to sing in many of Mali's principal languages, Ramata was in high demand. After accompanying Mali's greatest popular musician, Salif Keita, to a Paris music festival, Ramata was invited by Wassoulou singer Souleymane Sidibe to Abidjan to record. She so impressed the producer there that he offered to make a record for her then and there. "We made my cassette in five days," she recalls. "We didn't even rehearse." Despite the hasty work, the cassette was a success, and Ramata soon returned to Studio Bogolon to create her first international release, Na. This time the musicians rehearsed for two months, and recorded a sophisticated and beautiful album. The title track was created in collaboration withYves Wernert, a French engineer with a proven track record of helping traditional Malian singers find a modern voice. It preserved an authentic, Wassoulou flavor, even as introduced a hint of spare, muscular hip-hop.
Ramata quickly became a star in Mali. She was known as "La Colombe," named for a bird, the customary trademark of female singers in Wassoulou. Ramata then began to work with the country's greatest kora (21-string harp) player, Toumani Diabaté. When Toumani was asked to put together a group of musicians to go to the United States and collaborate with Taj Mahal on the landmark Kulanjan project in 1999, Ramata got the call. Ramata's pentatonic Wassoulou melodies fit like a glove into Taj's blues-based music. "I can feel that," she said at the time. "Blues is pentatonic, and Wassoulou is pentatonic. They can marry naturally. I love the blues. Music is not like war. Music is another way. There is just a feeling there."
Traveling America with Taj Mahal as part of the 1999 Africa Fête tour, Ramata established contacts with American musicians, and has continued to work with them and continues to tour in America and Europe.
-Contributed by Banning Eyre
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