Amadou Bagayoko, the award-winning Malian singer and guitarist within the husband-and-wife duo Amadou & Mariam, has died, in keeping with the Related Press. In an area televised broadcast, Mali’s Minister of Tradition Mamou Daffé revealed that Bagayoko died on Friday (April 4) in his hometown of Bamako. He was 70.
Alongside his spouse Mariam Doumbia, Bagayoko discovered worldwide success creating music as Amadou & Mariam. The 2 mixed conventional African devices with extra Western-inspired rock, pop, and blues within the hopes of constructing Malian music common. On some data, that meant invoking their regional sounds by means of inventive strategies, like enjoying electrical guitar as if it had been the ngoni, a West African stringed instrument. Over the course of their a number of decades-long profession, they greater than succeeded at their purpose, performing all over the world with artists like Stevie Surprise and U2, recording lauded collaborations with Santigold and TV on the Radio, and incomes high-profile awards within the music business.
Born in October 1954, Bagayoko misplaced his imaginative and prescient resulting from a congenital cataract at age 15 and started learning at Mali’s Institute for the Younger Blind. It was there that he met Doumbia, who went blind at age 5, and so they bonded over their shared love of music whereas performing on the institute’s Eclipse Orchestra. After getting married in 1980, the 2 formally kicked off their band Mali’s Blind Couple, recording blues songs within the regional Mali fashion. They relocated to Côte d’Ivoire a couple of years later and switched to extra lo-fi, stripped-back preparations on guitar and vocals below the moniker Amadou & Mariam, recording songs on cassette tapes within the ’80s and ’90s. It was there that they crossed paths with Stevie Surprise, who invited them to start out enjoying festivals outdoors of Africa.
In 1996, Amadou & Mariam moved to Paris and signed to the document label Emarcy. Sou Ni Tile, their first studio album recorded outdoors of Africa and their debut on the label, got here out in 1998 and located appreciable success on Parisian radio with the only “Je Pense à Toi.” The duo rolled out three extra albums earlier than catching the eye of Latin star Manu Chao, who supplied to provide their 2004 document Dimanche à Bamako, their breakout LP and highest-charting album in quite a few nations. Amadou & Mariam adopted it up with three extra full-length data: 2008’s Welcome to Mali, 2012’s Folila, and 2017’s La Confusion.
As their music crossed over to different nations, so did their touring routes. Amadou & Mariam booked units at U.S. festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza, landed opening slots for historic gigs like Blur’s huge 2009 reunion exhibits in Hyde Park, and received invitations to carry out on TV exhibits like Late Evening With Jimmy Fallon.
