iSound

When it comes to African guitar music, Guinea holds a very special place. And when it comes to Guinean guitar music, it doesn’t get much better than the African Virtuoses. Their story goes to the very heart of the emergence of the guitar as a bona fide African instrument in the early era of independence in the 1960s and 70s, and is inextricably linked with one of the most illustrious guitar-playing families in Africa, the four Diabate brothers heard here. These wonderful, rare recordings of various formations of the African Virtuoses, made in Conakry and Abidjan between 1970 and 1983, showcase acoustic African guitar playing at its most intimate and virtuosic.

In the late 1950s, as most African nations were gaining their political independence, Papa Diabate (born in Faranah, Guinea, 1936) was developing a new single-note style of African guitar playing based on using a plectrum rather than the thumb and index finger technique used throughout Africa. Having learned his scale...