‘With this album, Solomane Doumbia pays tribute to Tidiani Koné
and brings afrobeat back to his other homeland, Mali’
It was in January 2020 that Solomane Doumbia composed and recorded the tracks for the album «Ségou
to Lagos» in Bamako. The recordings took place at night, Solo would take his guitar and start playing riffs.
Then he would go to the computer to compose the beats that would have been interpreted and enriched
by Malian musicians directed by Solo.
Solo is one of those great artists who made the golden age of Malian music and until his retirement from
the international scene in 2013, he was considered one of the greatest percussionists in Africa. Life has
not always been easy for Solo, like for many other great musicians, but his brilliant musical intuition has
never failed him: every time Solo picks up an instrument, sings or dances, a singular light shines on him.
For a long time, he was Salif Keita’s percussionist and arranger on some of his albums. He has accompa-
nied him on all his tours, from his beginnings in Abidjan where they met until 2013.
Solomane Doumbia comes from a family of musicians who left the Wasulu region (Mali) for Bamako in the
early 1960s. They spent more than five years on the road before reaching the capital of Bamako, as the
balafonist father and his two singer wives had to take part in all the cultural ceremonies in the various
villages along the way! When they arrived in Bamako, they settled in Baco-Djikoroni. It was there that
Solo began to learn the instrument with his father and older brothers and by the age of 15, Solomane was
already a formidable instrumentalist! He stayed in Bamako until the early 1980s when he decided to join
his older brother Madou Fakoly Doumbia, also a great musician, in Abidjan. This was at the time the route
for all Mandengue musicians who wanted to make an international career. It was here that the friendship
story of Salif Keita and Solomane Doumbia began.
This opus «Ségou à Lagos» is above all a tribute to another great artist, Tidiani Koné. Like Solo, the work
and life of the great Tidiani Koné are little known to the general public, but it was he who first built a
bridge between the music of Mali and Nigeria and who inspired and arranged the rhythms that made up
Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat.
Solomane Doumbia owes part of his inspiration to Tidiani Koné and this album, this tribute, retraces the
route of Afrobeat and brings it back to his other homeland, the present-day Mali.