Amadou Bagayoko, the award-winning Malian singer and guitarist within the husband-and-wife duo Amadou & Mariam, has died, in accordance with the Associated Press. In a neighborhood 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 have 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 objective, performing world wide with artists like Stevie Marvel 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 on account of a congenital cataract at age 15 and commenced learning at Mali’s Institute for the Younger Blind. It was there that he met Doumbia, who went blind at age 5, they usually 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 model. 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 Marvel, who invited them to begin enjoying festivals exterior of Africa.
In 1996, Amadou & Mariam moved to Paris and signed to the file label Emarcy. Sou Ni Tile, their first studio album recorded exterior of Africa and their debut on the label, got here out in 1998 and located appreciable success on Parisian radio with the one “Je Pense à Toi.” The duo rolled out three extra albums earlier than catching the eye of Latin star Manu Chao, who provided to supply their 2004 file 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 large 2009 reunion exhibits in Hyde Park, and acquired invitations to carry out on TV exhibits like Late Evening With Jimmy Fallon.
