Lo'Jo are as much about an idea as the music they make. The band, founded in 1982 in Angers , has been involved in multimedia shows, circuses, politics, and even hosted a festival in the Malian desert; not your basic group, by any means.
Playing with microtiming is a remarkable feature of musical rhythm in the Western Sudan. Both African and Western musicians and musicologists have time and again wondered at the capability of Malian, Senegambian or Guinean drummers to excitingly place not
Habib Koité & Bamada
Habib comes from a noble line of Khassonké griots, traditional troubadors who provide wit, wisdom and musical entertainment at social gatherings and special events. Habib grew up surrounded by seventeen brothers and sisters, and developed his unique guitar style accompanying his griot mother. He inherited his passion for music from his paternal grandfather who played the kamele n'goni, a traditional four-stringed instrument associated with hunters from the Wassolou region of Mali. "Nobody really taught me to sing or to play the guitar," explains Habib, "I watched my parents, and it washed off on me."