Virtuoso Derek Gripper Recreates Sounds Of West African Kora On Classical Guitar

A World in Trance, now in its fifth edition, has been host to some of the world's most captivating music, bringing people together in search of enlightenment and spirituality. This year's four-part festival begins on March 23rd with virtuoso guitarist Derek Gripper, who masterfully interprets the hypnotic sounds of the West African kora (21-string harp-lute) on solo guitar.

Derek Gripper's exploration of Mali's greatest instrumental virtuosos has created a new form of classical guitar music out of one of Africa's richest musical traditions. Derek, a master guitarist from South Africa, magically conjures anew a centuries-old ancient African musical heritage, interpreting kora compositions on solo 6-string classical guitar - a feat which the renowned classical guitarist John Williams said he thought was "absolutely impossible until I heard Derek Gripper do it." His remarkable guitar renditions of Toumani Diabaté's elaborate compositions for the 21-string West African kora are without precedent. After hearing Derek's album One Night on Earth, which marked a meeting point of the written tradition of Western classical music and the oral tradition of the West African griots, Diabaté asked for confirmation that it was indeed just one person playing one guitar. Derek's recent work includes transcriptions and improvisations based on the work of other Malian composer/performers such as Ali Farka Touré, Ballaké Sissoko, Salif Keita and Fanta Sacko, as well as his own compositions based on the music of the Western Cape of South Africa.

Derek Gripper is a classical guitarist who has taken a unique path. He found himself limited by the music of the traditional classical guitar and so went on a journey through different musical styles, returning always to the guitar to find ways of bringing what he learned onto the instrument. His studies took him to India where he learned the rudiments of the Carnatic percussion language, and then to the farms of the Western Cape where he created an "avant-ghoema" string quartet language with South African composer and trumpeter Alex van Heerden. He then began to explore the limits of the classical guitar's sonority, first on eight-string guitar evocations of Cape Town folk music, then in compositions on a guitar by legendary luthier Hermann Hauser and then in transcriptions by Brazilian composer Egberto Gismonti whose solo guitar works are an explosive rewriting of classical guitar, world music, jazz and contemporary classical. The 2011 album The Sound of Water combines Gismonti's music with Derek's own compositions.

His project to understand and translate the music of the West African kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté to solo guitar resulted in two critically acclaimed albums, the 2012 One Night on Earth (Songlines Top of the World) and Libraries on Fire, which explored kora duets on solo guitar and won the Songlines Award for Best African and Middle Eastern Album in 2017. The recognition from these albums resulted in concert tours the world over, performances at such prestigious venues as Carnegie Hall, and collaborations with classical guitar legend John Williams, Indian guitar master Debashish Bhattacharya, and West African musicians Trio da Kali and Toumani Diabaté himself.

In 2017, Derek returned to the studio and to his musical roots to record an album of the solo violin works of Bach, arranged on solo guitar and delivered with the phraseology and fire of a musician who has steeped himself in musics outside of the classical canon.

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