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Derek Gripper - Guitarist
Presented By The Saco River Theatre
Saturday, November 18th at 7:30pm EST
Online sale ends: 11/18/23 at 6:00pm EST
The Saco River Theatre
29 Salmon Falls Rd.
Buxton, ME 04093
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Derek Gripper Description
Derek Gripper is one of South Africa’s leading guitarists whose love of the kora set him transcribing and recording some of its greatest works, changing the face of classical guitar and giving the instrument its very first African repertoire. As a South African classical musician, he found 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. It took Derek Gripper untold hours of painstaking work to transcribe note-for-note the complex compositions of Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté and find a way of playing them on six-string guitar. The results appeared on his ninth album, One Night on Earth, recorded with an orchestra of crickets (who he didn’t invite). The album created an unprecedented meeting point between the written tradition of Western classical music and the oral tradition of the West African griots. When Gripper released “One Night on Earth,” his first album of kora translations, classical guitar legend John Williams said he thought it was “absolutely impossible until I heard Derek Gripper do it,” while kora maestro Toumani Diabaté asked for confirmation that it was indeed just one person playing. Both invited Derek to collaborate with them: Derek performed with Williams in London’s Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s Place, and with Diabaté and his Symmetric Orchestra at the Acoustik Festival Bamako, Mali. His 2016 Carnegie Hall debut paired him with Mali’s Trio da Kali, and the UK’s Songlines honoured him with best album in Africa and the Middle East for his 2016 album “Libraries on Fire.” Since these two recordings put kora/guitar translations on the map, his recent recordings “A Year of Swimming” (2020), “Billy Goes to Durban,” (2021) and “Sleep Songs for My Daughter” (2022), have incorporated elements of his kora explorations in original compositions and improvisations, captured on tape in the field and in studio, while his Bach recordings have shown that African music has a lot to teach us about recapturing the natural simplicity of early European music. Touring globally from his home in Cape Town, Gripper is collaborating with Malian kora master Ballaké Sissoko on a new duo project and recording for the record label Platoon. “Five stars… Gripper has brilliantly transferred [the kora] repertoire onto a regular six string guitar. He sees [Toumani] Diabaté as the Segovia, or indeed John Williams, of the kora, championing it as a solo instrument. And Gripper brilliantly takes it back to the guitar. He’s opening a whole new repertoire of classical guitar music… bringing African guitar into the classical mainstream.” — SIMON BROUGHTON “The result is astounding, not just for its technical brilliance, but its musicality. Gripper executes these pieces with the precision and attention to detail one might expect from a great classical musician… It’s hard to imagine a more impressive and passionate rendering of Malian music on classical guitar.” — BANNING EYRE, AFROPOP WORLDWIDE |
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7:30pm to 9:30pm
General Admission: $15.00
All Ages
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