As a youngster, Daby Toure would get together with friends to bang out rhythms on old tins, canisters and cardboard boxes and entertain his village in Mauritania [see map]. Eventually he taught himself to play his father’s guitars and began discovering the exotic joys of western pop music, thanks to radio, pirated cassettes and the occasional TV broadcast. The Police, Dire Straits, Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Jackson were powerful formative influences.
Later, when his father received an invitation from his younger brothers to join their group Toure Kunda in Paris, he took the eighteen-year-old Daby with him. Music began to take over Daby Toure’s life at that time. He began to play little gigs in bars and college parties with rock and cover bands and finally gave up, over his father’s objections, his courses at Business School.
He teamed up with his cousin Omar and formed Toure Toure; the two “Toures,” and began to explore the vivid common frontiers of jazz and African music. He now sings of relationships, his family, freedom and, above all, of being positive when times are hard.
Daby Toure of Mauritania writes his own material, and is a virtual one-man band, layering his own guitar, bass and percussion parts, with his wide-ranging vocals. [This is his] first U.S. tour.
Program for the Millennium Stage:
[forthcoming]
CLICK HERE to watch and listen to Daby Toure's performance from the Kennedy Center's Video Archive.
Publications (CDs):
Diam (2004)
Official website: http://realworldrecords.com/dabytoure/
** co-marketed by David Chambers
July 21, 2005 (Thursday) 6:00 p.m. on the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage
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