Live Music from 9pm

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Entry Price: £12 / £8 / £15
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A Friday night of West African music, including coastal African sounds and rhythms and cross-cultural fusions with the fantastic Touki.

Comprising of Amadou Diagne and Cory Seznec, Touki’s new LP ‘Plastic Man’, recorded at the legendary Real World Studios, focuses on climate change, environmental activism and spiritual matters. Drawing together West African fables, personal stories and the social, economic and political challenges facing both developing and Western countries and Western ones, this is music that asks ecological, spiritual, and political questions.

Amadou Diagne has centuries of West African music at his fingertips, while Cory Seznec is a musical wanderer and uncertified ethnomusicologist.  Their band name, Touki, means “journey” in Wolof, Diagne’s mother tongue.  Born into a griot family of percussionists and praise singers in Dakar, Diagne is not your ordinary griot. A self-taught kora player (he was prohibited from studying in Senegal as he did not descend from a lineage of kora players) and guitarist, he has developed a signature style to accompany his powerhouse voice, also drawing on his skills as a percussionist. His music has been featured in Songlines, BBC 3 Late Junction and fRoots.

A French-American in Paris, Seznec’s fingerstyle guitar-playing is syncopated, polyrhythmic, cross-pollinated and idiosyncratic. He also plays banjo and wades in the deep river of American song. Busking misadventures with Malian musicians in the Paris metro led him to Songhai songsters in Timbuktu and ancient omutibo guitarists in Western Kenya. Feverish touring with the world roots trio Groanbox gave him his sea legs. But a three-year stint in Ethiopia is what cracked everything open. These experiences shaped Seznec into an artist who traces the through-line across musical cultures and whose songs let the past reverberate in the present. Together they form something very special indeed.

Jamboree food option: Our ‘Arepatoire’ kitchen is open from 6pm serving a delicious mix of Italian/Colombian food for you to enjoy a pre-gig meal/snack if you wish! Find the menu HERE!