Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita
Echo – Collaboration Biography
By Andy Morgan

“We’re the epitome of everything opposite, Seckou and I,” Catrin Finch admits. “Religion, gender, race. Seckou started over in Senegal, I started in Wales. And yet we’ve managed to bring our different musical worlds together and create a journey of our own. The way I see it, with this album, we’ve reached our place, creatively and musically.”

In other words, this album will be their Echo.

It wasn’t easy. Ten years ago, before Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita were thrown together by a series of fateful twists, a marriage of the classical harp and the West African kora sounded good on paper. There were enough historical, cultural and musical parallels between the two instruments to make the union seem workable, even predestined. But would it actually succeed? Could there be a profound merging, grounded in love rather than mere concepts? And would that love ever be strong enough to propel the result beyond a tiny audience of harp and kora aficionados?

If the duo’s first album Clychau Dibon (2013) answered yes to all these questions, it was because Catrin and Seckou both possessed that rare combination of virtuosity honed by years of dedication to one particular instrument and fearless attraction to other traditions and other instruments.

Catrin was already the UK’s most famous young classical harper, the first Royal Harpist to The Prince of Wales of the modern era, fêted for her chart-topping renditions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, her appearances with the world’s leading orchestras (New York Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Boston Pops, Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields etc.), her work with John Rutter, Bryn Terfel, James Galway, Julian Lloyd Webber and many more.

At the same time, Seckou, then nicknamed “the Hendrix of the Kora” was celebrated for his ingenious tunings and virtuosity and praised as “one of the finest exponents of the kora”. Performing all over the globe as a solo artist, and with his ground-breaking quintet, he captivated audiences at WOMAD, Hay, Glastonbury, Tokyo Jazz, Chicago World Music Festival, Sydney International and Montreal Jazz Festivals. Known as a generous collaborator, he had started his exploration into classical music with Orchestre Symphonique de Lyon.

Through their fingers flowed opposing tributaries that merged into a single river of notes: Europe and Africa, Wales and Senegal, notation and improvisation, woman and man, white and black, arrhythmic and rhythmic. Their magic was to create a seamless whole that went beyond its constituent parts and broke free of the traditions that had nurtured them.

Success came fast: fRoots Critics Poll Album of the Year 2013 and Songlines Best Cross-Cultural Collaboration 2014 for Clychau Dibon. Two BBC Radio 2 Folk Award nominations in 2014. A very similar haul for their second album SOAR (2018), which the Guardian, in a 5-star review, described as ‘an emotional demonstration of how two virtuoso musicians triumphantly bring different cultures together.’ Catrin and Seckou were dubbed ‘Best Duo / Group’ at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2019. There were sold out shows all over the UK, world tours, headlining spots at major festivals and venues including WOMAD, Sydney Opera House, Interceltique Festival Lorient, the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, Hay Festival, and gushing endorsements from unlikely sources (Robbie Williams, Toby Jones, Mark Rylance, Johnny Depp).

When lockdown came in 2020, the duo was on the other side of the world. They had just played the WOMAD festival in New Zealand. It was a race to get home before the gates of normality slammed shut. The enforced hiatus that followed brought gloom, anxiety but also a valuable clearing of calm in the breathless frenzy of their careers. Catrin retreated to her home in South Wales and devoted more time to composition, new collaborations and the people she cared for most. Seckou also refocused on his family and a huge variety of new projects, some of which reconnected with his homeland, musically as well as spiritually.

It was a whole year before they saw each other again face to face. Collaborating long-distance, south Wales to southern Senegal, had proved technically infeasible, so a function room was secured in a hotel on the outskirts of Birmingham and work began on the long-mooted third album. It was almost as if they were starting from the beginning again.

Snippets of tunes were drawn from the ‘tune bank’ the pair had accumulated during their countless soundcheck jams in pre-Covid days. Others were gleaned from side-projects: a ballet score, TV commissions, festival collaborations, works- in-progress and experimentation. The addition of strings seemed more than obvious. There had to be some major variation to differentiate this album from its predecessors. They couldn’t peddle the same story.

In that anodyne hotel suite, Catrin and Seckou regained their magical ability to ‘park all the noise’ as Catrin puts it–all those daily cares, personal woes, creative doubts, Covid anxieties–and blend hearts, minds, fingers, each rediscovering their echo in the other.

An overture Catrin had written for the ballet Giselle was turned into a gentle ode to optimism called ‘Gobaith’, the Welsh word for hope. Seckou’s creation of the world’s first double-necked kora in 2007 opened up the ground-breaking possibility of chromatic scales, which the duo exploits beautifully in the song ‘Julu Kuta’ (new strings in Mandinka, Seckou’s native language). A tune initially composed for the soundtrack of the BBC TV series Don’t Forget The Driver, starring Toby Jones and Luwam Teklizgi, became an homage to Seckou’s close friend, the Zimbabwean mbira virtuoso Chartwell Dutiro, who had recently passed away. One of Seckou’s compositions, ‘Tabadabang’ became a celebration of Lo Yiro, the game that West African parents play with their children to get them out from under their feet.

Slowly, the ‘difficult’ third album was born. It was conceived in the womb of lockdown, a time of universal anxiety and unknowing, a silent time in which to rethink, reassess, and pose deeper questions. Why all the frenzy, the hunger for achievement? What about humility, care and compassion? And what about our legacy, as individuals, as societies, as the human race? The pieces on this album don’t necessarily provide answers, but they echo that tumultuous zeitgeist with their mix of bittersweet sadness and sparkling hope.

Echo proclaims the tender triumph of this extraordinary partnership, the dissolution of opposites into one seamless musical expression of our common humanity. This is the echo they will leave behind – the echo of dear ones now departed, of beating hearts, of music, of love. “That’s what continues to travel through space and time,” Seckou says, “even after the last note has been played, or the last word has been sung.”

Andy Morgan

February 2022