at the courtyard presents Derek Gripper

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...

Fifteen years ago, Derek Gripper did what everyone said was impossible: he recorded the works of Mali's greatest virtuoso, Toumani Diabaté, on solo classical guitar. What followed has been an unusual career. A discography of nearly thirty albums moves from Diabaté to Bach to Arvo Pärt to Keith Jarrett-style improvisation. His collaborators include Diabaté himself, classical guitar legend John Williams, and most recently, kora master Ballaké Sissoko. His string-quartet arrangements of Diabaté's music were premiered by the Kronos Quartet.

Derek's original impulse had been to make a point: Classical audiences had long accepted African rhythmic ideas as raw material for European and American composers, but the complete works of the African oral tradition remained outside the "classical" canon. By transcribing and recording Diabaté, Derek was arguing that the classical world could credit Africa’s music in it’s original sources, and that the word "classical" should belong to Mali as easily as it belongs to Europe. But somewhere along the way, performing and teaching and writing down this music, Derek became a first-language speaker of this musical language. This added a new element to his interpretations and performances of these compositions.

On this tour Derek focuses on kumbengo — the cyclical variations that sit at the heart of the West African tradition. These small, ancient kernels, are music that focuses the mind, soars to melodic heights, moves the body and aches the heart. Toumani Diabaté once showed the world that the virtuosity of Bach and modern jazz could live inside the Malian kora tradition. On this tour, the same richness arrives on a single guitar — one that has travelled from the recital hall into the wide and open fields of spontaneous musical creation. While these new performances continue to be attributed to their sources, the delivery now enters into the spirit of provisionality that was always inherent in the original music, and perhaps all music before writing fixes it.

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Your seats will be reserved for you, we set tables to make sure all guests have the best view and sound possible.

Please be reminded that this is a theatre-style show.

No under 18's.

Please be considerate of those around you by holding personal converstations for the break or after the show

For those chosing the dining option, dinner is served between 6:30pm and 7:30pm, and the show follows promptly.

No alchohol to be brought onto the premesis please, fully licensed bar available.

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Derek Gripper plays classical guitar like someone who got bored of classical guitar. The beginning-middle-end of it, the standard tuning, the priesthood of flawless rendition. From a remote nature reserve outside Cape Town — homeschooling four children in a custom Montessori classroom; transcribing West African harp music from an old laptop with a broken 'e' key — the South African guitarist has spent the last decade dismantling the assumptions of his training and rebuilding something stranger, more porous.

The kora translations are what made his name. Beginning in 2012, Gripper found a way to play the 21-string Malian harp's interlocking patterns on a six-string guitar, a feat classical guitar legend John Williams pronounced "absolutely impossible until I heard Derek Gripper do it." Toumani Diabaté, unconvinced that one player was responsible, invited him to perform at the Acoustik Festival in Bamako. Carnegie Hall, a Songlines Best Album Award, and multiple collaborations with Williams followed.

But what looks like a feat is really a philosophy: that to play music is to host it briefly, to enter a genealogical line in which each iteration is family. African composers — Diabaté, Madosini, Salif Keita, Mansour Seck — taught him a different relationship to authorship, where the new song carries its grandfather's melody intact and nobody calls it theft. Solo authorship isn't assumed, ownership isn't claimed. Continuation is key.

Improvisation came late and crookedly. He learned it not through jazz but by breaking apart Bach and Toumani and reassembling them, and through study of Carnatic music in Chennai — drawn to its disciplined freedom rather than to any dogmatic style. Now he walks onstage with no setlist, the neurotic rituals of the concert hall reprogrammed into trained ease, whether playing solo or in unplanned conversation with masters of other disciplines: a wordless collaboration with kora master Ballaké Sissoko (they share no spoken language), or an effortless dialogue with sarod player Alam Khan, son of Ali Akbar Khan — whose records spin continuously in the Gripper household.

He is, increasingly, in conversation with his tools: a more than thirty-year obsession with the guitar has branched into 35mm film, darkroom printing, analogue tape, and the metal-plate reverbs of mid-century recording studios. He thinks continuously about process; about photography as a way to think about analogue media through a non-musical discipline; about a visceral sound that mimics nature; about drawing compositional processes from the writings of his longtime hero, natural farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka. On tour he carries an eccentric fifty-year-old tape delay that returns fragments of his playing seconds later, half-remembered, in the manner of Zimbabwean mbira music.

Gripper comes from a lineage of disrupters. His father was jailed for refusing apartheid-era army conscription. The son inherits the disposition: openly preoccupied with the state of things, willing to be public about it. Intense, but funny with it. The laser focus has a sense of humour about itself, playing everything as though mid-thought, always available for revision. His guitar — a West German relic of the golden age of classical music, flawed and opinionated — is the thinking partner.

Years ago on Robben Island, a younger Gripper played for Nelson Mandela on his first return to the prison since his release. Everyone else in the room was distracted; Mandela watched the music without looking away once. That's the audience Gripper still seems to be playing for — the one paying attention.

“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

“Gripper has cracked it… his playing has a depthless beauty, which does full justice to the complexity of Toumani’s compositions. To do so without any hint of the music being dumbed down is a staggering achievement on solo guitar.”

— Nigel Williamson, Songlines Magazine

“More than a labour of love, Gripper has brought a new purity to the dream-like improvisatory nature of these compositions. My recording of the year, so far!”

— Tim Panting, Classical Guitar Magazine

“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

“A true synthesis and a great album.”

— Ian Kearey, fRoots