Mamane Barka

about

Malam Maman Barka (Tesker, Niger, 1959 – 21 November 2018) was a Nigerien musician, and one of the world's most prominent players of the biram, a five-stringed harp-like instrument used by the Boudouma, a fishing community on Lake Chad, for traditional songs. Malam Mamane Barka was born in 1959 in Tesker, Niger. He was a member of the nomadic people of Toubou. As a player of the ngurumi, a two-string plucked instrument, he gained popularity in his homeland and neighboring Nigeria. In 2002 he decided to devote himself to the study of the biram. Mamane Barka started his professional life as a teenage schoolteacher, then a teenage headmaster, he was sixteen, then a musician, a player of a two-stringed, skinny-necked, banjo-like, plucked instrument called the gurumi. Over two decades he built up a repertoire of more than 200 gurumi songs, making a name for himself in Niger and neighbouring Nigeria. It was as a gurami player that he performed for the first time outside Africa, in Pyongyang, where, he noted, the streets were very clean. And it was as a gurumi player that he released his first international album, Guidan Haya, which came out through Beauty Saloon Music. In 2002 Barka decided to pursue an additional instrument, the biram. Mastery of the biram is an endangered art. To learn this instrument he travelled to Lake Chad and apprenticed himself to the single remaining biram expert, a man named Boukar Tar. Tar died before Introducing Mamane Barka was released, meaning t

top songs

albums

Introducing Mamane Barka

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Rough Guide To Desert Blues

The Rough Guide To Desert Blues

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Rough Guide to Blues and Beyond

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Rough Guide to the Sahara

Rough Guide to African Roots Revival

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Rough Guide to the Music of West Africa

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The Rough Guide to Blues and Beyond

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Rough Guide To The Best Music You've Never Heard

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The Rough Guide To The Best Music You've Never Heard

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The Rough Guide To African Roots Revival

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Rough Guide: Desert blues

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