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 and giving the instrument its very first African repertoire.

As a South African classical musician, he found limited by the music of the traditional classical guitar and so went on a journey through different musical styles, returning always to the guitar to find ways of bringing what he learned onto the instrument. It took Derek Gripper untold hours of painstaking work to transcribe note-for-note the complex compositions of Malian kora player Toumani Diabaté and find a way of playing them on six-string guitar. The results appeared on his ninth album, One Night on Earth, recorded with an orchestra of crickets (who he didn’t invite). The album created an unprecedented meeting point between the written tradition of Western classical music and the oral tradition of the West African griots.

When Gripper released “One Night on Earth,” his first album of kora translations, classical guitar legend John Williams said he thought it was “absolutely impossible until I heard Derek Gripper do it,” while kora maestro Toumani Diabaté asked for confirmation that it was indeed just one person playing. Both invited Derek to collaborate with them: Derek performed with Williams in London’s Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s Place, and with Diabaté and his Symmetric Orchestra at the Acoustik Festival Bamako, Mali. His 2016 Carnegie Hall debut paired him with Mali’s Trio da Kali, and the UK’s Songlines honoured him with best album in Africa and the Middle East for his 2016 album “Libraries on Fire.”

Since these two recordings put kora/guitar translations on the map, his recent recordings “A Year of Swimming” (2020), “Billy Goes to Durban,” (2021) and “Sleep Songs for My Daughter” (2022), have incorporated elements of his kora explorations in original compositions and improvisations, captured on tape in the field and in studio, while his Bach recordings have shown that African music has a lot to teach us about recapturing the natural simplicity of early European music. 

Touring globally from his home in Cape Town, Gripper is collaborating with Malian kora master Ballaké Sissoko on a new duo project and recording for the record label Platoon.