Bringing unique sounds from the remote villages of Burkina Faso in Western Africa, the Djakaly Kone musical band pulled crowds in great numbers to Katara Cultural Village to celebrate the Cultural Diversity Festival recently.
Narrating stories through their typical African musical instruments featuring Kora (a harp-lute) and xylophone, the Burkina Faso musicians enlivened the spirit of a great Western African tradition unique to their area, storytelling with instruments.
Coming from Babouti Alajout in the South of Burkina Faso, a famous musical town, the musicians in the band come from families whose members are especially trained from early childhood in telling stories not vocally, but with their musical instruments.
“They would walk around with their musical instruments and they would transfer information from one village to the other. This was in ancient time when there were no proper means of communication and people just walked from one village to the other,” Dr Martin Trisko, a member of Djakaly Kone, tells Community.
These people combined storytelling with musical tradition and they had an important role in the society. These people called Sambla are unimaginably rich in music. Each village, each important family and every profession has its own piece of music that functions like a coat of arms.
Music is composed for every important occasion. Any work carried out by the village community is accompanied by music. 
The most striking feature of this music is the rich ornamented virtuous xylophone solo — it speaks. 
What outsiders consider to be beautiful music is in reality the Sambla language transposed into music. The children learn this musical language simultaneously to their spoken language. They can tell everything verbally expressible with the tunes of the xylophone.
Without opening the mouth they can tell their stories, report on current events, chat with the people around, mock people who annoy then, and even flirt with the same musical language.
Two of the band members, Trisko says, came to Austria and used to play in different bands before they formed a new band called Djakaly Kone. There are very few African bands in Austria and there are very few who can play instruments such as Kora.
“I have been travelling to Africa and other parts of the world for more than 20 years. By profession, I am a medical doctor and I did a part of my training in Ghana, so I have connection with African musical tradition,” says Trisko, who was so thrilled by the African music that he joined the band as their bass player.
“We played together in Austria and then I went to Burkina Faso. Sakali, one of the band members, was my mentor there who taught me these instruments,” says the doctor-cum-musician, who still actively practices medicine. It is often difficult to manage time between music and practice, he says, but he has a great passion for music and manages to find time for it somehow.
The African music, he says, is very rhythmic, same as the Indian or Arabic music. And this is what he is most interested in — the rhythm.
“But it is usually pentatonic music. It is not about chords, it is mainly about the rhythm. If you listen to the patterns, you cannot say where they start and where they end,” says Trisko. “It is always about putting it together and making it sync. This kind of music has sure connection with reggae music. The beat is the same and it is very driving as reggae is very fast and precise on the beat,” he adds.
Living in Austria, he is an anaesthetic and also has a private practice in pain medicine. The trip to Doha was his first visit with the band outside of Burkina Faso or Austria, but the band itself has travelled all over the world.
“It was the first time for me to be here. It is amazing, it is something different, you do not get to see this a lot. I mean I travel a lot but this is a new city. I do not know how it looked like 20 years ago. I am sure most of the buildings were built during the last 20 years,” says Trisko.
They were welcomed here in Doha, he adds, and the people are very friendly.