Musicians do not get much earthier than Kocassalé Dioubaté. “Wood and skin,” he says, reached at his Vancouver home. “All I play is wood and skin.”

A quick visit to his BéréSanké Percussion company’s Web site (www.beresanke.com/) confirms his self-assessment. Not only does Dioubaté play instruments of wood and skin, he builds and sells them as well: marimbalike balafons, crafted from gourds and tropical hardwoods; the African harp called the kora, with its goatskin-covered body; the drum known as the djembé, carved from a single piece of tree trunk.

These are not unsophisticated instruments, however, nor do they produce unsophisticated sounds. That they’re made without machine tools, carbon fibre, or stainless steel is less important than the fact that they’re the tools of the griots, West African singers, storytellers, and tribal counsellors whose complex, loping rhythms and Arab-inflected singing date back to the Middle Ages, if not before. As Dioubaté’s family name—which he shares, in modified form, with Malian kora virtuoso Toumani Diabaté and Guinean singer Sona Diabaté, among many other West African greats—indicates, he’s a griot born, and of this he’s deservedly proud.

“I’m from the Mandingo tribe,” he explains, in the careful English he’s learned since moving to Vancouver from Guinea in 2005. “My family, since long time ago, all my family is musical family. My dad, my grandpa, my grandpa’s mom: everybody played music. If people have a ceremony in my country, like somebody has a new baby or people have a marriage, they take my family to play music. Back a long time ago in the villages we had kings, and all kings had one person to sing for them. That is my family: singing for kings.”

There are no kings in Canada, however. People have their babies in hospitals and hire cover bands to play their wedding parties. So, as an urban griot, Dioubaté has had to look for different avenues where his talents can be deployed. That means making and selling the instruments he grew up with, and it means teaching African percussion styles. “In Canada there is not much African music,” Dioubaté notes. “So I’m very happy to come in and teach people to play djembé, and to teach them African style and culture. If I teach drumming, it’s always drumming and stories together.”

And it means looking for performance opportunities beyond Vancouver’s African community which, according to this musician is both tiny and diverse. Accordingly, Dioubaté’s four-piece percussion ensemble will be one of the highlights of African Cabaret, at the WISE Hall on Friday (February 2). As the first installment of Festival Baobab, a month-long celebration of African culture, the concert will also feature Congolese musician and storyteller Jean Pierre Makosso, the Nigerian stylings of the Kokoma African Heritage Ensemble, and a “special mystery guest”. Contractual obligations have prevented Festival Baobab organizers from publicizing his name, but those familiar with Vancouver’s world-beat scene will recognize an old friend in this well-known Guinean-Canadian singer and guitarist.

“Any African living in Vancouver should visit Festival Baobab,” says Dioubaté, whose dream is that local Africans will eventually form an organization to promote that continent’s culture here and support it at home. “In Vancouver the African community is not very, very strong,” he continues. “But I want it very strong; the African people should get together and make a conference every month to talk about how to help Africa. I want Africans living here to do that, because Africans here have more power and more money to help Africa.”

This is a vision Dioubaté could very well help realize: as he points out, griots like the members of his family are born diplomats. “In my country, Guinea, we speak 100 languages, because there are many tribes and not all the tribes speak the same language,” he explains. “But all the tribes, if they have a ceremony they call in my tribe, the Mandingo tribe. The Mandingo tribe is a very special tribe: they play songs in all the languages of West Africa.”

And even, it appears, in the languages of Dioubaté’s new country. “How is my English?” he asks, toward the end of our conversation. “It’s very good,” I answer, noting that it’s considerably better than my French, the other European language this African musician speaks.

“Well, thank you,” he replies. “I have only been in this country one year and five months, but I am a griot and I have good ears to hear.”