Derek Gripper
Derek Gripper
Derek Gripper (born November 14, 1977) is a South African classical guitarist who turns West African kora music into six-string guitar pieces. He mainly works with traditional Malian music and has collaborated with John Williams, Toumani Diabaté, and Ballaké Sissoko.
Gripper was born in Cape Town and started studying music on the violin at age six, continuing classical training for 13 years. As a teenager he became interested in guitar and bass and played in bands around Cape Town. He studied classical guitar at the South African College of Music at the University of Cape Town. At nineteen, encouraged by a teacher, he learned Andrés Segovia’s transcription of Bach Partita No. 2 for violin and performed the Chaconne for Carlos Bonell and Nikita Koshkin. Bonell encouraged him to use the guitar to express a wide range of sound, including from different instruments. He was also introduced to the idea of extended guitar sounds by Jonathan Leathwood, through Paul Galbraith’s eight-string music. After college, Gripper traveled to southern India to study Carnatic music. A meeting with Cape Town trumpet player Alex van Heerden inspired him to explore musical ideas from cultures beyond South Africa.
In 2002, Gripper and van Heerden released Sagtevlei, a recording that helped define a new style described in the press as “avant-goema.” In 2009 he began studying Malian kora music and discovered he could play complex Diabaté pieces on the guitar without losing the original notes by borrowing techniques from the Renaissance vihuela. He started making arrangements of Toumani Diabaté’s music in 2012. From the late 2000s he worked on full guitar transcriptions of kora repertoire, developing methods to reproduce the instrument’s bass, accompaniment, and melody on the six-string guitar.
Gripper met Ballaké Sissoko in Paris in 2022. They began performing and improvising together across many concerts around the world, even though they do not share a common language. He has also contributed to ethnomusicology research in both South Africa and West Africa.
His approach aims to capture the kora’s interlocking rhythms and melodies on the guitar while keeping the cyclical forms and textures of the original music. The Financial Times described his technique as a dialogue between instruments, not a substitution, with clear, distinct musical lines. Songlines noted his restrained playing and fidelity to the source material. Critics also point to influences from Western classical guitar, Brazilian music, and minimalist ideas, calling his style precise and restrained.
Gripper’s recordings have drawn international attention for their technical skill and deep respect for African musical traditions. His solo album One Night on Earth: Music from the Strings of Mali was praised for its musicality as well as its complexity. The collaborative album Ballaké Sissoko and Derek Gripper received positive reviews in Financial Times, Le Monde, and the Mail & Guardian.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 12:08 (CET).