The Wednesday night performances of Mamady Kouyate’s Mandingo Ambassadors straddle two pivotal epochs of African history nearly 1000 years apart. One is the time-honored tradition that fuses oral history and song in performance, which is a craft dating back more than a millennium to the age of West African kingdoms such as Mali. The other is a portal into the more contemporary challenge of creating national identities as the continent emerged from colonial rule starting in the 1950s and 60s.

History and legacy aside, however, the music the Mandingo Ambassadors play is very much rooted in the moment. The band — Kouyate’s centerpiece guitar joined by musicians on horns, drums, rhythm and bass and, on occasion, vocalists — takes the stage in a room at the back of the Brooklyn nightclub Barbès.

From the first note, it is impossible to tell whether you’re listening with your head, hips, or some combination of both. The music’s foundation is dense and shape-shifting, a churning kaleidoscope composed of oscillating polyrhythms. It’s a lush carpet of sound, an invitation to dance that is at once hypnotic and, at unexpected intervals, surprising.

Tenors of an ancient art

Through this complex sound, Kouyate’s guitar remains the focal point. It beams, radiating on a gently shimmering vibrato that is equal parts light and heat and shines much like a beacon slicing through the night sky.

Barbès owner, Olivier Conan, says the mesmerizing sound of the Mandingo Ambassadors attracts a dedicated following of up to 50 audience members, even on a mid-week night. Conan, whose club prides itself on uplifting unsung, innovative, and eclectic artists, learned about Kouyate through the New York musician grapevine, which inspired the band’s Wednesday performances, which started over a decade ago.

The Ambassadors’ lineups are fluid — sometimes including jazz saxophonists, trumpet players, bassists and others who come to sit in under Kouyate’s tutelage. Whatever the week’s assembly, the results are consistently top-flight. Conan recalls a select group of Kouyate’s performances over the years. At the top of the list are the occasions when the leader pairs with rhythm guitarist Mamady Kourouma, a second guitarist.

“The two have a true telepathic connection… they deliver a sort of precious, intimate, introspective dialogue,” Conan said.

Kouyate, now 67, is the heir of a lineage of griots he says date back to the seventh century. The guitarist first experienced music during his childhood in the river port of Kouroussa, Guinea. It was there that family members taught him the balafon, the thickset wooden mallet instrument that serves as both a timekeeper and melodic engine.

“History, culture and music was essentially my family’s profession,” Kouyate said. “Generation by generation, our grandfathers passed down knowledge to the young coming up. I started learning pieces on the balafon before my father sent me off to French school.”

Kouyate’s art is timeless and yet entwined in 20th-century realities. His father, a djeli, too, took notice of how amplified instruments were being introduced into popular music on the continent and set to the painstaking work of transcribing traditional Mandingo melodies reserved for balafon and the kora gourd-harp to Western notation. This was a way of preserving classic and enduring melodic themes for guitarists like his son.

History in the making

In mid-century Guinea, however, there were more immediate geopolitical forces at play in the background. Kouyate was born just two years before Guinea gained its independence from France. Like other newly formed African nations, Guinea was confronted with an identity crisis. Its borders were the creation of Europeans focused on extracting local commodity wealth. They carved the continent’s vast territories into chunks with no regard for local cultures.

Early on, the country’s leader, Sekou Toure, saw a solution. The government threw its weight behind a nationwide arts program, a cultural policy dubbed authenticité — an attempt to mold a new national identity with deep roots in Mandigo culture. Under the Toure regime, arts councils and troupes of musicians, actors and dancers were set up across the country. The government even went so far as to furnish instruments, amplifiers and equipment. Kouyate was a beneficiary. At 16, he joined one such local group, received a guitar and went about teaching himself to play based on what he had learned as a child.

In 1967, the government founded the recording label Syliphone that published vinyl records of Guinea’s top-tier groups, including Bembeya Jazz International and Les Amazones de Guinée, a women’s band that gained notoriety after appearing alongside Stevie Wonder and Miriam Makeba in Lagos in 1977.

In the late 70s, Kouyate completed a college degree in economics and in 1984 took a post in Guinea’s ministry of agriculture. He kept what you might call a second job as an official Chef d’Orchestre of Kouroussa, his home town. The second job made it possible to launch a revival of Les Amazones, which he took on tour around West Africa and Europe.

Looking to the future

Kouyate’s intervention came at an important interval. When Toure died in 1984, the Guinean government’s support of the arts began to wane and bands were left to their own means of survival. Thanks to Kouyate’s work, two of the authenticité movement’s headliners — Bembeya and Les Amazones kept performing, rehearsing, touring and recording for over 15 years.

The political turmoil that has plagued Guinea since 1958 eventually forced Kouyate to flee to the U.S., where he founded the Mandingo Ambassadors in 2005. Soon afterward he began his long-standing Barbès appearances.

For Kouyate, there’s a third act in store. New York guitarist and music producer Yonatan Gat says he’s been an admirer of Kouyate’s for over a decade. After kicking around the possibility of recording Kouyate both in collaborative settings and with rhythm guitarist Karouma, Gat released a single on his Stone Tapes label featuring the Guinean entitled “Lila,” which will soon be followed by his new album, Proclamation.

“His guitar is so beautiful, so healing I’ve always been inspired to give him a platform that would be more ambient and atmospheric,” Gat said.