Toumani Diabaté's US fall tour with music from his latest release, The Mandé Variations, comes to a close tomorrow night at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music following a performance tonight at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis.

This past weekend, Toumani was on the West Coast for shows that included two sets at Seattle's Triple Door on Sunday night, closing out the city's Earshot Jazz Festival. Covering the concerts for the Seattle Times, reviewer Hugo Kugiya calls Toumani "the ethnomusicologist's delight and master of the traditional West African harp called a kora."

Reports Kugiya:

As a showstopper, Diabaté did not disappoint the adoring, capacity crowd at the Triple Door Sunday night, playing the 21-string kora alone, sounding often like three people playing at the same time, with only four fingers doing the plucking ... Diabaté tapped out a spare but steady rhythm against the body of his kora and improvised a sometimes diabolically impossible round of riffs and variations.

While this Malian virtuoso may seem an atypical choice for a jazz festival, Kugiya insists that Toumani more than fits the bill. "All of the essential elements of jazz were in fact represented in Diabaté's performance: virtuosity, tonal and rhythmic complexity, and improvisation."

Read the full review at seattletimes.com.

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The previous night, Toumani had performed at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz, California. Metro Santa Cruz writer Curtis Cartier previewed the set by calling Toumani "the new gold standard for skill with the kora" and his music this way: "At times like rain on dusty fields, at others like the roar of a jungle cat, Diabaté's music is constantly surprising and inarguably brilliant."

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Previewing tonight's show at the Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis City Pages writer Rick Mason calls The Mandé Variations a "tour de force" and "a shimmering mix of traditional and startling experimental pieces played with the exquisite touch and resolute soulfulness that are his trademarks."

Mason references the Toumani's innovative blend of ancient and contemporary into something entirely new, "and essentially establishes his own avant-garde path with a pair of entirely improvised, jazz-like pieces. It's richly evocative music, whether skittering along on lightning runs or delving into enthralling melodies."

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The Chicago Tribune's Greg Kot recommends Friday's tour closer at the Old Town School of Folk Music as a "show you can't miss." He calls Toumani's first and only previous solo record, Kaira, released 20 years back, a "recording of astonishing power," one that "single-handedly put the 21-string harp on the international map," and says the new album from this "legend from Mali ... affirms that he's only gotten better and bolder, incorporating blues, flamenco and Indian music into his jaw-dropping vocabulary."

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Time Out Chicago's Craig Keller dubs Toumani "the world's greatest living virtuoso" on the kora and credits him with having made the instrument "one worthy of concert-hall respect."

Keller calls Toumani's latest album "exquisite," writing:

His technical prowess and flights of fancy lie somewhere between Hendrix and Paco de Lucía. When the simultaneous bass lines, rhythm accompaniment and solo improvisations (with, astonishingly, zero overdubs) hit at warp speed, it's clear Diabaté has evolved into a full-string orchestra unto himself.

Read the article at timeout.com/chicago.