“Darling, I love you to death! This sentence, sung by Mariam on M’Bife Blues, takes on all the more meaning since 4 April 2025, the date of the death of the man with whom she has built a life: Amadou. “With you, darling, life is beautiful… Life is so good”., she insists on Sabali, a song written by herself, like a call to appeasement, to patience, which once in the hands of Damon Albarn will become a superlative hit. With its synthetic layers, cosmic loops and basic chorus, Sabali had everything to please, without betraying the essence of Mariam’s personality, for whom music is above all a link between everyone. A story of serenity that rhymes with a story of eternity.

That’s why there was no question of the story ending there. Even his guitarist counterpart would not have agreed. Of course, as they often liked to say, Amadou & Mariam were a complementary pair both in town and on stage, but each had developed his own taste for music, even before they sealed their destiny.

For Mariam Doumbia, born in Bamako on 15 April 1958, singing began at the age of 6, taking part in local weddings and christenings. And then there was

the Institute for Young Blind People in Mali’s capital, which she joined in 1973. “After classes, I used to sing and dance with some of the pupils, and we ended up setting up an orchestra at. I composed all the songs”, she recalls a few years ago. It was there that the future diva met the man of her life, with whom she married on 8 July 1980. We know the rest: forty-five years of shared feelings, between the placid Amadou and the tempestuous Mariam, two characters for one hell of a soundtrack.

Until the spring of 2025, when Amadou Bagayoko left for a long solo trip. As for Mariam, she will be back on the road, still accompanied by her faithful musicians, carrying the melodies that have made the couple a success, withJe pense à toi and Beaux Dimanches topping the list, but also the songs that make up the repertoire of the new album, due for release this autumn, at the same time as a documentary revisits her exceptional career on Netflix.  The title? « L’Amour à la folie ». A whole programme to discover on stage.