Perceptive Travel World Music Reviews
December 2010 - By Laurence Mitchell

In this issue: Garifuna meets West Africa, Afro-European chamber music, Copal, and the South Indian Nagore Sessions.

Chamber Music
Ballake Sissoko & Vincent Segal
We say: Afro-European chamber music of great loveliness

Malian Kora player Ballake Sissoko has always delighted in improbable musical fusions. A veteran of several tasteful collaborations, his back catalog includes the wonderful New Ancient Strings with Toumani Diabate in 1999, and Silk Sound with Chinese pipa player Liu Fang and French flautist Henri Tournier in 2006. In many ways, this recording echoes the same sort of gentle lyricism that graced New Ancient Strings, and the result is transcendent, floating music of great beauty. Diabate, his companion on that recording, has long been lauded as the world’s number one kora virtuoso, so it is hardly an insult to describe Sissoko as the world’s current number two. French cellist Vincent Segal is no slouch on the fusion scene either: a conservatoire-trained musician who also performs with a dub/trip hop combo that goes under the glorious name of Bumcello.

However lame – or safe – the album title might seem, African chamber music is probably the only adequate way to describe this genre. In these ten compositions, the kora and cello weave around each other, each an equal partner in the warp and weft of the melody. The two instruments are occasionally supplemented by n’goni or balafon but, to be honest, this would have been an equally fine album if it had just relied on the interplay of the two key musicians. What is remarkable is that there are few obviously distinct Western or African elements at play here, and where they do exist they often appear to have swapped roles: Sissoko’s kora sounds very much like a traditional classical harp in places, while the cello of Vincent Segal toys with upper register harmonics and meandering melodic lines that effortlessly conjure up Sub-Saharan landscapes.

There is a single vocal track, Regret – A Kader, featuring singer Awa Sangho, that strikes a slightly different chord and sounds a little more mainstream Malian than the rest of this collection but otherwise the end product is seamless fusion with no fixed geographical abode. Recorded in Bamako’s Moffou studio, founded by Salif Keita for African musicians to record acoustic music, the dynamics are warm and the recording quality finely detailed. The result is refined, subtle and intense: highly sophisticated music of the first order.