Chamber Music
Chamber music is art music (as opposed to folk or pop musics) written for a small ensemble. World music, at the other end of the global village, is folk music played by the indigenous peoples of a region. I am indebted to Wikipedia for these singularly useless definitions, which while they may well apply to those things to which they are applicable, don’t even begin to fit the quiet glory of “Chamber Music”, the world music album by Malian kora player Ballake Sissoko and French cello player Vincent Segal. 

A kora is a 21 string West African harp, traditionally made from a bisected calabash covered with cowhide. It can be played so that it sounds like a delta blues guitar, and the Putumayo album “From Mali to Memphis” was my early initiation into that aspect of it, as was noted kora player Toumani Diabaté’s collaboration with Taj Mahal. A cello is a four string viol pitched above a double bass. Bach’s cello suites are the most famous solo cello works, though I probably really became aware of the cello through “Eleanor Rigby”, being of that age.

“Chamber Music” is not like any of this. Instead it is a quiet collaboration that engrosses the listener, drawing them into a musical conversation between the two instruments. If you like cinematic similes, this is the “My Dinner with André” of soundscapes. The music is sometimes dominated by the kora (mostly plucked) and sometimes by the cello (mostly bowed), but often is entwined sounds. One track (“Regret”) features vocalist Awa Sanagho, but otherwise the album is instrumental. 

The songs range from up to downbeat, and while there are a few other musicians and instruments on the album much of it is just kora and cello. The instruments communicate with each other, weaving a hypnotically rhythmic texture. It is difficult to describe because it is something that simply has never been done before. It is certainly not European chamber music, nor is it world music, nor is it background music, nor is it folk music. What it is is sui generis, unique of its kind. And the more I listen to this album, the more I treasure it. 

Van Morrison scathingly sings in “Show Business” how they want him to do “the next one, just like the last one.” Neil Yonge was famously bounced from his label for producing music “that didn’t sound like Neil Young music”. “Chamber Music” doesn’t sound like the last one whichever one of its pedigrees one explores, and I suspect there won’t be a next one that sounds similar, even if Sissoko and Segal do record together again. But a niche marketplace is full of diamonds that fall through cracks, and it would be your loss if this music slipped under your radar. You can hear (and see) a cut from it on Youtube, and you’ll understand the allure.