It isn’t often that you hear music that is quite literally unlike anything else you’ve heard before, but that is the case with Ballaké Sissoko and Derek Gripper’s self-titled album of kora and guitar music – or more accurately, kora music played on guitar and kora. After playing just two concerts together in Paris and London in late 2022, the pair spent less than three hours improvising the album’s seven instrumental tracks. “Musically, we tested each other,” Sissoko said, while Gripper said of Sissoko, “He’s an amazing interpreter, the prime master of timbre”.
Mali’s Ballaké Sissoko comes from a traditional griot background; his father Djelimady recorded Ancient Strings, regarded as the first significant kora release, in 1970 with Sidiki Diabaté, father of Toumani Diabaté who died shockingly young at the age of 58 last month. Ballaké and Toumani reprised their father’s pivotal album with the influential New Ancient Strings in 1999. In addition to many critically acclaimed solo albums, Ballaké is no stranger to collaborating with others, including with French cellist Vincent Segal and with Madagascar’s Rajery (on valiha) and Morocco’s Driss El Maloumi (on oud) in 3MA.
Classical-trained guitarist Derek Gripper is from South Africa. Besides performing and recording his guitar transcriptions of Bach’s violin and cello music, he became enchanted with the kora after hearing Toumani Diabaté’s music, going on to record two albums of kora music transcribed for guitar – One Night on Earth: Music From the Strings of Mali (2012) and Libraries on Fire (2016) – featuring the compositions of legendary Diabate, Sissoko, Ali Farka Toure and Segal. When Toumani Diabate heard Gripper’s recordings, he asked producer, radio presenter, and SOAS Professor of Music Lucy Duran to confirm that she had actually seen one person play that music on just one guitar. Gripper’s 2020 Year of Swimming album included songs by Baaba Maal, Mansour Seck, and Salif Keita, and he made a previous, less improvisational, guitar/kora album, Mali in Oak, with Tunde Jegede in 2017.
A fluttering kora gently starts off the opening track, Ninkoy, one of three joint compositions. The guitar and kora soon echo each other’s delicate refrains, like an aural image of two butterflies chasing each other. The tune shifts as the melody changes direction, and things become more rhythmic. Koortjie, written by Gripper and previously recorded by him on Year of Swimming, conversely sets off like the playful soundtrack to a Buster Keaton silent movie, a weaving pulse running throughout the track, guitar and kora trading the lead on the tune, and at times almost like a John Martyn loop.
Sissoko’s more typically kora tune Maimouna, which he recorded on his 2012 album At Peace, is also revisited here, the delicious runs of notes making it quite impossible to distinguish one instrument from another. Both re-makings are immediately identifiable as the same tune, but with the added depth that comes from the combination of the two instruments sharing higher and lower reaches of the register; comparison of the versions of each track serves to exemplify the degree to which Gripper can make his guitar sound like a kora.
Daraka, another joint composition, is initially underpinned by a bowed cello-sounding rhythm from Sissoko on kora, sounding like an irregular heartbeat; and with Gripper’s guitar, full of flamenco flourishes, they both gradually become more interlaced through an animated improvisational, more jazzy, second half.
Describing the specifics of the music seems almost beside the point. There is such depth and imagination in every track that you hear quite different things on each listen, and doubtless, each listener will appreciate distinct nuances in music. Sissoko isn’t playing his kora here as you might expect; he is, in a sense, re-inventing the kora, the innovation necessary to commune with Gripper’s re-imagined classical guitar, which is mostly more kora-like than the kora. As Lucy Durán puts it: “It’s the furthest away that Ballaké has gone from his own idiom, and it’s brilliant – not world music, it’s in a totally different realm, entering new territory”.
These maestros emerge from quite different and distant musical worlds (and they don’t share a common spoken language), but Ballaké Sissoko & Derek Gripper is not a meeting of traditions; instead, their sparkling improvisation, played on Sissoko’s twenty-one strings and Gripper’s six, pushes the kora tradition into a brand new musical space.
Ballaké Sissoko & Derek Gripper (2024) Matsuli Music
Bandcamp: https://matsulimusic.bandcamp.com/album/ballak-sissoko-derek-gripper