Ballaké Sissoko and Vincent Segal – Chamber Music

Bamako, Mali – the country’s capital and the uniting thread between the only two Africa-related albums I’ve heard so far this year. Dirtmusic’s album BKO was named after the code for the city’s international airport, whilst Chamber Music was recorded at the Bamako’s Salif Keita studios. This album is a collaboration between Ballaké Sissoko and Vincent Segal, the former one of Mali’s foremost players of the kora (a type of 21-string harp-lute native to West Africa), the latter the French cellist from the band Bumcello.

Chamber Music has no overdubs and was recorded in only a few sessions, completely unadorned but for a few guests, such as Ivorian singer Awa Sangho, who puts in a haunting performance on ‘Regret-á Kader Barry’. Consequently, this is a naked record with a deeply naturalistic sound, bereft of any attempts to make it more “marketable”. Fans of its primary musicians appreciative of their skills will already be interested, but it’s hard to imagine newcomers taking to Chamber Music very easily.

Although the collaboration with Sangho is admirably inviting in the same way as Peter Gabriel’s efforts at introducing African music to western audiences – for example – the rest of the album has a kind of sober tenseness and seriousness which makes it a challenging listen. Tracks like the closer here, ‘Mako Mady’, are wonderfully played but unwind lazily over six, fairly languid, minutes. That the preceding tracks are mostly in the same vein means that, understandably, a lot of listeners may not make it that far. This is not an entry-level African/French instrumental album, if there is such a thing. Fans of the men involved will no doubt lap this up, as will seasoned veterans of this style of sounds, but this is a challenging and forbidding gateway for anyone in search of an entry point to African music.