“The music takes me over. I dive in so deep that I go into a trance… Music is who I am” | Rokia Koné interview

Sometimes, when I’m singing, the music takes me over,” says Rokia Koné, sitting straight-backed at home in Bamako, Mali. “I dive in so deep that I go into a trance. It’s all to do with my love for music.” A smile. “Music is who I am.” Blessed with a voice that uplifts and mesmerises, a voice that, overheard, prompts gasps and double takes, Rokia, 37, came early to song. Her maternal grandmother, Fatoumata Diarra, is a wedding singer, and her aunts and uncles on both sides sing. But it was Rokia’s talent that stopped the people of Dioro – a town on the banks of the Niger River in Ségou region of south-central Mali – in their tracks.

She sang for the community. Aged nine, she headlined a concert for the Red Cross. When the bright lights of Bamako beckoned, she went. After a stint as a backing vocalist for popular singer and guitarist Aliya Coulibaly, a mentor, she went solo, her rise to fame swift, her reputation not without controversy. The city’s grapevine pulsed with gossip about the antics of this tiny chanteuse with the butterfly tattooed on her arm, a performer whose charisma and big, bold voice commanded the attention of late night crowds at outdoor clubs such as Douly and Radio Libre. In 2016 she joined the all-female West African super group Les Amazones d’Afrique, kick-starting a series of events so serendipitous they seem divinely orchestrated.

Now comes BAMANAN, Rokia’s long-awaited international debut. Released on Real World Records and accompanied by visuals shot in Senegal, the record is a joint project with Jacknife Lee – the Irish producer behind albums for pop and rock music giants, from REM and the Killers to U2 and Taylor Swift. An unlikely pairing, sure, but a creatively fruitful one: BAMANAN has the feel of a West African classic. Or at least, of a West African classic, refreshed.

Sung in the Bamana language (called Bamanankan by its speakers), BAMANAN’s ten songs see traditional percussion and the ringing West African guitar of Salif Koné (no relation) blending with Lee’s synths, keyboards and drum programming in ways subtle and innovative. It’s an album made all the more remarkable for the fact that Rokia Koné and Jacknife Lee haven’t ever actually met.

“The only Rokia I needed to know was the Rokia behind the microphone,” says Lee, surrounded by instruments and technical equipment in his fairy light-lit studio in California’s semi-remote Topanga Canyon. It was there that he reworked a clutch of songs recorded by Rokia over several years: chopping, re-arranging and reverse engineering while maintaining the singer’s essence. “Rokia is such an expressive singer. I had a real sense of spirits speaking through her, of a baton being passed.”

“I worked intensively on her music,” he adds, “spending days and nights in the studio. Going through 20 seconds of her music would take me around half an hour.” Isolating a drum part, looping the guitar, laying down some synth pads. “I’d make sure each song had a signature quality then go purely on instinct.” The pandemic ostensibly kept them apart, but Lee prefers working in isolation. “My biggest breakthroughs happen when the musicians aren’t there. I think Rokia respected me enough to leave me alone.”

Today, at home in Bamako, Rokia is surrounded. Her manager Aba Sangaré is with her, battling to set up a connection on Zoom and switching to WhatsApp instead. Myself, Odhrán Mullan from Real World Records and Bamako-born cultural commentator Wilfred Wiley, who’s translating, are in the UK. Valérie Malot from French agency 3D Family, the woman who both facilitated Rokia’s studio recordings and invited her to join Les Amazones, is in Paris.

For the first half hour all we see is an empty chair, which makes us wonder which Rokia we’re about to get: Mali’s beloved Rose of Bamako? The wild Rokia of yore? Or shy Rokia, overawed by such mighty Les Amazones bandmates as the great jelimuso (female griot) Kandia Kouyaté? The spooky Rokia of the djinn-led trances? (“If you want a singing career in Mali you need a bit of witchcraft on your side,” she has said.) The famously plain-speaking Rokia, telling it like it is on subjects from alcohol (she admits to a drink to combat stage fright) and Mali’s oh-so-common inter-diva rivalry (“futile and detrimental to Malian music”) to women’s rights (“I call on men to get involved in works that educate and protect women”)?

When Rokia eventually takes her seat she’s reserved, and reassuringly prismatic. Her delay isn’t to do with any diva leanings but her fourth, youngest child, a girl born at the start of the pandemic. She’s placed within reach but out of WhatsApp sight, audibly sucking a dummy; Rokia bends down to attend to her whenever Wiley translates her responses.

One key interview question defies a forthright answer: the meaning behind ‘N’yanyan’, the title of the album’s first single. ‘N’yanyan’ is a well-known ancient song that probably dates back to the 13th century and the beginning of Sunjata Keita’s Malian empire, a lamban dance song written in praise of music and evolving with several slightly different variations. ‘The griots were asked, ‘Where does N’yanyan come from?’ They replied to me, ‘No one knows the origins of N’yanyan’,’ sings Rokia in a voice that seems to come from long ago, the ideal conduit for lyrics whose existentialist themes tell of the ephemeral nature of life. ‘N’yanyan, this life is passing. It’s only a moment in time.’

It’s a beautiful song, lovingly rendered by Rokia and accompanied by a video filmed with drones, imagination and several costume changes at Gorée Island Cinema, the mansion house owned by Senegalese filmmaker Joe Gaï Ramaka, the video’s director. Rokia had recorded the vocals in a single take in Bamako on August 17 2020, the evening before a coup that triggered a power cut, a curfew and more upheaval for an already beleaguered Mali. “I don’t know much about politics but like many, I was worried,” she says. “We Malians are used to things changing dramatically. As long as we can find food, I feel okay. And as ‘N’yanyan’ tells us,” she adds sagely, “each difficulty will pass.”

A tribute to the Bamana, the Mande ethnic group particular to southern Mali, BAMANAN invokes Rokia’s ancestors on a trilogy of repertoire staples (‘Anw Tile’, ‘Soyi N’galanba’ and ‘Bambougou N’tji’) that praise the kings of Ségou’s past. “‘Bambougou’ has these strange grooves going on, with that extraordinary voice in the middle,” says Lee. Elsewhere among the album’s ten tracks are songs that warn against disrespectful husbands and jealous co-wives, and ‘Mansa Soyari’, composed by Rokia for Les Amazones, namechecks heroines including singers Ramata Diakité and Fanta Damba as it tells Malian herstory. “If you are inspired by somebody” – today Rokia references traditional singer and protofeminist Molobaly Traoré from Macina in the Ségou region – “you must not imitate what they do. You have to do it [in your own style] right, and well.”

The album is a paean to the griots, the hereditary praise singers, quarrel solvers and keepers of the flame. “The griots remind us of our origins,” says Rokia, who was not born a griot (Koné is not a griot surname, unlike Kouyaté), but is a noble who borrows, as is common, from griot techniques. Or if you like, Koné is a griot through dedication and practice – a state of affairs whose origins are explained by late Malian diva Bako Dagnon in Lucy Durán’s award-winning 2016 film Voice of Tradition: “There was a need for someone to foster good relations in the community. Nyakoma Doka Kouyaté [an original griot to Sunjata Keita] was chosen but it became too much for him alone… so it was decided that each household should put a person forward to help Nyakoma Doka fulfil his role of making Mande a better place.”

It’s all a far cry from Jacknife Lee’s home studio in Topanga Canyon and the album that is launching Rokia to the world. How this improbable alliance came about is a story with several subplots, one of which finds Valérie Malot upstairs at Radio Libre, the Bamako nightclub owned by Ivorian reggae star Tiken Jah Fakoly, gasping on hearing the voice of the singer who’d arrived onstage below.

“Her show was astounding. It had blues, jazz and almost psychedelic trance,” explains Malot. “When I said I wanted to record her I was told she is wild, unmanageable, mistrustful of Europeans after recording tracks for a French producer then never hearing back. But that voice! I knew we had to try. We integrated Rokia into Les Amazones and began a real professional relationship. We taught her about arriving on time for soundchecks and waking up early; she’d been living in the night, beginning concerts at 1am. We made a couple of European tours and she was great. I went back to Bamako to record an album with an American artist but he cancelled, so I had a studio free.” Rokia laid down several tracks over four days, in 40-plus degree heat. “Rokia’s music is based on improvisation,” Malot continues. “She gives everything when she sings, and in order to do this has to make herself vulnerable. We knew early on that magic had been captured. But then life got in the way.”

Malot took the recordings back to Paris, stuck them in a drawer and – busy with the demands of Les Amazones’ second album Amazones Power – left them there. In April 2020, as lockdown began to bite, Real World partnered with Universal Audio on a remix competition featuring Les Amazones’ single ‘Love’. One of the judges was Jacknife Lee. “I heard this guitar part that was amazing, and I wanted to tell the person who did it how much I liked it,” says Lee. “I contacted Odhrán who put me in touch with Valérie, who told me it was Salif Koné, the lead guitarist for an artist called Rokia Koné. She said they’d started an album and needed help to finish it.”

Lee was in the right headspace, at the right time. Having jettisoned his days of overwork, of saying yes to every project (“it takes a lot out of you”), he had been teaching music production to teenagers, inviting the likes of Zimbabwean Afro-fusionists Mokoomba to his studio and recalling how he felt when he first heard the artists that shaped his love of music. “As a kid I remember turning on BBC TV one night to find a large fat man sitting, surrounded by people, all singing. It blew me away. It was Nusrat [Fateh Ali Khan],” remembers Lee, who promptly bought Mustt Mustt, the qawwali fusion album, a collaboration between Nusrat and Canadian producer Michael Brook that was released on Real World in 1990. “His singing felt close to God. The reason people build cathedrals. It was a spontaneous sound like an original thought, spiritual as well as physical, in the way that, say, Fela Kuti is. And when I heard the extraordinary voice of Rokia on ‘Anw Tile’, the first song I was sent, I knew how I wanted the album to feel. I wanted to hold onto the toes of Nusrat.” A grin. “Or just under the ankle.”

To find his way in, Lee cracked the songs open, adding, subtracting and moving things around Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry-style, finding tempos to work with. And while he’s more pained than intimidated by music purists he felt nervous about making a record for Real World, given his emotional/musical associations. “I’m just so glad it worked out; it sounds even better than I’d hoped. But I’ve never been one to learn lessons. If I were starting another Rokia record, I wouldn’t have a clue. I don’t know how I did this one.”

Back in Bamako, her youngest now seated on her lap, Rokia smiles and makes a face when asked her first impression of BAMANAN. “Shock. It sounded strange. But my manager reminded me that it is a collaboration, and for an audience outside Mali. He encouraged me to be open. Now I have grown to love the music, and the new palette it brings to the music of Mali and, God willing, the new opportunities for my career.”

Lee and Rokia hope to meet onstage in London and Paris in April, pandemic pending. He’s nervous, I say, and she laughs. “Tell him not to be worried,” she says. “When you love music like we do, everything comes to you naturally.”

Read the review of BAMANAN in the Songlines Reviews Database

This interview originally appeared in the March 2022 issue of Songlines magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today