If you travel around the villages of West Africa, you will hear music played with a raw and earthy vigour; it’s easy to imagine that this music has remained unchanged for centuries, handed down over the generations in the griot tradition. Yet when the same music is recorded in a studio, it invariably sounds different. Even if you find a producer who resists the temptation to add overdubs and layers of digital sophistication, the musicians themselves seem to perform differently. The Malian griot Baba Sissoko and his mother, Djeli Mah Damba Koroba, have made a rare recording that captures the unmediated spirit of rural African music. Sissoko now lives in Italy and these eight tracks were recorded in Bamako’s Studio Bogolan – the finest in Mali – but you’d never guess. The veteran Koroba sings with a natural, throaty sensuality that has never bothered with the niceties of microphone technique, on a set of simple melodies, which Sissoko, in his liner notes, recalls her singing at Bamana ceremonies when he was still a child. He accompanies her on gloriously scratchy ngoni (lute), Zoumana Tereta scrapes away on a single-string soukou fiddle and various other family members provide percussion on tama and calabash.

The other side of Sissoko’s diverse musical personality can be heard on his solo album, African Griot Groove. Backed by electric bass and guitar and full drum kit, it’s an upbeat, hybrid affair packed with thrilling moments and some dazzling interplay between Sissoko’s ngoni and the electrified Western instruments. There’s no reason to choose between the two discs, which set out to perform quite different functions. But there’s something about the simple, minimalist honesty of the first disc that’s hard to beat.