Bamako Chicago Sound System

In the summer of 2017, kora maestro Ballaké Sissoko and American jazz flautist Nicole Mitchell were commissioned by Chicago’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival to premiere a collaborative project joining the dots between West African griot tradition and Black America’s blues/jazz lineage. Augmented by balafon player Fassery Diabaté and backing singers Fatim Kouyaté and Mankwe Ndosi and the avant jazz duo of guitarist Jeff Parker and bassist Joshua Abrams among others, Sissoko and Mitchell also entered the studio to record the project. On ‘Tara’, Sissoko’s group takes the lead. Elsewhere, on ‘Spicy Jambalaya’, Mitchell’s astral jazz accents set the tone. At best, as on ‘Bamako Chicago’, the combined ensemble is indivisibly one, riffing cosmically over a vibrant groove driven equally by Diabaté’s balafon and the jazz percussion of JoVia Armstrong. No idea why it has taken seven years to get a release, but we should be grateful it has, for this is fusion at its finest and most organic.