Do You Know a Place Called Flekkeröy?

Scandinavia in recent years has provided a home for many fine African musicians and the Gambian-born Denmark-based kora player Dawda Jobarteh figures prominently among them. Many of the Scandi-based African musicians have also collaborated fruitfully with local musicians – one thinks, for example, of the teaming of the Senegalese kora player Solo Cissokho and the Swedish fiddler Ellika Frisell.

Jobarteh – whose Mande griot family are kora aristocracy in Gambia but who have lived in Denmark for more than 20 years – has also been a bold adventurer, collaborating with the likes of Danish avant-garde jazz musicians Pierre Dørge and Stefan Pasborg. His last album, 2022’s Soaring Wild Lands, teamed him with a classical string quartet and here his foil is the Norwegian trumpet player Gunnar Halle. It’s an inspired pairing and although Halle’s better-known countryman, the saxophonist Jan Garbarek, plays a different kind of horn, both men have the same ability to coax an otherworldly sound from the instrument. On tracks such as ‘Do You Know a Place Called Flekkeröy?’ (inspired by an idyllic Norwegian island) and the sombre ‘Winter Trees Standing Sleeping’, Halle’s trumpet floats hauntingly over Jobarteh’s ethereal strings, with the meditative mood only broken on the sprightly ‘Togo’, on which a balafon adds a more percussive texture.