Faya

New Yorker Joe Driscoll (now based in the UK and part of the One Taste collective) and Sekou Kouyaté, the kora player with Guinea’s Ba Cissoko, met at the Nuits Métis festival in France, spent a week jamming together and were so pleased with the results that they decided to record what came out. Driscoll’s 2011 album Mixtape Champs was described by reviewers as a mix of rap, nu-blues, folk, rock and turntabling with a dash of world music thrown in. His willingness to trample down musical boundaries calls to mind Damon Albarn’s inventiveness. Kouyaté, as he has shown with his electrified, effects-laden kora playing with Ba Cissoko, is also a great experimenter. The nine tracks they recorded together fill just over half an hour and betray their jamming origins, cooking up the kind of reggae/Afro-beat/hip-hop/global rock soup that is usually the default setting when musicians who do not share a common culture or language get together. There are some fantastic moments, however, full of explosive energy; Driscoll’s rapid-fire rhyming is echoed by Kouyaté’s lightning-fast kora licks on the opener ‘Tanama’, while his rapping on songs such as ‘Passport’ and ‘Ghetto Mary’ exhibit a powerful social conscience.