Kananayé

This album has its origins in a project commissioned for a 2019 festival in Burkina Faso in which French singer and flautist Clotilde Rullaud worked with guitarist Abdoulaye Traore and percussionist Achille Nacoulma. It went well enough for the trio to expand to a quintet with the addition of Seydou ‘Kanazoé’ Diabaté on balafon and Boubacar Djiga on kunde, a Burkinabé version of the ngoni. Over further meetings their jams were finessed into the more formal compositions and arrangements heard here. Recorded in Brussels, the Burkinabé contingent create a pleasing soundbed that draws on a variety of West African styles from Mande tradition to Sahelian blues over which Rullaud delivers her lyrics, mostly in French. On the trance-like ‘Garibou’ and a striking cover of Nina Simone’s ‘Sea Lion Woman’ her singing is formidable but for much of the time she relies on a mannered form of recitative that frustratingly doesn’t quite ring true.