Live in Turku

Bliss it must have been to have attended the Finnish jazz festival where this live set was recorded featuring the Gambian kora virtuoso Dawda Jobarteh and the well-travelled Danish jazz drummer Stefan Pasborg. Jobarteh, who has lived in Denmark since 1999 and is an uncle to both Toumani Diabaté and Sona Jobarteh, is a longtime Songlines favourite, both for his traditional kora playing and his bold collaborations with Scandinavian jazzers, such as the Norwegian trumpet player Gunnar Halle. Here he plays electric kora through a bunch of effects pedals so that on tracks such as ‘Folkman’, ‘Better Git It in Your Soul’ and ‘Go Daw’ – all of which are furiously improvised psych-rock ‘ramalams’ – you wouldn’t even know it was a kora. On ‘Togo’ – which includes a crashing drum solo à la Ginger Baker – you can just about tell that Jobarteh is playing a traditional African stringed instrument but it is only on the gentler ‘I Met Her by the River’ and ‘Bamananyanke’ that the Mandinka kora tradition is really evident. Purists will probably hate it – but for the rest of us the explosive sonic assault of Jobarteh and Pasborgs’s Afro-futurism is nothing less than thrilling.