Songs of Lake Volta

Ten years ago, Sheehan, an American composer and assistant professor of music at Duquesne University, spent six months in Ghana studying traditional music and dance. Since then he's formed the jazz/classical quintet Kinetic and composed several pieces intended to incorporate African styles into a Western musical context, culminating in Songs of Lake Volta. Subtitled Ghanaian Traditional Music Reimagined, it's a cycle of nine songs that reference Ghanaian folk sources and which are sung in various indigenous languages, although the end results have little to do with African music as most readers would understand the term.

Meandering jazz piano and rumbling double bass, a classical string quintet and the conservatoire-goes-jazz vocalese of Anqwenique Wingfield do their job well enough – even expertly – and the effect is appealing in many ways. But the key really is in the word ‘reimagined,’ which can cover a multitude of crimes. If Joseph Sheehan's vision was to do for West African traditional music what Vaughan Williams did for the English folk tradition, Songs of Lake Volta sadly doesn't even come close.