Jayme Stone & Yacouba Sissoko
Two-time Juno Award winning banjoist Jayme Stone and Malian kora master Yacouba Sissoko build a boundary-crossing musical bridge from Africa to Appalachia in their groundbreaking collaboration.
Jayme Stone keeps an ear to the ground. His curiosity and unlikely set of reference points started early with the quirky physics of the banjo, led to a mysterious librarian who stocked his local public library with a vast trove of banjo recordings, and landed him long-lasting lessons with a series of maestros, from Béla Fleck to Bill Frisell. Influenced by Japanese poetry and Brazilian literature and featuring what he calls a “tiny symphony that takes place inside an imaginary light bulb”, Stone’s album, The Utmost, won the 2008 Juno Award for Instrumental Album of the Year.
The most recent chapter in Stone’s musical travelogue takes place in Africa. He went knowing what’s still news to most: that the hide-covered instrument with an “extra” drone string we call the banjo actually comes from West Africa. He became particularly curious about the music that may not have made it across the ocean on slave ships headed west from Senegal and Mali in the 1700-1800’s. An eight-week trip to Mali was supported by a prestigious Chalmers Arts Fellowship and found Stone sitting in with Toumani Diabate and the Symmetric Orchestra in downtown Bamako, lost in circles of Wassoulou polyrhythms and in a rural Dogon village with no electricity where he inadvertently discovered a banjo predecessor unheard of in the West. The resulting album, Africa to Appalachia, featuring kora player Mansa Sissoko, ngoni master Bassekou Kouyate and fiddle pioneer Casey Driessen, won the 2009 Juno Award for World Music Album of the Year.
Yacouba Sissoko was born in Kita, Mali and is a master kora player from the Djeli griot tradition. Yacouba attended the Institut National des Arts du Mali in Bamako. After his graduation, he played with Ami Koita, Kandia Kouyate,l’Ensemble Instrumental du Mali, among others. In his career, he has traveled to almost every nation on the African continent, as well as most of Europe, Canada, the US and Australia. He is in demand as one of the best kora players in the world, performing and recording with the likes of Paul Simon, Regina Carter, Harry Belafonte and many others.
