Afrissippi

Guelel Kumba began his musical odyssey as little more than a toddler, when he picked up the one-string molo guitar that accompanies the griots in his family. He started on the more modern six-string version at eight but, according to his website, it was the meeting with the music of John Lee Hooker at the age of 20 that opened his eyes to the music from the other side of the Atlantic. His priority at the time, however, was his studies and he spent years studying sociology in the French capital before returning to a career as an artist.

It is not clear what initially brought Kumba over to the Deep South town of Oxford, USA. However, a jam session with country bluesman Eric Deaton suddenly opened up possibilities of symbiosis between the latter’s electric blues and Kumba’s griot heritage. Deaton introduced the Senegalese guitarist to the late RL Burnside, doyen of the hill country boogie and cottonpatch trance blues. They noticed similarities between their respective musical traditions that undoubtedly find root in the slave period centuries before. The result of the collaboration is summed up with the following words on the band’s website: “Afrissippi channels ancient boogie music and today’s Mississippi hill country groove (...) to give birth to a new sound.”

Kumba’s first recording Fulani Journey is enhanced by the presence of some of the region’s sharpest musicians, including saxophone legend Herman Green (former collaborator with Miles Davis, BB King and Lionel Hampton), drummers Kinney Kimbrough and Cedric Burnside (son of RL), as well as the Taylor Grocery Band. The unlikely combination of two traditions an ocean apart has been applauded by American critics, one of whom writes Fulani Journey’s “idiosyncratic vitality suggests that the blues in its many guises will continue to find its own way, looking back while moving forward.”

May 2007

Daniel Brown

Artist website