GWEN ANSELL

“Almost everything I do,” reflects musician Derek Gripper, “is rehabilitation from my first violin lessons.”

Cape-based guitar Gripper and Malian kora master Ballaké Sissoko are in Johannesburg for the final South African concerts to launch their duo album and Gripper takes the interview on the Winter-sunlit balcony of their Joburg b&b, over strong ginger tea: “I talk to English-speaking journalists; Ballaké takes care of interviews in French.”

For Gripper, the tour represents the current stage of his six-string study of the music of the 21-string African harp, which began on record with the solo One Night on Earth in 2012. For Sissoko, it marks a waypoint in the journey of a remarkable friendship between two players whose only fluent shared language is music.

Ballaké is the son of another kora master, the late Djelimady Sissoko; his cousin is the recently deceased Toumani Diabaté – whose recordings were Gripper’s first introduction to the music – and his niece is Sona Jobarteh. The collaboration with Gripper is only one of many creative relationships outside Africa he has built since he began playing professionally with the National Instrumental Ensemble of Mali in 1981, aged 13, including with bluesman Taj Mahal, flautist and composer Nicole Mitchell, French classical cellist Vincent Segal and more. In Mandinka society, he told a journalist^{[1]ballake sissoko}, “we are strongly advised to go and soak up what we can find in other places. By acquiring outside knowledge, then adding it to what you already have, you get a richer result.”

Gripper was classically trained, played bass in teenage bands, and later jazz alongside the late Robbie Jansen and Alex van Heerden. He has explored Carnatic violin and also collaborated with the late Xhosa bow player, Madosini.

These diverse musical experiences provoked questions about how he had initially been taught to conceptualise musicianship. Gripper’s teenage time in bands, for example, “cured me of sticking obsessively to a score. Since then, I’ve always been an improviser – though not the same in every context.” Transcribing and playing kora music on his guitar crystallised many of those questions and suggested a few answers.

Initially, his interest in the music on Toumani Diabaté’s recordings that led to One Night on Earth “was more to do with the musician than the instrument or the tradition – he was in my pantheon of soloists and that was my focus.” Gripper loved the melodicism of Diabaté’s composing (which facilitated transcription) and found consonances between kora and classical guitar playing. Both rely on four fingers; both employ nylon strings; “there’s a similar range – but the guitar uses a chromatic scale. Ballaké has the advantage: he can shift the scale, whereas I just hit wrong notes.”

(On the night I hear the duo perform, one of the levers that shift scales on Sissoko’s kora has been damaged: it’s a night without F sharp.)

Notions of “right” and “wrong” in music force consideration of who decides that: who is a composer; who owns music; and what is it for?

One of Gripper’s early observations was that “Toumani, Ballaké and the others are composers; their notation is the recording, not paper.” That, he feels, may be a positive. Earlier eras of Western classical music were not hostile to improvisation, “but in those days, Bach – whose music is very hospitable to improvising – hand-wrote scores on a scruffy, disposable sheet of paper. Today, the notation’s got too good.

Beautifully-printed, consistent scores condition players towards uniformity.

There’s much more to the story, of course, including the class differentiation that led to ideas of ‘High Art’ and the colonial period when it had to be asserted that ‘our music is superior.’ But now, the score literally comes first: the first thing you learn is not to play, but to read music. And that makes me – anybody who learns this way – only a second-language speaker of music. Bach or Mozart grew up in and with music, the way somebody like Ballaké did. It was their first language.”

As Sissoko puts it, “I was born with music…music is part of me.”

Gripper first met Sissoko in Copenhagen in 2016 “but just as a fan. I played for him.” In 2022, when they first assembled to play together, in Sissoko’s Paris apartment, it immediately became apparent that the two had a lot in common as musicians. “We’re both interested in the nuance of the string: touch, dynamics, time. He’s a master of nuance and timbre.”

At the same time, there were surprises. It “blew my mind that I could play absolutely anything I knew with him.” A tune like Gripper’s Koortjie, whose composition predates his kora period, and which the two perform on the current album, “became kora music. It completely dissolved that separation for me [between kora music and other music].”

As someone who grew up hearing and watching his father at home, being mentored by his uncle and others, and having to adapt quickly to working with musicians from many Malian ethnic groups in the National Ensemble, Sissoko has “practised the exercise of adapting to constant changes in scale for many years”. He explains^{[2]ballake sissoko nicole mitchell} that “In Mali, there’s no classification of music, like blues, rock and so on. Music is music.”

He, like Gripper, has used the metaphor of language to discuss playing across different traditions: “If you don’t converse with others, you can’t free yourself and evolve,” he says^{[3]15questions.net}.”[Different] tuning is not even a question…this is the way we communicate through the music. The idea of tonality is not very important because we are speaking musically and can make adjustments to each other in the moment. (…) the music…has to be open… you always have to search. You can’t say: that’s what I do and it stays that way.^{[4]Apple podcasts, op. cit.} “

But alongside openness and flexibility, there’s another element in those conversations too:

disruption.

“At base level, ” reflects Gripper, ” you need the empathy to understand what each instrument can do or not do, and look after the other, not putting them somewhere their instrument can’t handle. But also to understand how each responds to someone disrupting him. Because that’s what we do: we disrupt all the time. We’ll do the classical kora thing for a while and then somebody – usually me – disrupts by playing against something I’m hearing, and making it work. He disrupts by noticing a nuance and picking it up.”

“One must not keep one’s instrument in the barracks,”^[5]ibid. says Sissoko. “My creative challenge is to get the kora out of its natural environment.”

It’s easy to romanticise this collaboration without borders, and audience conversations around me at the Market Theatre are voluble in praise of how “seamless” the interaction between the two players and instruments feels. But listen for the disruption Gripper mentions and you’ll hear it. Quicksilver drops of musical mercury coalesce and disperse – but then something different emerges, hocketed into the spaces between, or laid across the flow. There are cooking moments of rhythmic intensity, but then phrases that were an echo are suddenly… not: they’re transformed and right at the front of the sound. A melody is challenged by dissonance or drone; both those are heard, negotiated, and welcomed in.

Remembering that jazz was born in Africa, there are parallels with the chorusing horn players behind a soloist picking up one of her phrases and improvising it into a different shape for the tune – only possible because empathy is there; because, in composer George Lewis’s words “the rest of the band has got your back.” Before the “cutting contest” was commercialised in Chicago and Kansas City, its roots lay in a far older musical tradition of conversation, encountering and accommodating difference and disruption.

When interpretation isn’t fixed; ownership becomes moot. Gripper reflects that although it’s important to acknowledge the creator of a musical idea, it feels increasingly awkward to use the phrase

‘a composition by…’

because those words displace the reality of a music’s extended communal lineage in favour of individual ownership. “These days,” he says, “I trace it back to the person I learned it from, which feels more appropriate.”

Such constant accretive and fluid re-visioning differs radically from modern musical ideas of “somebody else’s tune” or “cover version”. It illuminates why, when Gripper began crediting I Like the Motorcar – which he learned from her – to Madosini, she vehemently disagreed and insisted it was his tune. He transcribed how she played it on one occasion, and built his interpretation from that; when she played it subsequently, other ideas, contexts and experiences took her interpretation along different paths.

The construct of originality thus occupies a different frame.

Gripper says he sometimes struggles with “a kind of self-loathing”, fearing that if he sees familiar faces in an audience, he’ll disappoint them “by playing the same thing again”. He was apprehensive about playing the late Toumani Diabaté’s music with Sissoko: “I can’t throw Toumani at him!

“But then he’ll start to play what I think of as a Toumani tune, and it’s crystal-clear he doesn’t see it like that. For him it evokes the kora, the whole legacy: a much bigger thing.” As Sissoko explains, he deliberately “includes the knowledge of [my teachers] in my own playing.”^{[6]alt.Africa, op. cit.} In the narrative of the music industry, the focus is on building a career around a novel brand, “but when I ask Ballake why he plays,” says Gripper, “he simply says it’s what he does.”

The Gripper/Sissoko musical conversation offers a powerful decolonial moment in its challenge to hegemonic ideas of music as a privatised commodity.

It’s also remarkably beautiful, not because the collaboration is seamless or effortless, but because we are listening to collective effort being expended, and seams being sewn together. The technique on display is astounding, but what matters is not the ability to make six strings sound like 21, or 21 like a whole ensemble – although that happens. It rests not on deft fingers, but on open hearts: the core of the Mandinka culture and philosophy that centre Sissoko’s identity: “It’s all about dialogue and respect: the art of being yourself and being with others.^{[7]15 Questions op.cit.}”