A 'mini-festival' offers Irish audiences a rare opportunity to explore two sides of the contemporary world music coin, writes Arminta Wallace

AS ANYONE WHO knows anything about world music will happily tell you, Mali is where it's at. This week, however, Dublin is where it's at - because by a happy accident, the city is playing host to two nights of top-notch Malian music in a row. On Wednesday, Dee Dee Bridgewater will perform with a 10-piece band at the National Concert Hall, while on Thursday, Bassekou Kouyate and his ngoni quartet will be in action at The Button Factory. Whether it's down to coincidence or the largesse of some unknown world music god, this Mali "mini-festival" offers Irish audiences a rare opportunity to explore two sides of the contemporary world music coin; to contrast the fiery jazz-world fusion of Bridgewater's Red Earth project with the cool elegance of the instrumental interweavings on Kouyate's album Segu Blue.

For those who know Dee Dee Bridgewater as one of the world's most successful jazz singers, with a Grammy award-winning Ella Fitzgerald tribute CD to her credit - as well as a Tony award for her performance in the Broadway production The Wiz and a regular slot as presenter of National Public Radio's weekly Jazzset programme - the question must be: what is she doing playing Malian music? "I went to Mali because I was trying to figure out what part of Africa my ancestors came from," she says. "I first had the idea of doing an African project in 1996, after I did a Horace Silvers tribute album. His music was so syncopated that I fell in love with rhythm and wanted to understand polyrhythms and the layering of different rhythm patterns."

She mentioned this to her Italian agent, who said there was a talking drum player from Mali she should meet. "So he brought Baba Sissoko to one of my concerts, and Baba brought his tamani, and I invited him on stage," she remembers. "And our connection was so strong my band was looking at me, like, 'what's happened to you? What's going on here?'" It wasn't that the members of Bridgewater's band weren't used to cross-cultural influences. "I have a Puerto Rican pianist. I have an Argentinian percussionist. My bass player is half- African-American, half-Swedish, was born in France, grew up in Germany and lived in Indonesia."

BUT THE CONNECTION with Baba Sissoko was, she says, something different. "I can't explain it. It was like finding a brother, or a family member. It was like he knew where I was going." At another level, perhaps he understood where she was coming from. One of the strongest musical traditions in Mali is that of the griots - families of singers whose job it is to preserve the rich tradition of griot songs, some of which date back to the 11th century, but also to add new material to advance the tradition. Bridgewater was instinctively drawn to this particular musical style - which came as no surprise to her Malian collaborators. In fact, they regard her as a modern griot: someone whose life's work has been to keep the vocal jazz tradition alive, while simultaneously moving it into the 21st century.

"So now," Bridgewater says, "Baba is going to sing about the things that I have done so that in Africa, people will know my name. The song, Dee Dee, that he wrote for me, is actually welcoming me back to my ancestral home." It's a hugely emotional business - but griot singing also has its mischevious side. Both Sissoko and Mamani Keita, the griot singer who sings Dee Dee on the album, will accompany Bridgewater to Dublin. "They add more stuff to this song all the time," says Bridgewater with a chuckle. "They change the lyrics around - I don't know what they're saying to me. They've only given me a kind of generalised translation, because they say there are some phrases which are totally impossible to translate from Bambara." The problem of translation is a familiar one in world music - and it doesn't just apply to words. To bring musicians from such vastly different worlds together, and make the fusion work, is a pretty tall order.

"I would say that it was easier for the African musicians to come into our world than it was for us to go into theirs," says Bridgewater. "They play from a very instinctive place. They don't read music; they rely on their ears and their guts. Now that's the way I learned, because I don't read music either. So their approach is very similar to mine. But they're so used to griot music, which is very free and improvised, that they don't understand structure. For them, an arrangement is something foreign. It was easy for them to come in and provide Malian rhythms and everything like that. What was very difficult for them - and still is - is to respect an arrangement."

Given these difficulties, Red Earth's reworking of such songs as Four Women, written in the mid-1960s by Nine Simone, is all the more remarkable. The lyrics, which sketch the lives of four African-American women, pack a powerful punch in their own right - and are interpreted with searing intensity by Bridgewater. Also woven into the fabric of the song, however, are solos from iconic instruments both of the Western tradition - the piano - and of Malian tradition, in the shape of the balafon or wooden xylophone, and the 21-string African harp, the kora. It's an evocative combination which offers a glimpse, in musical terms, of just how much of a rollercoaster this Malian journey has been for Bridgewater.

"It has blown my brain, emotionally and spiritually," she says. "So much so, that at the end of this year I'm going to take a break. I'm going to have a year's sabbatical. It's just so much information, so much cultural difference and yet so many deep connections, it's, it's . . . phew!"

BORN IN MEMPHIS, Bridgewater grew up in Michigan to a jazz soundtrack. "My father was a trumpeter and music teacher, and when my mother was pregnant with me, her favourite singer was Ella Fitzgerald," she says. "She swears I could scat before I could speak." Yet here she is, putting down deep roots in the red earth of Mali - a long, long way from Michigan. Or maybe not. "I've met so many people in Mali who look like members of my family, or who look like people I know, that I believe a large part of the African-American community is of Malian descent," she says.

The next step, she says, is to go the DNA route and find out for sure about her African ancestry. "Now that it's cheap," she adds, with another chuckle. "When Oprah Winfrey did the DNA thing it cost, like, $20,000 (€12,870). Now you can send a swab of saliva in a ziplock bag for $250 (€160) and they can trace it. So I'm gonna do that, and we'll see what happens." In the course of her explorations and assimilations, has Bridgewater come to any conclusions about why the music of Mali, so particular a soundscape, so rooted in Africa, speaks so loudly to the urban Western world? "I think it's because the slave trade brought people to the United States from the region that is Mali today," she says. "Slaves from West Africa were taken to Mississippi and Arkansas, and the Mississippi delta blues is, I believe, an extension of Malian music. When I improvise in vocal jazz, that's an extension of the griot tradition."

Musically and spiritually, it's a combination of something new and something very old; a soundscape that is both familiar and excitingly different. "When people see the show and hear the music, they get the connection," says Bridgewater. "And now that we've been touring together for over a year, it's a seamless kind of connection that we've got. You can't tell where the jazz ends and the Malian music begins."

Dee Dee Bridgewater plays the National Concert Hall on Wed as part of the Waltons World Masters series. Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni ba play The Button Factory on Thurs.

BASSEKOU KOUYATE comes from Segu, a region of Mali whose music has been described as sounding like "an African blues". But in truth, it's the other way round - what we call the blues derived from the music of Segu, and one of the reasons we enjoy Malian music so much is that Western ears are subconsciously attuned to it.

"If you were to go to Segu tomorrow and find an old griot," says Bassekou, "and ask him to play Korossenkoro - a traditional tune - you would think you were listening to John Lee Hooker. But if you asked the old griot to play 'the blues', he wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about."

Bassekou grew up in a small village on the banks of the Niger river. "My father was a griot, my great-grandfathers were griot," he says. It's a dynamic tradition.

"My grandfather played with two strings, my father with four. I play with four, seven, nine strings. I'm trying to put the ngoni on the international stage." But while the playing style - and the instrument itself - changes, the lyrics of the songs form a still point of reference.

"For example, the song Jonkoloni, on our album Segu Blue, is from the 17th century, from the Bamana Empire. If you were to listen to the traditional version and the version I have created, they are two different songs. But the words are the same."

In 1998, Bassekou was invited to play with Toumani Diabate at a festival in Belgium - Bassekou's first concert outside Africa, and his introduction to creating music for an audience outside griot culture. He went on to make several albums with Toumani Diabate.

The following year, when he went to Tennessee to work on a film about the roots of the banjo, he met Taj Mahal - and made an album, Kulanjan, with him, too.

But it was Ali Farka Toure who urged Bassekou to record his own album. "On his last album, Savane, he gave me a lot of space to play. I believe he did that to make the world know about the ngoni."

So Bassekou created the band Ngoni ba - "the big ngoni" - using four ngonis. "I decided to see if it works — and it has," he says. It has worked all right - their debut album, Segu Blue, won two awards, including album of the year, at the recent

BBC Radio Three World Music Awards, and Bassekou is being hailed as the next big name in Malian music.

So is his wife, the vocalist Amy Sacko, who will be with him on stage in Dublin, and whose presence adds even more dynamism to the live experience.

Bassekou, meanwhile, is sanguine about the way his career has blossomed."In Malian music, we work hard to develop the spirit of people - to create music which relaxes you, to wake the mind. We don't only create music for dancing. It's music for the spirit and the soul," he says.