Playing the much harder to amplify kora, of course, Toumani doesn’t get the chance to sling in stinging lead breaks, but through everything I’ve heard him collaborating on he manages to sneak things into the mix in much the same way as Mr Randolph. One suspects peer group recognition of this ability has a lot to do with frequent invitations to collaborate.
This time around, however, it seems to have been Toumani doing the inviting. After collaborating with Sao Paulo alternative rocker, songwriter, poet and artist Arnaldo Antunes and guitarist Edgard Scandurra at the 2010 Back2Black festival in Brazil, he invited the pair to record with him in Mali. They arrived in Bamako in April 2011 with a collection of songs they had written, and the result, once they’d got together with Diabaté and a selection of other Malian musicians, is an Afro-Brazilian fusion that doesn’t work in quite the same way as Kulanjan or Afrocubism.
Where those other collaborations brought traditional material from both sides of the fence and blurred them in together, here we’re looking at new territory as the Brazilian vibe is set against a different backdrop rather than taking a bit of samba and slipping it in among the Africanisms. We’re looking, in effect, at a Brazilian record with added tonality through the kora and balafon though there’s a reworking of Diabate's Kaira, and African vocals and instrumentation come to the fore on Ir, Mao.