The regular Sunday night session at Ronnie Scott's is a good setting for Kandia Kouyaté's stately brand of world music, as well as her predominantly acoustic band, which includes five instrumentalists and a backing singer, Maimouna Sissoko, who spends most of the time gyrating to the gentle rhythms. Kouyaté is a griot, a musical storyteller, and for most of her career she has relied on the sponsorship of the rich upper classes of Mali rather than the uncertain pickings of the international music business.
In this famous club, decorated with monochrome photographs of jazz royalty - Duke, Count, Lady Day - Kouyaté bestows a further reflected nobility upon the audience, even though most of us, dressed for a cold night in Soho, hardly match the sumptuous robes and long shawls of the performers.
A typical Kouyaté number consists of her singing long, expressive lines over languorous riffs on the kora and ngoni, often in a triplet feel implied by a drum machine pulse and hand percussion. The excellent balafon player, Mahamadou Diabate, adds a bright, rippling counterpoint; guitarist Modibo Diabate injects a hint of rock'n'roll. Sissoko's backing vocals are used sparingly; and several numbers end on a "chorus" coda, a kind of recap with the energy level one notch higher.
On the small stage, audience members come and go all the time. A teenage girl presents the diva, known as "la dangereuse" for her daring improvisatory skills, with a bouquet of flowers. Grandly dressed men and women present her with banknotes. Kouyaté has always sung for her supper, and her lyrics apparently include lavish tributes to sponsors, friends and (wisely) the musicians in her band.
In the second set, Kouyaté urges the crowd to dance. There is very little room in the aisles here, and the number she chooses is one of the least danceable, a slow groove with just a hand-drum pulse to keep it together. Yet within minutes everyone is moving. For the next number, kora player Mamadou Diabate hits the little box of microchips to start an infectious drum-and-synth bass riff, and the band immediately join in to create a gloriously jumbled groove that has everyone in motion. Across the music, while the stage fills with dignified, almost courtly dancing, sail Kouyaté's beautifully textured, improvised vocals, proud and pleased.
