Browse by Artist: SISSOKO & VINCENT SEGAL, BALLAKE

Artist:	SISSOKO & VINCENT SEGAL, BALLAKE
Title:	Chamber Music
Label:	NO FORMAT (FRANCE)
Format:	LP
Price:	$23.00
Catalog #:	NOF 014LP

Originally released in 2009, now available on LP once again. One bare room in Salif Keita's Moffou studio and three recording sessions without overdubs were woven inside the protective cocoon of the Mali night. Sheltered from the agitation of mankind inside the heart of the world, Ballaké Sissoko (kora player) and Vincent Segal (cellist) chased out of their minds everything that can distance a musician from his art -- all the vain considerations of genre and style that only have interest for collectors of labels -- the better to concentrate on the essence: harmonious imbrications of language and signatures, and the interlacing of their inner song, to which the subtle waves of improvisation and the secret vibrations of silence contributed additional density. Their complicity is such that the kora and the cello, far from resulting in an overly formal exchange of rejoinders, seem to express themselves here with a single voice: Sissoko and Segal mix their blood and their sounds to conclude a pact that aims to cause a (precisely) unified world to spring forth with incomparable clarity. What the listener hears in Chamber Music is both rare and precious: two sensibilities in unison, on the same wavelength, creating music which, literally, follows naturally. This art of conversation based on understanding, on the attentiveness of one musician towards the other, is developed here to its highest degree of exactness. The care brought to the human aspect of all music is something that Sissoko and Segal have been cultivating for more than two decades. Sissoko's strings have notably crossed paths with those of Taj Mahal and the pianist Ludovic Einaudi, while Segal has enjoyed many roles as an accompanist, arranger and producer with such diverse performers as Cesaria Evora, -M-, Blackalicious, Piers Faccini, Sting and Marianne Faithfull. Formerly stable-mates at the same label (Label Bleu), the two men formed a close bond of friendship, and you can hear this clearly. Pressed on white vinyl housed in a full-color inner sleeve with an insert.

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