Nicole Mitchell’s Malian Collaborations

Interview, From the Magazine, Nicole Mitchell

By Aaron Cohen I Dec. 17, 2024

“Hope is important, and it always shows up in my music,” Mitchell said.
(Photo: Lauren Deutsch)

Flutist Nicole Mitchell put new friends through changes for the 2024 album Bamako*Chicago Sound System (FPE), which she co-led with Malian kora player Ballaké Sissoko.

Bringing together jazz improvisers with Chicago ties and traditional West African singers and instrumentalists, Mitchell reveled in placing experimental jazz musicians in new circumstances and getting players who represent legacies spanning centuries to improvise freely. The album’s centerpiece, the 15-minute “This Moment,” embraces a host of idioms and conveys contrasting emotions concluding in euphoria, a musical statement that its creator feels is ideal for today’s condition.

“Some people feel we don’t deserve that level of joy because the world is so messed up,” Mitchell said. “To have this good news and happy ending. Some people have expressed, ‘Do we deserve to have such a happy ending?’ But for me, hope is important, and it always shows up in my music. It starts in a bright place, goes to a dark place, then comes out in a different bright place.”

As Mitchell described such optimism from her home in North Carolina, her voice conveyed a radiant inflection that echoes her music’s ebullience. She lives a few hours away from the University of Virginia, where she is a professor of music. Her approach to both music and teaching involves building communities. Personal connections with African musicians have always been key. These ties stretch back to her beginnings as a performer when she was growing up in Southern California and Nigerian afrobeat percussionist Najite Agindotan was an early mentor. Those lessons gave her insights into the techniques as well as the historical connections and dissimilarities between groups who seem to be an ocean apart.

“From the very beginning, I didn’t start in the jazz context, I started in that [afrobeat] context,” Mitchell said. “I was making music that was influenced by West African music, even if it was not specifically Malian. And divisions between countries were made by Europeans — there was a lot of relocation, migration happening over many years from different groups of people, so they were not statically in one place. That’s why you see the kora in other parts of West Africa and similar aesthetics in the music.”

After moving to Chicago in 1990, Mitchell collaborated with jazz musicians who shared her enthusiasm, including on her Afrika Rising album in 2002. Mitchell added that she also recorded an unreleased piece, “Oumou,” a tribute to the Malian singer Oumou Sangaré. She also formed deep ties with like-minded members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The city itself presented new opportunities for cross-continental performances, including a vibrant performance in 2007 at Millennium Park, which brought Mitchell and a host of sharp locally based improvisers together with the late kora master Toumani Diabaté.

Five years after that concert, Mitchell invited Sissoko to sit in during her performance at the Manzoni Theater in Milan, Italy. Living outside of Paris, Sissoko had been partnering with musicians from all over the world and eagerly sought to continue doing so. In 2014, the French author and music promoter Alexandre Pierrepont invited Mitchell over to work with the kora player for a residency. She arrived 10 days ahead so they could learn each other’s melodies. Other Chicago and Malian musicians joined for a tour across France and returned in 2016. Mitchell felt mutual admiration during these encounters.

“To actually have a 3-D collaboration with, and making a new friend with, Ballaké was great. It was a dream come true, an opportunity to also integrate my own aesthetic, Chicago avant-garde jazz and all of that within the music. Ballaké is a very open, very caring person,” Mitchell said. “He’s strong but he’s very egalitarian. That was really beautiful, there was no ego or patriarchal stuff going on. We’re making music, we’re collaborating, we’re equals, we’re just going to do this. That can’t be taken for granted working with anyone in any country.”

Still, Mitchell added, there was a bit of a learning process.

“The music I wrote, I wrote everything in C major, because I didn’t understand he could have different keys,” Mitchell said. “So everything he was improvising on was in C major. I used other factors in the ensemble to create dissonance and other chords, I had marimba and Tomeka Reid on cello. It wasn’t that I was determining whole soundscape based on what he played. Then we met, and I realized that’s not how it works. You can do anything using the chromatic scale. You can create any mode or scale you want. With a classical harp, you can change within a piece but with kora, you can’t, so you have to set up your key or scale for each piece.”

The differences between playing improvised jazz (as can be heard in a city like Chicago) and traditional kora music (as Malians play it) have not been formidable, according to Mitchell.

“Ballaké and I also have a duo project and there the challenge is if he’s within a particular song that I don’t know, where is it going to go and what is the harmonic going to be in the moment for me to be able to adjust? But we work it out because it’s an intuitive process, the more we play together the easier it gets. We always do some music that we’ve never done before. I’ll also bring things, and I’m less predictable where I’m going to go harmonically. That’s a fun challenge for him to figure out how to navigate that.”

A bigger, and inevitable, challenge has been obtaining funding to keep the Chicago*Bamako project performing and recording. This includes the headaches of obtaining work visas for the international ensemble. Mitchell was able to obtain grants from the MacArthur Foundation and 3Arts organization. Chicago’s World Music Festival and Hyde Park Jazz Festival presented a platform for the group’s compelling set in 2017. That event also proved crucial since it provided the means for Mitchell, Sissoko and their group to record the album. The concert also created an opportunity for Mitchell to present Malian musicians to an entirely new audience.

“I had done so much work as a teaching artist in Chicago, it was important to have these musicians meet students on the South Side,” Mitchell said. “These were second through fourth graders who never heard Black people speaking another language and playing instruments they’d never seen before.”

African American musical ideas and sounds from West Africa blend throughout Bamako*Chicago Sound System. Mitchell brought in her compositions and Sissoko brought in his. Vocalist Fatim Kouyate contributed lyrics as did Mitchell’s daughter Aaya Badue. One of Mitchell’s pieces, “Spicy Jambalaya,” presents an imaginative vision of R&B within an open soundscape. Mitchell’s own rhythmic drive ties everything together.

“That piece has a lot of shifting energies,” Mitchell said. “There’s some funk in it, I was thinking of it kind of like a dance piece. It represents New Orleans but also a Caribbean, African diasporic mixing it up. A lot of influences, not just African and European influences. Our project is kind of a Creole project. I thought that ‘Spicy Jambalaya’ was a great name for taking us on a ride, mostly through African American musical idioms and having a good time.”

This combination also highlights everyone’s individual personalities, which can come across on a few crucial measures within a cross-continental tapestry. One example is guitarist Jeff Parker’s dynamic solo alongside Sissoko and balafon player Fassery Diabaté on “Se Wa Kole.”

“It was a fun challenge for Jeff to work with another string instrument,” Mitchell said. “He took on a lot of different roles, depending on what kind of piece it was. Sometimes he’d be doubling with Balaké, sometimes doing chords, sometimes soloing, bringing in rock, jazz, blues influences, or he’s doing Jeff. He does all that.”

Percussionist JoVia Armstrong (also a University of Virginia professor) is another regular participant in Mitchell’s groups, and the flutist thought of her immediately.

“JoVia was my first choice because of her versatility, her understanding of music throughout the African diaspora and the instruments she plays while being able to play a set that’s super loud and dominating,” Mitchell said. “She uses a similar set up in The Mandorla Awakening [from 2017]: cajon from Peru and cymbals, congas and small percussion. They enjoyed giving her rhythms, giving her things to do. She finds a lot of colors throughout the album.”

Bassist Joshua Abrams has worked extensively with Mitchell numerous projects, such as her Black Earth Ensemble record Hope, Future And Destiny from 20 years ago. Along with this lengthy association, Mitchell said he also brought his own thoughts about African instruments. “Josh loves learning new things, he plays [Moroccan] guimbri and is interested in meeting people who are playing different instruments,” Mitchell said. “Josh has a great sound and it resonates and blends well with these traditional instruments.”

While the musicians themselves conveyed positive feelings toward each other, Mitchell said that a disheartening issue arose outside of the group. She mentioned that, initially, a French person’s suggestion for the ensemble’s name reflected that country’s colonial-era conceptions of Africans. Seeking words that were not derogatory, she turned to the late writer Greg Tate, who suggested Bamako*Chicago Sound System.

“We did learn and discover the big differences in how French people viewed Africans versus how they viewed African Americans because there’s that history,” Mitchell said. “Those aspects could have threatened our connection but that never got in between musicians and what we were trying to do. With this name everything is on equal footing.”

Mitchell’s consciousness toward any kind of social inequity comes from her own experiences. She has endured sexism as a jazz musician and prepared herself to face those who feel that contend roles in West African music belong to specific genders. These situations never arose among the members of this ensemble.

“People make assumptions and assume that women are supposed to be in a certain role,” Mitchell said. “I’ve had problems in the U.S. with that in jazz: Asking if I’m a girlfriend when I’m in a recording studio instead of asking if I’m the bandleader. There’s enough of that anywhere in the world. The other part of that is these instruments are traditionally played by men in Mali. And a lot of assumptions can be made: ‘You need to learn our music, our music has been around longer, there’s a certain royalty about it.’ There are musicians who are like that. Just being open to learning to someone else’s music, some people are like, ‘I’m the master of this, I’m not going to learn anything else. I don’t need to.’ And that wasn’t what was going on. The idea of me being a composer, contributing compositions as a woman, that can be seen as ‘Well, that’s nice and everything, but not on this project.’ I’ve had enough experiences being in a group where everybody is contributing music and suddenly it’s my compositions being left out in the past when I was younger. But this recording was an affirming situation.”

Along with Bamako*Chicago and Mitchell’s teaching duties, she is immersed in myriad other configurations. These include Iridescent with vocalist/composer Christina Wheeler, which Mitchell described as “super outer-space music” that combines blues and electronics. Another group, Black Earth SWAY, presents what she called Afro-Folk-Futurism. Armstrong is also part of this ensemble, as is Coco Elysses who plays the time-honored African American diddley bow while contemporary electronics are also central. While the Malian acoustic musicians who are Mitchell’s creative partners may not use the word “Afrofuturist” to describe themselves, she said that is essential what they are all about.

“They know everything and sing about it,” Mitchell said. “It’s their job to maintain this history and this memory through music. That’s what being a musician is for them. For us, it’s a completely different thing. On some level being a musician in this country is an aspect of resistance. Because you don’t have the kind of support from your society. It’s almost an act of resistance to even be doing it in the first place, even if it is to preserve culture. Because the culture’s not being supported. To collide these ideas with each other and make a new world with each other, that is Afrofuturism.” DB