Annarella and Django’s debut album is a sublime, often dream-like musical tapestry that links West Africa & Scandinavia, featuring Swedish jazz flautist Annarella and ngoni harp master Django, from Mali, cousin of the late and great Toumani Diabate.
Referring to the album’s tender production touch (by Annarella), transcendental grooves and jazz improvisations and harmonies, Jouer, meaning ‘play’ in French, was recorded between Dakar and Stockholm. With Django’s mesmerising West African harp laying down the rhythmical intention, and Annarella’s flute giving a freedom and space to the record, the result is a re-threading of griot traditional music in a contemporary setting, much influenced by a spiritual notion of jazz.
There are a mix of instrumental and vocal tracks, with songs sung in Mandingo and Bambara by Django and his wife Marietou Kouyaté with further guests including Ale Möller, a renowned Swedish folk musician and trumpeter who features across the album playing jew’s harp, accordion, melodica and shawm, with the rhythmal foundation provided by Swedish trio Lars Fredrik Swahn, Pet Lager and the album’s co-producer Karl Jonas Winqvist.
Having met whilst on tour together as part of the Wau Wau Collectif, another Afro-European project and released via Sahel Sounds in 2021, Annarella and Django had an immediate connection. With plenty of downtime , they began jamming together on the tour bus, backstage and at hotels at the end of a busy concert day. Realising their potential, the two of them went back to their respective homes – Annarella to Örebro in Sweden and Django to Dakar in Senegal – and would begin laying down tracks for each other to share and riff on. Aptly the debut single is named after the duo’s hometowns, Dakar Örebro. The album has taken 18 months to craft, finishing in May 2024.
First single, Dakar Örebro introduces the trumpet, played by Swedish honorary musician Ale Möller and features vocals from Django with Annarella’s flutes weaving in between the spaces.
Those magical sometimes unexplainable golden collaborations often come from opposite ends of our learnt worlds, where recognized norms and cultural frameworks are torn down and musical maps are redrawn. Here two musicians, a female flautist from Sweden and a male Mailian griot harp player, who met on a tour bus provide another example of what can happen when creativity is given space to thrive and where freedom, physical and emotional, is expanded and blossoms, leaving us in awe at the outcome.