The Electric Kora

HARD KORA

An interview with Ravi by fRoots editor Ian A. Anderson

Flashback to 1986 and one of mind-adjusting trips of Lucy Duran (of BBC Radio 3) to the Gambia. Among the dozen or so rambling fools including yours truly, Andy Kershaw and David Muddyman, (of Loop Guru) bumping around the poy holed roads, visiting traditional musicians - and being strangely shadowed by an American party that included Philip Glass, guided by Foday Musa Suso, as I remember - was a young man we only ever knew as Ravi.

Lots of people on that and subsequent visits shelled out their dalasis and brought home koras, but Ravi was the only one who seriously persevered. It might be advancing years or the fact that if you're quite good on one instrument it's too disheartening to be crap on another, but most of us kora nuts slowly found our purchases gathering dust. Ravi was different, and in recent years he's been making wavelets with an ensemble called Kora Colours. Now, he's taking things a big leap forward with the development of an impressive-sounding aluminium electric kora - quite possibly a planetary first!

Was that Gambia visit his first jolt of kora consciousness?... No, my first contact was at WOMAD. The Gambia National Troupe were there, including Dembo Konte and Mawdo Suso. Just seeing them turned my world around, so I went to the workshop afterwards and got up close - I was immediately attracted. I didn't go on the trip with that intention, but when I got there I went to see Jali Nyama Suso and he gave me one that was well played. That was my first kora, quite a small one but the right size for my hands, but when Dembo Konte and Kauso Kuyateh came on tour the next summer I bought a bigger one off Kausu

His route into all this was diverse...Up to that point I was playing guitar, percussion; I'd also made and played a Celtic harp and had always been, for many years completely eclectic in my music tastes - folk, jazz, world, whatever - I used it for recording, but never really got it together, which is why when I got to the kora it somehow seemed to happen easier

One thing Ravi hasn't tried to become is a fake African. He's evolved an original way of handling the beast and doesn't, unlike some alien players, chance his luck with the traditional jali repertoire. "Well, it was partly that I was lazy and never got the traditional technique together and theres also the fact that there are so many wonderful West African musicians playing traditional kora music

A lot of the time I was learning the kora I was playing with a tabla player and seeing whatever came out. So over the year a style has developed which I can finally say is my own

I naturally started using my nails rather than the flesh of my fingers, because I'd played wire-strung Celtic harp before, which adds to my own style; I can get more funky on a kora than a harp."

For a while he had a group called Terra Incognita with other musicians playing sarod, sitar and bamboo flute...I developed my own tunings through playing with them and now when I'm playing on stage I have a major scale kora and a minor kora."

He's had machine heads for tuning his koras for quite a while - traditionally you move leather rings on the neck - putting him in the good company of Senegalese kora genius Soriba Kouyate.

When I first tried getting a band together around the kora, I couldn't have done it without machine heads. Changing tuning with jazz musicians with the old leather rings was hard work

He seems to be Britain's only white kora player working professionally, if at all, these days...I've started connecting up with other western kora players around the world.. There's David Gilden in the States, there's a guy who lives in Tasmania called Martin Tucker, and one of the musicians (joby Baker) I had in the first line-up of Kora Colours emigrated to Canada and ended up playing with another western kora player in Vancouver. I also connected up with another guy who has not only been living there and learning it but also took up the religion and a Moslem name and brought back an African wife

Then there's the band which includes Spencer Cozens from Joan Armatrading and John Martyn's band and a drummer from a top funk/soul band. There's a pool of musicians I use when the appropriate gig comes up" The Spencer Cozens' connection , incidentally, extends to Ravi's sessioning on the excellent Jacqui McShee's PENTANGLE CDs

So what's the plan with the electric kora, which actually sounds quite similar to - naturally enough, I suppose - and electro-harp....One of the differences between the kora and the harp is the way it's strung, so you can do these really fast runs. Also, as I was once an electric guitarist I liked the power of pickups. There's more control over the sound, which means I can play in a band with bass and drums without a problem.

I was always dreaming of this, and I finally met up Tim Martyn, who was crazy enough to make the instrument

He's clearly a persevering sort, is Ravi, and I hope we'll be hearing a lot more of the electric kora in the future.