Spring term Circle Talk tackles the tradition of West African kora

When Sona Jobarteh first asked her father to teach her to play the traditional West African kora, he didn’t talk about how the instrument’s legacy was almost exclusively male.

“He said to me, ‘Don’t be a female kora player. Be a good kora player. When I close my eyes and listen to you, I don’t want to know if it’s a woman or a man. I just want to know that they’re good.’”   

The daughter heard her father’s call and, after studying the instrument for her entire childhood, Ms. Jobarteh attended the Royal College of Music and the Purcell School of Music to study composition. Her father’s break in tradition allowed her to carry the larger kora tradition to a global audience through performances with the Royal Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony orchestras, and through the release of several albums, including her latest, Badinyaa Kumoo, released in 2022.

As the spring term Circle Talk speaker, Ms. Jobarteh gave an intimate masterclass in Gammons Recital Hall on April 1 before playing with her band the next night for the entire Groton community in the Campbell Performing Arts Center.

Born in London, Ms. Jobarteh grew up with a close connection to her Gambian heritage. In Gammons, she gave students, faculty, and staff a crash course in the history of the region, from how her modern country was carved out of a river valley by French and British colonialists to how the centuries-old musical traditions of West Africa transcend those arbitrary lines drawn on a map.

“We had our own traditions, our own culture, before all that,” she said.

One among those traditions is the kora, a twenty-one-string instrument that’s a combination of guitar and harp. Its body is round, made from a halved, hollowed-out gourd with a drum skin stretched atop that allows for percussion as well. There’s no glue or nails (other than decorative); the entire instrument is held together by tension. 

Ms. Jobarteh intertwined performance with history—the instrument’s and her own—explaining how kora players practice hours, days, lifetimes to learn hundreds of songs all by ear. The kora is an oral tradition, passed down through West African families from father to son for generations. Now that she has joined that lineage, Ms. Jobarteh is teaching her own son what her father taught her: Find your voice, and listen to it. 

“What I’m trying to promote and encourage is that you can find your voice within your own traditions,” she said. “You can pick up this instrument and find ways to be critical, or find ways to be very present, and contribute to society in constructive ways using our own traditions.”

Toward the end of the talk, Ms. Jobarteh took questions from students—many of them musicians themselves—about things like collaboration, the importance of practice and routine, and the creative process. Throughout all her answers, she urged the students—whether their music was classical, jass, or traditional West African—to make their own path.

“The main thing is not to try to imitate people, but to stay true,” she said. “Music is a conversation. You might have a different accent, but in the end we can still share in the same topic of conversation.”