Before returning to perform this winter in Grasse and La Seyne, Ballaké Sissoko and Piers Faccini spoke to us about their musical friendship.

They have been friends for over twenty years, when they played for the same independent label. That's how long it took these two talented musicians to shape Our Calling , a collaborative album released in February 2025.

In this poetic ode to migration, the two string instruments, the kora of Malian master Ballaké Sissoko and the guitar of British folk singer Piers Faccini, delicately converse.

Now on tour, the duo enchanted the Jazz à Porquerolles festival for a closing evening featuring the traditional Mandingo instrument.

They shared the stage with Sona Jobarteh, a pioneering Gambian composer, who was the first professional female kora player, an instrument traditionally reserved for men in the past.

Real Musical Conversation

On stage, the creative collaboration between Piers Faccini and Ballaké Sissoko transformed into a true musical dialogue. "I always told myself that we should do something together," says Piers Faccini. "I wanted to be able to really and truly meet Ballaké, learning much more about his music, about the modes, about the rhythms, to be able to have a real musical conversation."

Far from the cliché of a supposed universal character of music, Piers Faccini reminds us that "what we forget is that there are countless musical languages in the world. Music only becomes universal when we learn the music of others. It's like a language. If someone doesn't speak French, they can't say that French is part of a universal language."

"When we play, we are free to migrate towards each other."

To design the album, the fruit of this long mutual learning of the other, "I went to his house several times, because to know and understand people, in our tradition, it is by attending their games that we have the most details" , says Ballaké Sissoko.

"We communicate a lot through our eyes," explains the kora master, something essential to give free rein to the elements of improvisation and feeling .

Although Piers Faccini wrote the lyrics of the melodies in English, with the exception of Ninna Nanna , a Sicilian tarantella, these "have a writing style that is truly Mandingo, or from Malian culture and its repertoire."

And the tarantella exception also holds a specific place in the album: "We chose this piece because it's also a mode that we'll hear in Mandingo music," he explains. "We imagined it as a symbolic bridge between southern Europe and Africa, which would trace a route for us."

This route could also be that of the nightingale that adorns the album cover, a songbird and migratory bird that travels from the Mediterranean to the Sahel throughout the year.

"It is a symbol of free migration and when we play, we are totally free to have this same possibility of migrating towards each other, of meeting and of dialoguing," explains Piers Faccini.

"That's what culture and music are, it's the same: musical styles are systems that have traveled. We find some in Mandingo music, which we also find in flamenco, in classical Arabic music and in southern Italy. It's because there were these conversations, between peoples and religions, that connected people," the guitarist emphasizes. " It seems important to us to remember that."

Exploring instruments... beyond clichés

For Ballaké Sissoko, globalization also contributes to these cultural and musical exchanges: "I'm very curious, because it's true that on our side, we don't necessarily know many Western instruments, even in Africa. In our culture, a long time ago, each ethnic group kept its musical identity. There wasn't all this mixing."

Hence the fact that Ballaké Sissoko also wants to collaborate with a wide variety of musicians, to learn about other people's instruments and explore the thousand possibilities of his own, the kora, beyond the clichés.

>> For those who missed the Porquerolles date, the duo will return to Grasse on November 7 (at the Théâtre de Grasse) and to La Seyne-sur-Mer on March 7, 2026.