Village Life

Having accompanied Herbie Hancock on a world tour in 1984, as the tour wound down in Japan, Hancock and kora player Foday Musa Suso decamped to a Tokyo studio. Across three days that July, Hancock and Suso laid down a fascinating duo album. Hancock’s original intention was to play acoustic piano, but the traditional kora’s tuning doesn’t quite align with tempered Western scales, so Hancock utilized a new-fangled Yamaha DX-1 Digital Synthesizer, which allowed him to tune to the kora. The result is a fascinating amalgam of America and Africa, but also ancient griot and Afrofuturism, two musical masters from different hemispheres conjuring a future village sound.