Jacknife Lee needed a jolt. The Irish-born, Los Angeles-based producer has spent the better part of the past two decades behind the boards with some of the biggest names in pop and rock-and-roll: U2, R.E.M., The Killers, even Taylor Swift. But something was missing.

“I was making records with an ‘adult’ mentality,” he admits, while speaking from his home studio via Zoom. “I was making sensible records. I was doing what I thought I should be doing.”

So, like most music fans searching for inspiration, he hit some local record shops and began digging, taking home tunes from Brazil, West Africa and beyond.

“I didn’t know the languages I was listening to, which forced me to engage with the music on a purely emotional level—it became all about how the music made my body feel,” he says.

Then, singer-songwriter Rokia Koné landed in his inbox, and the pieces started fitting together again.

Koné had already been making a name for herself in her native Saharan home, Mali, singing mostly in the local Bamana language. Mali is most famously, to Western ears, the source of the deep-grooving, guitar-based Tuareg music of acts like Tinariwen. But Koné was creating something new, straddling tradition and pure, unbridled creativity. Already one of the voices driving the African feminist supergroup Les Amazones d’Afrique, she was also just beginning to dig deeper into her own expression as a solo artist.

In May 2020, Real World Records asked Lee to judge a remix competition for a new Les Amazones tune. That’s when Rokia Koné’s voice truly hooked him. After an email exchange, Lee received a batch of Koné’s unfinished songs—which he describes as raw, complex and deeply infectious—with the green light from her manager to dig in.

“Her voice,” he says. “Once I heard it, nothing else mattered. I felt like I was holding a hummingbird in my hand. I don’t know anyone who communicates like her. She reveals herself immediately; it’s raw and vulnerable. I was just in awe. But me being in awe was no use to her. So I just got down to work.”

Soon after, BAMANAN— the staggeringly gorgeous, experimental collaboration between a Malian star and an Irish producer—was born.

In Bamako, the capital and cultural center of Mali, Koné is at home preparing dinner for her children when she sits down to answer questions, through a translator, about BAMANAN’s genesis. She’s been a renowned singer in Mali for years, and Les Amazones took her on tour through Europe—but BAMANAN is something totally new, linking her long musical family history to the future of Malian music.

“Both sets of my grandparents were singers; all my uncles were too. My grandmother is a praise singer, and she still sings today at the age of 98,” Koné says. “She used to sing at weddings and child naming ceremonies, and I learned my first songs from her.”

Koné grew up in a village a few hundred miles upriver from Bamako, surrounded by her musical family. She remembers first appearing in front of an audience at the tender age of 9. When local singer Aliya Coulibaly came to perform years later, she boldly asked if he could teach her to sing with a guitar accompaniment.

“Back in those days in our village, we only sang with traditional percussion like the gitaha or djembe—no stringed instruments,” she says.

Before long, she moved to Bamako and joined his band. Over the next decade, Koné “really began to get serious about my music.”

By the time Koné joined Les Amazones d’Afrique in 2016, she was a regular at the Bamako clubs. Her performances, heralded as transcendent musical experiences, were filled with improvisation and passion in equal measure. Dozens of recordings exist of that period— many filled with loose, winding songs that last over 20 minutes.

The collection of tunes that her manager sent to Lee in early 2020 wasn’t totally different— the energy was blinding, with Koné’s voice leaping through the speakers. But they were still best appreciated live. One song, “N’yanyan,” was recorded in Bamako in August 2020, just hours after a coup d’état threw Mali into political and economic tailspin.

“We only managed to record ‘N’yanyan’ that night before the city was closed down [and the power was cut],” Koné says. The vocal track Lee received was recorded in a single take, amid immense worry and uncertainty.

Back in California, and stuck at home due to COVID-19, Lee approached the recordings like a surgeon—extracting Koné’s vocal tracks, chopping up long, looping melodies and constructing more concise songs. He added warm layers of piano, shapeshifting synthesizers and polyrhythmic percussion. Some cuts sounded like meditations, others like dance parties, but they all were mesmerizing. Lee didn’t have a plan or agenda besides making Koné’s voice shine—and the resulting arrangements elevate Koné’s melodies to the heavens.

“I was very conscious of being the European white guy coming in, saying ‘Let me fix this for you,’” he says. “There can be colonialism in music, certainly. So I based this project on Night Song—a record that feels like a single, timeless idea.”

That ‘90s collaboration between Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Canadian producer Michael Brook is a gold standard of multicultural collaboration. It was Lee’s inspirational north star as he remixed and reassembled Koné’s songs.

The communication between California and Mali was minimal—Lee would send back reworked tracks and wait for feedback. But Koné and her band were fascinated by this new sound, and let Lee explore sonically.

And though the producer never actually spoke with Koné as BAMANAN was taking shape—let alone met her in person—a 10-song album quickly emerged.

“I will admit to being a little shocked when I first heard the results because it’s very different than the music we listen to here,” Koné says. “But I love what he has done. I hope this album will encourage people to look into our culture and our music. And I’m sure even my grandmother will love it.”