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Jazz players who venture to collaborate with African musicians often confront the paradox that structural freedom and harmonic complexity--hallmarks of modern jazz--tend to be alien concepts in Africa, and not especially interesting ones to most music musicians there. Jazz, like all African American music, has roots on the continent, but it embodies a rebellious, free, tradition-busting attitude that comes from the American experience and has little parallel in most African settings, where preserving, evolving and renewing traditions is usually a key musical motivator. That said, there have been a few inspired meetings of African and jazz musicians, and trombonist Roswell Rudd's playful summit with Malian kora genius Toumani Diabate and some of his longtime collaborators is a fine new addition to that short list.

In a long interview with Afropop Worldwide, Rudd looked back over his four-decade-plus career, observing that he has never made any two records that were really similar. MALIcool, he observed, was probably the most different, and also the most satisfying. Rudd's joyful enthusiasm for this project is evident throughout its ten remarkably different tracks, pieces that combine strains of Manding tradition with Gershwin, Monk, Beethoven, free jamming, and for good measure, an old Protestant hymn. Rudd describes the encounter as "horn-drum based music" meeting "string-based music" and from the rolling, simple opener, a Rudd composition called "Bamako, Rudd's bellows and blasts on trombone provide an inspirational contrast with Diabate's light, elegant kora lines. The duet between the ant and the elephant turns out to be irresistible.

Of course, one reason this works is the fact that Diabate and his musicians are sterling improvisers, quite up to the challenge of taking on, for example, Thelonious Monk chromaticism on Rudd's one-of-a-kind arrangement of "Jackie-ing." As adventurous as this session gets, it never feels overly intellectualized. These guys are having fun, and there's the palpable sense of an old man's whimsy in Rudd's simple rendering of "All Through the Night," or better still, his exuberant melodies on the spirited "MALIcool" (the track sampled for this review). Basekou Kouyate on ngoni and Lassana Diabate on dual balafon absolutely hold their own amid the improvising brilliance of Rudd and (Toumani) Diabate. Their instruments give them access to chromatic notes that can't be had on the kora, and they delve into this largely uncharted territory with verve and gusto.

Rudd visited Mali and jammed with Diabate and his musicians a year before returning to make this record, so there's enough thoughtfulness and chemistry at work here to make this far more than the novelty it might have been had the players just met and recorded right away, as often happens in these "encounter" records. We get the feeling that these musicians are comfortable together, comfortable enough to take chances. That easy quality ultimately makes the record, so that when the musicians cut loose on a jam, mixing up traditional Manding riffs with Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," a bugle call rendered with trombone bluster, and the old swing jazz standard, "Get Happy," you just have to surrender to the musicians' free-spirited delight.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre for www.afropop.org