Greeted by the Kora…

When my family and friends in Mali picked me up in the middle of the night at the airport in Bamako, they brought along a kora to serenade me to sleep on the way back to the house. A 21-string instrument made from a calabash gourd, the kora (like the ney) is notoriously difficult to learn–which is why I stuck to studying the djembe instead…