Heading a four-member group, one of the exciting young stars of world music today gives her first concert in Hungary at Müpa Budapest. Gambian singer-songwriter Sona Jobarteh is the first female virtuoso of the kora, the 21-string West African harp, to emerge from the ranks of the griot caste of musicians and storytellers. She was born to one of the five principal kora-playing families from West Africa, the granddaughter of Amadu Bansang Jobarteh and cousin of the renowned master kora play...er Toumani Diabaté. Born in London in 1983, she also spends a lot of time in her ancestral home in West Africa, both preserving and modernising its traditions in her music. She has been playing music and performing on stage since the age of four, and collaborated when still a teenager on the album Mali Music (2002) by Blur and Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn. She has worked with classical orchestras, jazz and spoken word performers alike. Besides kora, she also plays guitar and cello, as well as instruments of her own devising, and studied piano and harpsichord as a student at the Royal College of Music in London.
Starting with her 2008 debut album Afro-Acoustic Soul, Sona has released her own albums of compositions that blend the traditional and modern, touching on both personal and social themes. Her 2011 album Fasiya (Heritage) has brought her international renown. She has worked on film scores, both as composer and sound editor (her music for the award-winning documentary Motherland also appeared as a separate album), and featured among the musicians in Pedro Almodóvar's film Broken Embraces, as well as being heard as a solo singer in the films Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom and The First Grader.