Sona Jobarteh

“A griot for a new generation of West Africans” (BBC Radio), London-born kora virtuoso Sona Jobarteh is a pioneer of the 21-string African lute. Her return marks her debut on the Miner stage with two nights of spellbinding musicianship.  

Jobarteh is the first female kora master to have emerged from an established family of West African griots, bucking a long-held hereditary tradition that restricted instruction on the instrument to males only. Starting as a prodigy, Jobarteh began studies with her brother, kora great Tunde Jegede, at age four and gave her first public performance on the instrument at London’s Jazz Café at five.  

She deeply immersed herself in western classical music studies at London’s Royal College of Music, touring the world with her brother’s acclaimed ACM Ensemble as a teen and sharing the stage with Toumani Diabaté, Oumou Sangaré, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra. She composed the score to the 2010 documentary The Motherland, and has done extensive work for film, lending her soaring soprano to the soundtracks of Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, The First Grader, and The History Channel’s 2016 miniseries Roots.  

Her beguiling debut solo recording, Fasiya, showcased her skills as vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, and her follow-up for African Guild Records, Badinyaa Kumoo, was voted Best Album of 2022 by Songlines.