When pianist Alex Wilson met kora player Madou Sidiki Diabaté, it was the genesis of a remarkable project fraught with huge difficulties but which culminates against all odds in the release of Mali Latino. The album marks the beginning of a new creative phase in Wilson’s career. He tells Selwyn Harris about the trials and tribulations of the project, and his motivation for pushing himself to the limit and beyond

Alex Wilson has been on the move almost since the day he was born. That was in Derbyshire in 1971, but then Sierra Leone became his playpen; Austria and Switzerland, the playgrounds of his youth. He was an engineering undergraduate at the University of York, a postgrad in California, before starting up a music career in London. Now well into his late-thirties, he’s back in Switzerland with a Swiss wife and a year-old baby. But the pianist-composer, of part Sierra Leone extraction, has also been on the move in a musical sense since his arrival on the London scene in the mid-1990s.

Building bridges, investigating connections between neighbouring strands of music culture is something that has occupied Wilson’s career to date. He has a base of course, an identity if you like, that mixes up latin folklorist, salsa and jazz, but it’s always looking to broaden in scope. The titles he gives to his albums almost without exception (since being picked up by Alan Bates’ Candid label in the late-1990s) read like newly invented sub-genres: Anglo-Cubano, R&B-Latino, Afro-Saxon, Salsa Con Soul (a big hit on the salsa dancefloor) and now comes a new CD release on his own label, Mali Latino.

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