Some musicians are said to have sold their soul at a lonely crossroads in order to play the blues. Markus James had a gentler initiation: he was on his way to nursery school in Washington, DC, when he first encountered the music that’s become one of his two great loves.

“When I was four years old, I heard an old blind blues singer on the street several times; it’s my first musical memory,” he recalls, interviewed by phone from his home in Sonoma County, California. “That’s one thing that stays with me: a feeling of being mesmerized by something that seemed to transcend everything else around it. Like, everything else became quiet, and I could just hear this guy singing very softly on a street that was very noisy.”

He’s sought such numinous moments ever since, and has found more than a few. In the process, he’s become an exceptional blues guitarist and singer himself, but he’s also immersed himself in West African culture. That process began at the feet of kora master Alhaji Bai Konte, deepened under the guidance of the late Malian guitarist and singer Ali Farka Touré, and continues every time he gets on stage with his African bandmates in Markus James and the Wassonrai.

Some of his discoveries can be heard on the recently released Snakeskin Violin, which sets James’s voice and guitar next to Mississippi house-party drumming and the African hunter’s harp known as the n’goni; one high point is his tribute to Farka Touré, “Sundown Pearl”, on which he’s joined by Hamadou Garba, spiritual leader of Timbuktu’s pre-Islamic Ho Le Hoire religion.

“He’s like a magic man, or a healer: he’s 75 years old and he plays a giant one-string violin,” James enthuses. “He’s constantly calling out the spirits—but whenever I start playing with him, it always ends up sounding to me like straight-ahead boogie music.”

Well, not quite. There’s a hint of John Lee Hooker in James’s playing, but Garba’s trance-zone fiddling and otherworldly singing lift the music into the realm of the supernatural—which is what James tries for whenever he can.

“I seek out those moments where the djinn are called by the music,” he says. “What I’m trying to get at is that with all these experiences, like when I was four years old, and then when I heard Alhaji Bai Konte, and then when I heard Ali [Farka Touré] play up in his village, it really became something in that moment that was more than music. It was some kind of transcendental experience—and I guess music is supposed to be that, sometimes, in your life.”