Bassekou Kouyate is a griot, meaning that he’s part of an ancient, hereditary caste responsible for maintaining a body of songs and stories that have been passed down for generations. In precolonial Mali, his job description would have fallen somewhere between court musician and oral historian; even in today’s multiparty democracy, the griots have an important role to play in maintaining their culture’s social mores and artistic heritage.

But Kouyate’s not just any griot. As he explains in French, through translator Maya Barsacq, he’s got certain family responsibilities to maintain.

“His family is really the griot family,” Barsacq says, checking in from Kouyate’s room in a Bay Area hotel. “So it’s not like he really had a choice about becoming a musician. And he’s passed it on; he has children, and they also play.”

The singer and ngoni virtuoso’s claim is easy to validate: a quick scan of my own less-than-complete record collection turns up more than a dozen albums by various members of his clan.

With support from the country’s politicians and entrepreneurs, who love to have their own family histories immortalized in song, being a griot is one of Mali’s more lucrative professions. Kouyate could easily have settled for being a busy and accomplished exponent of the traditional arts. Unlike some of his cousins, however, he’s been an innovator ever since he began his professional life as a teenager in the country’s capital, Bamako.

Working with members of the legendary Super Rail Band, he started standing up to play, introducing an element of rock ’n’ roll showmanship to what had previously been a sedate hunter’s lute. Since then, he’s added extra strings and frets to his instrument, making it capable of playing western melodies as well as Mali’s traditional pentatonic tunes, and he’s designed a bass ngoni that, in his Ngoni Ba band, sounds as funky as any electric Fender.

“What’s really innovative is that we can play now with any instrument or any sort of orchestration,” Kouyate says. “If you were to play with an American musician, for example, if you told him the Malian scales or the pentatonic scale, there’s no commonality. But if you actually have a full scale, then you can open up who you can gig with.”

That’s certainly worked for the 45-year-old musician, who’s established ongoing partnerships with American folk-blues veteran Taj Mahal, Cuban singer-guitarist Eliades Ochoa, and roots-music icon Béla Fleck, who sees the ngoni as the ancestor of his own instrument, the banjo. But Kouyate’s outreach program goes beyond these one-on-one collaborations. He’s among the first African performers to sign to an American indie-rock label—Seattle’s esteemed Sub Pop imprint, which issued his brilliant I Speak Fula album in 2010—and he’s bent on making the ngoni a household name around the world.

“Everybody can comprehend a feel-good melody,” he say. “People don’t understand what we’re talking about, but they like the music, they like the melody, they like the structures. They can relate to it on a musical sense and be connected to that.”

And everyone, he adds, can relate to the theme of the most recent song he’s been working on. “La paix,” he says, before switching to his interviewer’s native tongue. “Nothing but peace.”

Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba play St. James Hall on Thursday (November 10).