When a leading London daily, the Independent, tags Mali’s Bassekou Kouyaté and Ngoni Ba as “the best rock and roll band in the world”, you know there’s something very special about the seven-piece outfit and its leader.

And its fourth and latest album, Ba Power, makes the rock connection more solid than ever. But the music isn’t coming from what we’d recognize as a rock ’n’ roll band. Ngoni Ba is a family—mother, father, two sons, and other relatives—and the majority of the musicians all play the same stringed instrument in different sizes.

As the band’s name suggests, that instrument is the ngoni—a paddle-shaped, skin-covered lute that’s almost certainly the oldest living ancestor of the banjo. Both playing technique and construction are similar: the thumb picks the highest string, and the ngoni’s body is more like a drum than a box. With no sustain, notes plucked on the ngoni with a pick are razor-sharp.

The sound is intense, and the grooves cut deep.

“It’s Africa’s history,” says Kouyaté, the lead and “soprano” ngoni player, reached at his home in Mali’s capital, Bamako. “The ngoni has been played for thousands of years in larger Mali, for every king and dignitary, every marriage, every hero and warrior.”

In the Bambara language that Kouyaté speaks, ba means “strong” or “great”, but it can also signify a group. “The album is called Ba Power because the messages that it carries are powerful, and without a doubt the music is our hardest and toughest sound to date.”

The road to the recording began at home in Bamako, with Ngoni Ba playing in a large and laid-back family space. With all the members related, the chemistry makes for intuitive communication and immediate responses on every track.

“The sound I make, and my quest to modernize it, started from the first album [2007’s Segu Blue] and I’ve taken it further with each new one,” says Kouyaté, speaking in French. “My aim is to reach many more people with the music, because it carries African culture with it.”

Kouyaté’s virtuosity had already drawn comparisons to Jimi Hendrix, and Ba Power’s release in April has brought more. “I didn’t listen to specific bands or musicians, but I saw from live experience that when I used the wah-wah pedal, for instance, people were starting to smile and dance more. Young people like rock music and I hear it on the radio, and in festivals—and also I like it myself, of course.”

Though Kouyaté wrote most of the songs on Ba Power, there’s also much older material from the griots, a caste of musicians and storytellers to which he and his family belong.

“Basically, I have two kinds of people who listen to my music—Africans, who understand what I’m singing and that for some part listen to my music for that, and others who listen to my music for the feeling it gives them even though they don’t understand the words,” he says. “So I wanted to maintain some tradition, to keep on pleasing my African audience, but I also wanted more salt and pepper, for people from Europe, Asia, America.”

Bassekou Kouyaté and Ngoni Ba play the Vancouver Folk Music Festival’s Main Stage on Sunday (July 19).