Amira Baraka said it best: “It must be Djeli ‘cause Jam don’t shake like that!” He was observing that West Africa’s griot tradition courses through the lifeblood of American music (i.e., jazz), and how the voice of the griot—the storyteller, the scholar, the artist, the teacher, the djeli, all wrapped up in one—lives and breathes in everything, from the scorching-hot vocals of Ella Fitzgerald, Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin to the many evocative moods of Miles Davis, Nina Simone and Jimi Hendrix. “What is needed is what the Griot/Djeli provided,” Baraka wrote, “Information, inspiration, reformation and self-determination! Mama Sky, we cried, hook us up with electricity. Turn us on. That city of our deep desire.”

All this rich history might seem like a world away from the resurgently hip arts and music scene of Asheville, N.C., but to hometown multi-instrumentalist Justin Perkins, it’s part of a natural progression that started with his musical upbringing. “I’ve come up with some crazy music in my life,” he says, with a distinctive Blue Ridge twang in his voice. “Between my father and my two older brothers, you’d have James Brown on one hand, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer on the other. My dad toured with James Brown, Sam & Dave, Joe Tex and Taj Mahal. He’s a badass guitar player. And then, on top of that, we’re talking about growing up in North Carolina, with banjos and fiddles.”

Perkins took to the drums as a kid, and eventually got into African percussion as a teenager. His childhood friend Drew Heller often came over to his house to jam on guitar, and while their excursions transported them primarily into rock-and-roll territory, they shared a mutual curiosity about West African music that they brought with them to Warren Wilson College, just outside Asheville. There, they met percussionist Luke Quaranta, and pretty soon, they had the early makings of a band.

Between semesters at school, Perkins and Heller followed through on their dream of visiting West Africa, starting in Guinea, where Perkins got his first hands-on taste of the multi-stringed kora. “I’d heard it, but I had never played it,” he says. He was already familiar with the music of world-renowned kora superstar Toumani Diabaté, but actually learning to play the instrument gave him a deeper connection to it. “It’s just so beautiful and angelic and soothing and magical so, of course, I fell in love with it. Then I met Lamine Soumano in Bamako [Mali], and I’ve been studying with him ever since. He’s a master. I’ve been playing the kora for almost 20 years now, but I’m still a student.”

Another extended visit to Mali in 2004 sealed the deal for Perkins and Heller. They spent a few months woodshedding and playing with Soumano and, by night, they soaked up the music in Bamako’s bustling clubs. They returned to the states with a fiery sense of purpose. Teaming up with Quaranta, bassist David Pransky and drummer Teal Brown, they formed Toubab Krewe—“toubab” being a word that has various meanings throughout West Africa, but boils down to “stranger” or “traveler” of European descent.

“The name is definitely in the spirit of good humor, revelry, being a foreigner and just traveling,” explains Heller, who is part of a mini-Asheville musical dynasty that includes his brother Elliot, best known as DJ Equal, and his Grammy award-winning producer/ composer father Steven. “For us, it’s important to just be real with it because it’s an identity thing. Toubab Krewe is us. We felt like the name was already written for us, so it made sense to claim it. We’re a crew, in that carnival spirit. And we were already calling ourselves that from the beginning anyway, because that’s who we were.”

Between 2005 and 2014, the band recorded two studio albums—their self-titled debut and the rousing follow-up TK2—and played, by their estimation, more than 2,000 shows. They became a force on the improv-friendly festival circuit, performing at Bonnaroo and High Sierra, jamming with Mike Gordon and hosting their own weekend destination events. Along the way, they changed personnel and recruited bassist Justin Kimmel and drummer Terrence Houston, a New Orleans resident known for his big-footed beats behind the funky Meters and George Porter Jr.’s Runnin’ Pardners. That lineup gets its first stab at asserting its studio prowess on the long-awaited Stylo, an ambitious and far-reaching instrumental gumbo of musical flavors that’s been more than three years in the making.

“Yeah, it’s been stewing for a while,” Perkins admits, “mostly because we’ve been off the road for about three years working on our own projects. But when you take that time off and come back together, it’s very refreshing. In fact, it’s necessary. We used to do 300 shows a year. When you tour that much, it’s like you’re on a hamster wheel. We all love each other, obviously. We’re friends, and we came to this with a fresh perspective. It’s fun to see that come out and come to fruition.”

“That Damn Squash,” the first single from Stylo, effectively encapsulates the journey. Rife with synth-y atmospherics and interlocking guitar parts from Perkins and Heller, the music sounds vaguely cinematic, like it could have emerged from a bare-bones studio tucked away in a dusty back alley of Bamako, before finding its way into the closing wide shot of a Sergio Leone western. Hints of zydeco, Southern-fried funk and even Appalachian folk peek through the vintage veil of reverb—a finely tuned result of the impeccable mix by Brooklyn-based engineer Jeremy Page (known for his work with Antibalas and Kendra Morris). It’s an absorbing snapshot of a band that has reached a level of maturity as a unit that can only come from experience.

“That’s one of my observations when I listen back to this album,” Perkins says. He notes that the band first started work on Stylo in Atlanta with another former drummer and longtime friend, Vic Stafford, back in October 2014 at the now-shuttered Southern Tracks studio. “But you can still tell we’re older. When you’re young, you’re trying to prove yourself, and play too damn much, but when you get older, you’re like, ‘I’ve already been down that road. I’m gonna sit and play my part until it’s time for me to solo.’ And it’s interesting playing with Terrence, too. He’s one of the baddest dudes on earth, but he also makes me simplify what I do because he’s a maniac on the drums. It’s easier said than done to stick to that, but I’m trying to play ‘grown-man music’ from here on out.”

“Miriama,” a traditional song that became more well-known outside West Africa in the early ‘90s, thanks to a stunningly soulful version by Senegal’s Baaba Maal, is a prime example of where Toubab Krewe is now, and where they might be headed. Featuring Sekou Bah and Wassa Coulibaly on vocals, with additional instrumentation by Lamine Soumano and percussionist Petit Adama Diarra, it’s the only vocal track they’ve ever recorded, but it’s also an uncanny take on the mystical “desert rock” style of Mali, fused to a harder, more muscular backbeat that embraces funk, hip-hop and jazz all at once.

“Lamine and Sekou did all their tracking at Sekou’s studio in Bamako,” Heller explains. “Lamine had just been over to visit for a few months here in the Carolinas, so we got to spend a good bit of time together playing music around Asheville, and working on his new record. That’s when we talked about doing something with ‘Miriama.’ After he returned to Bamako, we were sending MP3 sessions back and forth, so it was this really slow process of getting all the tracks loaded. But when we finally hit ‘play,’ I was just floored by what he sent back. That song has a special place in our hearts because we first heard it in Guinea back in 2001. A hip-hop group called Fac Alliance had a hit with it, and you couldn’t get in a taxi or go to a club without hearing it. It was the soundtrack to our first trip over there, so we always talked about playing it.”

For sheer exuberance, “Lafia” might well be the album’s standout track. Featuring a Santana-like wah guitar solo by Heller and a breakdown that gives Perkins room to explore his full repertoire on kora and the bluesier-sounding ngoni—another stringed instrument which, in the hands of a master like the late Vieux Kanté, could sound like an orchestra—the song has quickly become another band favorite.

“It’s just a banger,” Perkins raves. “It’s not really sticking to any one style at all, and really, that’s what blew my mind about Vieux’s playing too. He was like Jimi Hendrix on that thing. It’s a pentatonic instrument, but he could hit so many harmonics that he was playing outside the pentatonic scale. I spent a good five months learning from him on another trip we took to Mali in 2004. He flipped our world upside down. We would talk about music, and he would say, ‘There’s no boundaries. Learn the tradition first, and then you can do whatever you want. You’re not African, so you’re not bound by this like we are.’ But Vieux, he was Fulani, so he’s not part of the caste system. He had carte blanche to just go nuts. Meeting that cat really changed my life. I don’t know how reincarnation works—and I’m not sure I believe in it—but if it is real, then I think Vieux was the reincarnation of Jimi. Just with his level of creativity and going balls-out, he was unbelievable.”

In Griot culture, knowledge goes hand-in-hand with responsibility—to teach, to impart wisdom, to preserve tradition—and all the members of Toubab Krewe take this closely to heart. They speak of Lamine Soumano’s mentorship with reverence and respect, and of their love of West African music with a passion that comes from years of study, tempered with an unspoken willingness to “let go” and get caught up in the communal spirit of the moment. It’s one thing to feed your head, and quite another to “free your mind,” as George Clinton once put it—and we know the rest.

“I look at it this way,” Perkins says, pausing to gather his thoughts. “I’ve had somebody trust me with damn near a thousand years of knowledge, right? And part of that is an obligation you have to share it, and to teach. That’s the djeli culture. A lot of people don’t understand that because we don’t have that here—at least not that deep. But if I don’t give it to you, and you don’t give it to somebody else, it’s gonna die. And you know how it is. People get greedy with music: ‘That’s not yours!’ No. This is meant to be fun. That’s what we’re doing this for. We damn sure don’t do it for money, I can tell you that. I do it because I don’t have a choice. I was trusted with this information that I’ve gotta pass along, hopefully, in a good way.”

Without a doubt, they’ve come a long way from opening their sets, as they did back in their early days in Asheville, with quirky cover versions of AC/DC’s “Back in Black” or Junior Brown’s “Too Many Nights in a Roadhouse.” But even those choices were signs of the band’s unquenchable thirst for a strange and challenging new horizon, all part of the quest for knowledge. And as Toubab Krewe gear up for yet another action-packed adventure on the road this spring and summer, Heller is confident that plenty more discoveries, and breakthroughs, await.

“If you don’t have fun doing it, there’s a problem,” he says plainly. “Being able to play openly and freely—of course, with careful attention, but with the intention being that the space we’re in together is open for new things all the time—that’s the most important aspect of it. It’s where the music really lives. It’s not so much in any recitation of parts or song structures, but in all the places between, in the way the music feels. It never ceases to amaze me how songs continue to change if you allow them to. And then, when I think about the joy of getting together and having fun—that’s so simple, really. The spirit of congregating to celebrate being alive, and playing music and dancing, is the reason we’re doing it, and the reason I go out to hear live music too. I want to set myself free enough to be swept away by music, to see where it takes me.”

Toubab Krewe have released Stylo in partnership with Seed Programs International, an Asheville-based nonprofit that seeks to alleviate global hunger by gathering, packaging and shipping vegetable seed packets to impoverished communities worldwide.

This article originally appears in the April/May 2018 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.