| World Jazz |
The Art of Crossing Borders: Ashley Maher’s Tree to Tree
In Ashley Maher’s world, borders are porous, melodies migrate, and rhythm is a form of citizenship. Born in Canada, raised in Los Angeles, and musically shaped in London, Maher has always seemed to live in transit, between continents, between idioms, between the measured grace of jazz and the untamed heartbeat of West Africa. Her new album, Tree to Tree, recorded in Dakar, is not simply the product of that journey; it is the journey itself, rendered in sound.
From the first measures, Tree to Tree feels less like a studio recording than a gathering, a communion of musicians, cultures, and histories. The percussion is alive with grain and dust, the horns rise like daylight over a city waking up. Maher’s voice, at once grounded and ethereal, doesn’t dominate the ensemble; it moves within it, part of the same current. The sound feels startlingly natural, as if the microphones had merely caught something that was already happening, a dialogue in motion.
Recording in Dakar gave Maher something that no polished Western studio could provide: space for imperfection, for breath, for chance. The local musicians, whose names, she insists, must be mentioned, bring an ease and spontaneity that defines the album’s pulse. Their interplay is elastic and alert, built on patterns that repeat and evolve like spoken language. In this setting, Maher becomes less a bandleader than a listener, her phrasing responding to the percussion the way a dancer responds to the floor.
It’s in that humility, that willingness to join rather than lead, that the album finds its quiet power. Too often, Western artists arrive at “world music” as tourists, layering exotic textures over familiar forms. Maher takes the opposite path. She lets the rhythm alter her time sense, lets the tonal colors of African instruments reshape her melodies, lets another continent’s musical logic become her own.
The Pulse of Place
You hear it most vividly on “Reading the Rings,” where the rhythm section drives forward with an almost hypnotic insistence, and the brass punctuates the air like quick bursts of sunlight. The groove is tight yet breathing, alive with the intelligence of musicians who understand that time can stretch and contract without ever losing its center. Maher floats above it, her voice tracing melodic arcs that seem to hover just behind the beat, a small, human defiance against the inevitability of rhythm.
Elsewhere, “Galon de Leche” becomes a kind of revelation: the point at which all her influences, African, jazz, singer-songwriter, merge into a single voice. Before that, her reimagining of Gordon Matthew Sumner’s “American in Dakar” plays like a declaration of intent: to inhabit a borrowed song until it feels lived in, transformed, reborn in another language of sound.
Between Africa and the West
The further Tree to Tree travels into African territory, the more it reveals about Maher’s Western roots. On “Ever Given,” for instance, her phrasing recalls the plainspoken intimacy of Suzanne Vega, that delicate balance between intellect and emotion, observation and confession. The song unfolds like a quiet essay on belonging, how an artist can be shaped by many places without belonging entirely to any of them.
That question, where does one belong? seems to hum beneath the album’s surface. For Maher, identity isn’t something fixed; it’s an act of movement, of reaching outward while remaining grounded. The title Tree to Tree suggests this perfectly: connection across distance, roots that extend far enough to touch.
Sound as Conversation
Much has been said about “fusion” in music, but Maher’s work resists the term. Fusion implies the melting of distinct elements into something new; Tree to Tree feels more like a conversation, one in which each voice retains its accent. You hear the interplay, the respect, the listening. The percussion doesn’t serve as ornament, nor does the voice claim center stage. Instead, everything coexists, human scale, hand to skin, breath to brass, one pulse answering another.
At first listen, the mix can seem unfamiliar to Western ears. The vocals aren’t sculpted to sit above the instruments; they move alongside them. But over time, this balance reveals its intent. It’s a refusal of hierarchy, musical and cultural alike. What emerges is a sense of equality, of participation rather than possession.
A Journey Toward Wholeness
By the time the final track, “Nenam,” arrives, the record feels like an arrival, not at a destination, but at a sense of wholeness. It’s the album’s moment of release, a celebration that gathers everything that came before: the pulse of Dakar, the harmonic curiosity of jazz, the introspection of the singer-songwriter. The song bursts open like sunlight through leaves, joyous, uncontained, complete.
Tree to Tree isn’t a casual listen. It asks for patience and openness, the way travel does. You don’t consume it; you grow into it. But the reward is immense: an experience that leaves you hearing differently, thinking differently, perhaps even feeling differently about what it means to live in a world where cultures meet, collide, and transform one another.
For Ashley Maher, music is not about crossing borders. It’s about dissolving them, not to erase difference, but to celebrate the spaces where difference becomes dialogue. In a time when the world often feels fractured, Tree to Tree stands as a quiet, luminous act of connection.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, October 10th 2025
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Musicians :
Jean Mermose – keys
Papis Konate – keys
Amady Sibide – guitar
Thierino Sarr – bass
Abdoulaye Lo – drums
Babakar Seck – sabar
Samba Ndokh Mbaye – tama
Willy Bousset – bass
Alioune Seck – sabar
Mildhah – trumpet
Silvain Boco – trombone
Ken Hnom – guitar
Aminata Doucoure – guest vocal
Ashley Maher – vocals
Tracking Listing :
Music
Salt and Pepper
American In Dakar
Till The Day
Galon de Leche
Dangerous
Reading The Rings
Ever Given
Nenam