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Derek Gripper is one of South Africa’s leading guitarists whose love of the kora set him transcribing and recording some of its greatest works, changing the face of classical guitar...

Derek Gripper plays classical guitar like someone who got bored of classical guitar. The beginning-middle-end of it, the standard tuning, the priesthood of flawless rendition. From a remote nature reserve outside Cape Town — homeschooling four children in a custom Montessori classroom; transcribing West African harp music from an old laptop with a broken 'e' key — the South African guitarist has spent the last decade dismantling the assumptions of his training and rebuilding something stranger, more porous.

The kora translations are what made his name. Beginning in 2012, Gripper found a way to play the 21-string Malian harp's interlocking patterns on a six-string guitar, a feat classical guitar legend John Williams pronounced "absolutely impossible until I heard Derek Gripper do it." Toumani Diabaté, unconvinced that one player was responsible, invited him to perform at the Acoustik Festival in Bamako. Carnegie Hall, a Songlines Best Album Award, and multiple collaborations with Williams followed.

But what looks like a feat is really a philosophy: that to play music is to host it briefly, to enter a genealogical line in which each iteration is family. African composers — Diabaté, Madosini, Salif Keita, Mansour Seck — taught him a different relationship to authorship, where the new song carries its grandfather's melody intact and nobody calls it theft. Solo authorship isn't assumed, ownership isn't claimed. Continuation is key.

Improvisation came late and crookedly. He learned it not through jazz but by breaking apart Bach and Toumani and reassembling them, and through study of Carnatic music in Chennai — drawn to its disciplined freedom rather than to any dogmatic style. Now he walks onstage with no setlist, the neurotic rituals of the concert hall reprogrammed into trained ease, whether playing solo or in unplanned conversation with masters of other disciplines: a wordless collaboration with kora master Ballaké Sissoko (they share no spoken language), or an effortless dialogue with sarod player Alam Khan, son of Ali Akbar Khan — whose records spin continuously in the Gripper household.

He is, increasingly, in conversation with his tools: a more than thirty-year obsession with the guitar has branched into 35mm film, darkroom printing, analogue tape, and the metal-plate reverbs of mid-century recording studios. He thinks continuously about process; about photography as a way to think about analogue media through a non-musical discipline; about a visceral sound that mimics nature; about drawing compositional processes from the writings of his longtime hero, natural farmer and philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka. On tour he carries an eccentric fifty-year-old tape delay that returns fragments of his playing seconds later, half-remembered, in the manner of Zimbabwean mbira music.

Gripper comes from a lineage of disrupters. His father was jailed for refusing apartheid-era army conscription. The son inherits the disposition: openly preoccupied with the state of things, willing to be public about it. Intense, but funny with it. The laser focus has a sense of humour about itself, playing everything as though mid-thought, always available for revision. His guitar — a West German relic of the golden age of classical music, flawed and opinionated — is the thinking partner.

Years ago on Robben Island, a younger Gripper played for Nelson Mandela on his first return to the prison since his release. Everyone else in the room was distracted; Mandela watched the music without looking away once. That's the audience Gripper still seems to be playing for — the one paying attention.