In a career spanning 20 years, Mina Agossi has never sold out to any particular style, fashion or demand of a producer. This spirit of independence no doubt explains the richness and originality of her œuvre, which has never ceased to surprise, from album to album.

Listening to Mina Agossi is to enter into a musical world on the same level as the likes of Louis Armstrong, The Beatles or Pink Floyd. And her new album Just Like a Lady is very much of the same calibre as her previous records.

Mina Agossi is from Besançon in eastern France, born of a French mother and a Beninese father killed in mysterious circumstances in Gabon in 1997. She started her career in the theatre, but her love for music – in particular jazz and  Jimi Hendrix – proved to be stronger.

Early on, she would rehearse in the cellar of her maternal grandmother’s house, together with a drummer and bass player, which went some way towards forming her musical identity. “When I compose these days, I still only hear drum and bass,” she explains. Which is perhaps why her initial recordings are very stripped down affairs – examples being  Voice & Bass (1997) with bass player Vincent Guérin, or Alkemi (2000) with the drummer Philippe Combelle.

After a period in Spain she returned to France and settled in Brittany in 1993, where she met Vincent Guérin. Following Bass & Voice, she quickly gained a reputation as one of the up-and-coming stars of French jazz. She started working with other musicians and performed at prestigious venues in the United States, alongside the singer Sheila Jordan among others.

In 2001, she performed in New York and released E-Zpass to Brooklyn, a first album of compositions recorded in Brooklyn, in which she explored other genres such as hip hop and R&B. Her talent was spotted by the saxophonist Archie Shepp, who became her mentor and developed her musical career.

Her career really took off in the UK, where she signed a three-album deal in 2006 with the owner of the Candid label, Alan Bates. Mina Agossi sang in a trio with the Japanese drummer Ichiro Onoe and bass player Eric Jacot, who both accompanied her on tour. That same year she released Well You Needn’t, inspired by Thelonious Monk.

The African influence was always there. As a child, she’d spent time criss-crossing the continent with her mother, who was a mathematics professor in a government volunteer program, in Niger, Morocco and Côte d’Ivoire. But it was in Benin that she felt most at home, and she returned to her father’s native country in 2006 to rediscover her family, filmed by her friend  Jean-Henri Meunier. Her travels in Africa were the centrepiece of the documentary Mina Agossi, une voix nomade (Mina Agossi, the voice of a nomad), broadcast on the Franco-German cultural channel Arte, in 2007.

She performed at the legendary Blue Note club in New York in November 2008. The following year, despite a failed collaboration with pianist Ahmad Jamal, marked a turning point in her career. Mina Agossi left the Concord label for Naïve, which provided her with serious commercial backing and gave her carte blanche for her next album.

She brought in Phil Reptil and for the first time used harmonic instruments. The pop/drum’n’bass/dub world of Phil Reptil fused with the more intimate ambience of Mina’s own work to create a remarkably original album, with innovative interpretations of classics like Antonio Carlos Jobim’s Waters of March, completely overhauled thanks to Reptil’s interventions. And Jimi Hendrix probably wouldn’t recognise his Burning of the midnight lamp, featuring the double bass. Mina had already covered a Hendrix track, 1983, on her previous album Simple Things.

A free spirit, Mina Agossi is impossible to categorise. On her ninth album she remains a voice apart, wild and unpredictable, regularly breaking the rules of popular music, not unlike the Icelandic singer Bjork, another key influence.