and saw Keita's development as a vocalist. They have continued to collaborate, with an upcoming album planned, and recent performances in 2021 include The Proms, the Brighton Festival and the London Jazz Festival, and a performance in Liverpool with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. In 2012, Keita met Omar Sosa, an acclaimed Cuban jazz pianist, and their debut album Transparent Water, featuring Gustavo Ovalles, was released in 2017, followed by SUBA on 22 October 2021, accompanied by a nationwide tour of England and Wales. Transparent Water was hailed by Songlines as ‘beautiful, rhapsodic… spiritual’ and by World Music Central as ‘mesmerising, evocative and sophisticated.' In 2019, Keita joined the AKA Trio, "an international musical summit meeting of three world-renowned virtuosos: Antonio Forcione, Seckou Keita and Adriano Adewale"; Forcione is an Italian guitarist-composer while Adewale is a Brazilian percussionist. Their album JOY was released in May 2019, alongside a major UK tour which included the Brighton Festival. Also in 2019, Keita was part of Spell Songs, which brought together folk musicians, and the artwork and text of Robert McFarlane's and Jackie Morris's children's book The Lost Words: A Spell Book; performances included the Hay International Literary Festival, with a followup concert hall tour planned for early 2022. In 2020, Keita sought to explore how the traditional role of a griot could address a global tragedy such as the COVID-19 pandemic, so he reached out to other artists and friends, and their contributions resulted in the release of Now Or Never, a charity single to support the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in July 2020, which featured artists from across Africa, Scotland, India, Cuba and Japan, including Fatoumata Diawara (Mali), Noura Mint Seymali (Mauritania), Kris Drever (Scotland), Anandi Bhattacharya (India), Zule Guerra (Cuba) and Mieko Miyazaki (Japan). All proceeds from Now Or Never go to the ICRC for its global response to COVID-19. Subsequently, Keita explored ways of collaborating with pan-African artists, including "long time friends, musical heroes and African legends," explaining that he's "collaborated a lot in the West, but not enough in the land of Africa, so that’s where my focus is at the moment." The first of these collaborations was with Aida Samb, a Senegalese singer and performer, with their single Elles Sont Toutes Belles released in February 2021; he has since released Homeland on 21 June 2021 which features the renowned Senegalese vocalist Baaba Maal. Following the