African Folk Gets a Jazz Infusion

Even for Regina Carter, the extraordinary jazz violinist and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, there's risk when straying from familiar terrain, as she does on her new album, "Reverse Thread" (E1 Entertainment).

On "Reverse Thread," her seventh album as a leader, the 43-year-old Ms. Carter reinterprets traditional and contemporary folk music from Kenya, Mali, Uganda and other African nations; the impact of the continent's music on the Western canon is represented by Papo Vázquez's "Un Aguinald Pa Regina" and "Day Dreaming on the Niger," a song co-written by Ms. Carter and Reginald Washington that first appeared on her 1997 album "Something for Grace."