As a teenager Lionel Loueke used to breakdance to his favourite hip-hop tune, Cantaloupe Island. He wasn�t to know that one day he tour the world with the man who wrote it, Herbie Hancock.

As a teenager Lionel Loueke used to breakdance to his favourite hip-hop tune, Cantaloupe Island. He wasn't to know then that this was a re-worked jazz classic any more than he would expect to one day tour the world with the man who wrote it, Herbie Hancock.

In those days, in his home town of Cotonou, in the West African state of Benin, Loueke concedes that he didn't even know what jazz was. But when a friend of his older brother returned from France with a George Benson album, Loueke made it his business to learn all about this music and where it came from, resulting in a period of 13 years' study in Paris, Boston and Los Angeles that have helped this thirtysomething guitarist become one of the most distinctive sounding arrivals on the jazz scene in this new century.

Growing up in Benin, Loueke heard the sounds that were emanating from neighbouring Nigeria and from Mali. He listened to Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade especially, as well as involving himself as a percussionist at school playing the traditional music of Benin. His brother played guitar and Lionel followed suit, but there was a snag ahead.

Cotonou is a big city, the largest in Benin, but at the time, under a Maoist regime, it didn't offer all the benefits of city life that we take for granted. Guitar strings, for example, weren't easy to come by and when Loueke broke one, he had to improvise, restringing his guitar with more readily available bicycle brake cables. This ingenuity only went so far, however, and what with the humidity, the guitar neck struggled to cope with the tension and snapped.

Loueke laughs as he tells this story. "Even now, it's not that easy to get guitar strings in Benin," he says. "But by then I'd heard George Benson and was gobsmacked and I wanted to find out where he'd learned to play like that. So I started checking out Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery and I realised that if I was going to integrate my own ideas with theirs and have people play my music, I'd have to learn theory and notation and the only place I could do that in West Africa was in the Ivory Coast."

So, disappointing his parents - his father is a retired professor of mathematics and his mother a high school teacher - who wanted him to become a lawyer, he set off for a three-year course that introduced him to classical music and pointed him towards his next stop, Paris.

"I didn't speak English at that point," he says. "I knew some song lyrics because I'd heard people like BB King, whose guitar style made me think of the way they play in the north of Benin, but I couldn't converse, and like many French-speaking West Africans, I thought that Paris would be a good stepping stone if I wanted to get to America, which was the ultimate goal."

In Paris he studied at the American School, picking up the English he needed by day and frequenting the capital's jazz clubs by night. He wasn't playing jazz in public yet, just listening to guitarists such as Bireli Lagrene who are carrying on the Reinhardt tradition, and studying the American musicians passing through. Winning a scholarship to its famous Berklee School of Music, he then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, from where, after another three years' study, he thought he'd try his luck in New York. One of his professors had a better idea, however.

"He suggested the Thelonious Monk Institute in California because, if you get accepted there, everything's covered - tuition, housing, they even pay you a stipend - and you're learning from the top, top guys. I studied with pianist Kenny Barron and bass player Dave Holland while I was there," he says.

There was a downside, he adds, in that the audition panel, consisting of Herbie Hancock, saxophone giant Wayne Shorter, trumpeter Terence Blanchard and bassist Charlie Haden couldn't have been any tougher.

Hancock, however, actually burst into spontaneous applause on hearing Loueke's audition pieces and wanted to take him out on the road with his band there and then, as did Blanchard. The Institute's rules, alas, dictate that students are there to study and must attend five days a week, so Loueke had to content himself with going out on gigs with Blanchard at weekends. Hancock kept the door open and hired Loueke as soon as his studies were finished.

"Touring with Herbie over the past five years has been an education in itself," says Loueke. "He's a real mentor, a hero, and just to see the way he works with an audience - and these are big audiences, up to 15,000 - is fantastic. I learn something from him every time we're on the band bus or at an airport, practical stuff, and it's inspiring to hear how he'll develop a piece of music, a solo introduction to a number maybe, every night and create something new, even if we're playing 10 nights in a row, as we often do."

Working extensively with Hancock hasn't precluded Loueke from fronting his own bands - far from it - and his latest album Kariba, for Blue Note Records, features the trio with which he makes his Scottish debut as a bandleader this weekend, having appeared with Hancock in Edinburgh previously.

"I've known Massimo (Biolcati) and Ferenc (Nemeth) since we were at Berklee together, so we have a real understanding and with their sympathetic playing I can introduce sounds on my guitar that represent the instruments I grew up hearing, like the kora, or African harp, and the kalimba, the thumb piano," he says. "I like to give people a flavour of where I come from. But I love playing jazz standards, too. Ultimately, I want to do everything but still be me."

Lionel Loueke plays The Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow, on Friday.