Just in case

Just in case the subject of Taureg rebels should come up, say for example in my next post,  I thought I would post some Taureg rebel music by the Malian band Tinariwen. They've appeared before on Flares, in my series on the music of Mali.

Habibe Koité

I'm going to wrap up my long, slow and rambling series on the music of Mali with this post featuring videos of the immensely talented Habib Koité and his band Bamada.  Koité is deservedly the most popular of all the Malian musicians I've posted about. In fact, he's considered by many to be the finest African musician today -- an opinion I would not argue with. 

I've used the rich musical scene of Mali to discuss how West African music was taken to America in the diaspora of the slave trade. In the Age of Sail it evolved in isolation, but by the middle of the 20th Century American and Latin flavored black music returned to Africa via records and radio.

Around the same time Malian expats were playing on European tours. Eventually, largely left-leaning promoters brought their music to a wider audience when they created the notion of World Music as a means of binning their albums in record stores. This led to a situation where much of the world's music -- J-Pop and Bollywood music being the most glaring examples -- were excluded from the so-called World Music scene in favor of left-leaning musicians.

However, those days are over. The demise of record stores with their bins, and the rise of the internet with it searches, will change that dynamic just as surely as the first record brought to Mali impacted the local music. It will curious to see if that particular march through the cultural institutions has came to an end and if it will be reversed, or at least countered.

Below is a list of the earlier posts in the series for those interested:

Father & Son
14 years later
Torn from today's headlines
Ex-pats in Paris
Unscheduled comparison
An interlude in the record bins
Unnatural Selection

Unnatural selection

I've been languidly writing a series of posts about the music of Mali. Using contemporary Malian musicians as a backdrop, I've noted that West African music was taken to the New World via the slave trade. There, in the isolation of the Age of Sail, it evolved separately in the U.S., the Caribbean, Latin America and Brazil.

In the mid 20th century the music of this diaspora returned to Africa via records, radio and Cuban advisers. African musicians absorbed these influences and integrated them into their music. At the same time African musicians were traveling to Europe where they encountered the Brazilian strain of the diaspora and, more importantly to their pocket books, found a European concert circuit that they could tour.  

In the previous post in this series, An interlude in the record bins (it has links to all of the earlier posts if you're interested), I discussed how European promoters of eclectic music from around the world who were eager to increase their sales were frustrated by the difficulty in getting their albums binned in record stores. They solved that problem by creating a new music genre which they called World Music.

Should you find a record store that's still open and look through the World Music bin you're quickly discover that the geography of it is very distorted. Irish and Brazilian music are the 800lb gorillas in it, with African, and Middle Eastern music taking up the bulk of the rest of the space, leaving only a little room for a few dusty Hawaiian albums and polka bands. Missing entirely will be the enormously influential sounds of Bollywood, J-Pop and any hint of China.

What's up with that?

The song I've embedded above is the blind duo Malian of of Amadou and Miriam. They were fairly obscure even in Mali, only selling a few thousand records, until a musician named Manu Chao collaborated with them. The first album they produced with him sold over 600,000 copies.

Manu Chao is actually a French singer of Spanish ancestry (his parents left Spain after his grandfather was executed by the Franco regime). He started out doing rockabilly, drifted into French punk music and reinvented himself by traveling through South and Central America absorbing their style and using his linguistic skills to sing in a pastiche of languages. Oh, and he's a hard core leftist -- his band Radio Bemba Sound System is named after the radio gear Castro and Guevara used during the Cuban revolution.

The name World Music is a misnomer. It was chosen more or less at random, and these days it would be more accurate to call it The Music of Fuzzy-Headed Liberal Lonely Planet Backpackers. OK, I'm exaggerating to make a cheap joke, but regardless it is pretty clearly slanted towards a transnational mind set. 

From time to time I've ranted and raved on Flares that one of our big mistakes is not selling how truly revolutionary the American concept of individual freedom is. It is what brings people to our shores.  Consider the difference to Amadou and Miriam between a couple of thousand records sold locally and 600,000 and counting sold globally. We bewail the long march through our institutions -- why do we concede that territory?   

It frustrates the hell out of me.

An interlude in the record bins

This is going to be an odd post in my Music of Mali series in that it is going to feature no musicians from Mali. Please bear with me.

In 1969 Nonesuch Explorer, a record label that specialized in anthropological recordings of tribal and ethnic music, brought out Goro Yamaguchi's album A Bell Ringing in The Empty Sky (I'm pretty sure, but not 100% certain, the video above is a track from that record).

When it was released, it was difficult to find the album, much less hear it played on the radio. You might hear it late at night on the radio or find it randomly filed someplace in an off-beat record store, but the odds were against either. I found it in a large, and faintly eccentric, record store in downtown Milwaukee. It was the first non-American/European record I ever bought.

All of Nonesuch's records faced that problem, as well as music from Brazil, Ireland, Latin America, Spain, Greece, India (represented by Ravi Shankar, popularized by the Beatles) and a few other oddities -- like the amusingly ridiculous musical "archeologist" Elizabeth Waldo. There was no place for any of these records, and so they fell through the cracks if they were carried at all.

Meanwhile, as I've discussed in the earlier posts in this series (Father & Son, 14 years later, Torn from today's headlines, Ex-pats in Paris and Unscheduled comparison), West African music had been taken to the New World via the slave trade where it evolved in the relative isolation of the Age of Sail, eventually to return to Africa via American recordings and Cuban workers where it had a great impact on contemporary African musicians. 

Many of these same musicians then spent time in Europe where there was a music circuit they could tour. Of course, they also made recordings and -- like A Bell ringing in an Empty Sky -- they had difficulty getting airtime or placement of their albums in record stores. 

That problem persisted until 1987. In that year a group of promoters met and decided to bundle it together under a genre they called World Music. They planned festivals, awards, worked the radio stations and, most importantly of all, delivered browser cards to record stores so the music could easily be binned. While still a niche market, the ability to properly bin the records, and for customers to find it, greatly increased the reach of the new genre.

Today there is an increasing push-back against the genre's name. It implies a split, and to some a second class status, from European and American music. Also, large swaths of the world's music -- Bollywood, J-Pop and Chinese pop are conspicuously missing from the World Music library. 

I doubt it matters with the internet replacing record stores as the source of music. Searches can be more complex and focused, and besides -- as we've seen with M.I.A.  (or our much beloved Japanese emo screamo punk band Z for that matter)-- there are other avenues for musicians to market their work directly to their audience these days. 

As an example, I'll end with the following video I found on Youtube. I don't know who the band is, or the woman singer, or why a Peruvian group seems to be working with some French Canadians, but they're obviously promoting themselves in a new and different manner than from the days of scrambling to get air time and space in a record bin.

Unscheduled comparison

I swiped the above audio clip from KurtP's post I've never heard it sung like this at his blog A Trainwreck in Maxwell. It a 1916 recording of 'Swing low, sweet chariot' by the Tuskegee Institute Singers. It. is from the Library of Congress collection.

As KurtP alludes to, the singers were probably the children or grandchildren of slaves, so this version is likely closer to the version slaves would have sung. The U.S. transatlantic slave trade was banned in 1787, with the signing of the constitution, which means the singers would have been only about 120 years removed from African born slaves.

I've been talking about the music of Mali in a series of posts; and how African music traveled to the New World via the slave trade, evolved there in the isolation of the Age of Sail, and then reflected back via records and the radio. The above piece comes towards the tail end of that isolation.

Listening to it, I was reminded of how Salif Keita (who we've met before in the post Ex-pats in Paris) sometimes intertwines his vocal lead with a backup choir of female singers in a similar manner -- almost a call and response, but not exactly. Below is a video showing an example. It is interesting to see the same vocal device used in the two songs.

Ex-pats in Paris

As a descendant of Sundiata Keita, the Mandinka king who founded the Malian empire, Salif Keita was born into a prestigious family. However, as an ablino, a sign of bad luck in Malian society, he had a difficult childhood as both his community and family mistrusted him and treated him poorly.

What he did have was an exquisite voice. Eventually he moved to Bamako where he joined the Rail Band as their lead singer. The Rail Band was the house band for the bar in the Station Hotel which many Malian musicians played for at one time or another. Incidentally, it was one of the major avenues of Cuban and Latin influences on the music of Mali.

Eventually, because of political unrest he moved first to Cote D'Ivoire, and then to Paris. In fact, many African musicians traveled north to Paris or London. There was an active European concert circuit they could tour, and working in Europe exposed them to a much larger, and wealthier, audience.

In earlier posts in this series I've talked about how West African music moved with the slave trade through the Caribbean, where it split north to the U.S and south to Brazil. It evolved in the isolation of the age of sail, but eventually reflected back to Africa -- via the radio for U.S. blues and soul, while the Latin influences came from the Cuban advisers working in Africa. The Brazilian influences were to come largely through the ex-pat African musicians being exposed to it by Brazilian musicians working the same European concert circuit.

So strong were these foreign influences that Salif Keita was criticized in Mali for having absorbed rather too much of it during his long exile. He eventually returned to Mali where he built a recording studio, and his latest works have been well recieved.

Below is a video of him singing with Cesario Evora, the great Cape Verdean singer (no doubt an influence on our old friend Myra Andrate who fretted so much about lopsided democracy) who was another of the African musicians who gained wider fame by working the European concert circuit.

It you're interested, here are the other posts in my series on the music of Mali:

1 - Father & Son (Ali Farka Toure and his son Vieux Farka Toure)
2 - 14 years later (AfroCubism, Toumani Diabate and Ali Farke Toure)
3 - Torn from today's headlines... (Tinariwen)

Torn from today's headlines...

I've taken a much longer break than I planned from my "Magical Tour of the Music of Mali" series (Part 1: Father & Son, Part 2: 14 years later). I had originally planned for this to be Part 4, but decided to go with it now because of its ties to Libya.

In the earlier pieces I talked about how West African music moved across the Atlantic with the slave trade, passing through the Caribbean and split north to the U.S. and south to Brazil. It evolved in the New World during the relative isolation of the Age of Sail, but eventually the music reflected back to Africa, where Latin and blues influences can now be heard.

I happened to see some of that reflection. During the Yom Kippur I was on a ship that ran a blockade of the Bab El Mandeb strait and had a port call in Massawa, Ethiopia. Being a sailor, as soon as I got off the ship I headed to the nearest bar. 

Most of the bars were just an empty room lit by a bare light bulb, with folding chairs to sit on and beer and ice served from a card table. Entertainment was 45 records played on the kind of record players American teens used to have -- the kind where the covers could be detached and had the speakers in them. The records they played, with the volume cranked up to an ear splitting 10 on the dial, were all Motown tunes and featured a lot of James Brown. That, and American pop in general, was the music that dominated many of their radio stations.

The videos accompanying this post are from the Malian band Tinariwen. The rhythms and chorus are definitely African, but the electric guitar and bass are unmistakably influenced by American blues. Specifically,  American blues filtered through rock bands like Elvis Presley, Led Zeppelin, Carlos Santana and Jimi Hendrix according to their lead guitarist Ibrahim Ag Alhabib.   

The band is composed of rebel Taureg tribesman from the Sahara who moved to Libya in the 1980s to receive military training from Gaddafi. Another name they call their band is The Collective, so that should give you an idea of at least one component of their politics. Today, the mercenaries Gaddafi brought in to bolster his regime are primarily Tauregs.  And so we have West African rebels in blue jeans, listening to rock and soul music, spouting Marx, waving the Koran and worried most of all about clan feuds as we drop bombs on them. Tilt your head a certain way and I suppose it makes some sort of sense.

Of course, in between then and now Tinariwen and other Malian bands landed record contracts and tour dates in the West, but how that happened is a story for another post.

14 Years later

The album which morphed into the Buena Vista Social Club was originally intended to be a collaboration between musicians from Cuba and Mali. Problems with passports, visa or scheduling caused the Malian musicians to miss the original recording date so the producer cobbled together the group that eventually recorded the well received album.

As Will Hodgkinson in his article AfroCubism: Buena Vista take two relates, ""The conversations I  had with the Malian musicians after Buena Vista came out consisted of two subjects. They were: 'Oh shit', and 'When can we try doing it again?'" says Gold, who has finally made his planned Afro-Cuban collaboration happen, 14 years after the event."  

Above is a clip of the musicians finally playing together. 

Such a collaboration isn't at all surprising. West African music moved across the Atlantic with the slave trade and through the Caribbean where it split north to the States and south to Brazil. Since then the Caribbean, American and Brazilian have reflected their influences back to West African.  

Below is a clip featuring Toumani Diabate, from the AfroCubism clip above, playing with Ali Farke Toure who's music I linked to in my previous post Father & Son. In that earlier clip the blues influences were obvious, in this clip one can hear the subtle Latin influences.

Father & Son

No comments, just videos by the two great Mali blues musicians, Ali Farka Toure and his son Vieux Farka Toure.