Not much to say except here's another good one from Tata. You'll notice two things about it probably pretty quickly, besides not having the album cover: 1) The song titles are the same as the last one (plus a few new ones) and 2) for the most part the songs don't sound at all alike except for lyrics. As I alluded to in that previous Tata post, Te Djama is more similar to the good ol' Wassoulou pop that we all know and love: drum machines, synthesizers, soft harmonizing backing vocals, and keyboards. The Laban album has a more organic sound that I prefer, but I love this tape nonetheless.
By leaps and bounds my favorite track on the tape, and perhaps one of my favorites in all of the Wassoulou music I've heard is this version of Djama. Aside from Tata's vocals being amazingly dynamic, wandering up and down through the melody, I love that little keyboard hook that persists throughout the song. It almost seems to draw out the beat it's on, momentarily stretching time between the notes before twisting at its apex and dropping back into the poppy rhythm that drives behind Tata's beautiful singing.
For the record, some of my other top favorite songs are Sarama (also Tata on Album du Laban), Mani Jin Dala (Oumou Sangare on Bi Furu), Diarabi Nene (Oumou on Moussolou), Anka Maliba (Djeneba Seck on Tigne), everything that Kagbe Sidibe has ever sung, and last but not nearly least, Wassoulon Foli (Sali Sidibe). As I started writing this list I realized that it would end up being quite long. Also everything off of Dayele by Doussou Bagayoko, who I'd marry in a second given the chance. I'm also quite fond of Fourou by Satta Kouyate off of Dakan.
I just saw a few new videos from Doussou on youtube...anyone have that album?
Yikes! I can't believe I almost forgot. Dielaban Tile by Doussouba Traore used to play on repeat endlessly. Another amazing song from Wassoulou. I'm pretty sure all the songs I mentioned above (minus the Oumou songs) can be found somewhere on this website. I just don't feel like digging up the links.
My final days in Bellingham were quickly approaching and I anticipated that San Francisco's dense neighborhoods would be less accommodating to building another instrument, so I took the opportunity last week to build another kamelengoni. I had one full antelope skin packed away from a trip in 2006 and a gourd from a trip in 2008. To date I've made 4, not including the assistance of that which I made with Sekou. Two of them broke; one had a tiny, thin gourd from a farm in North Carolina and the skin on the second one ripped under the tension of the bridge, leaving me with the mid-sized gourd from 2008 ready to go.
Making the instruments is pretty simple. The most difficult part of the entire process is getting the materials in the first place. Finding gourds of an appropriate size in the states is challenging (my efforts were unsuccessful, although I did get smaller gourds from farms in Florida and North Carolina that would be good for soku/njarka). Anyway, here are some photos of the process with brief descriptions.
Step 1: Assemble materials.
In a clockwise direction starting at 11: Antelope skin, high guage
fishing line for strings, wooden bridge with holes drilled for however
many strings you want (I did 6), bamboo rods to insert under the skin/on
top of the gourd, upholstery tacks to secure the skin, neck with guitar
tuning keys to tune the strings, gourd with top cut off and insides
scraped out, 2mm accessory cord to counter-tension the bridge against
the taught strings, fabric or cord to tie two of the bamboo handles to
the neck (see below where I just used 1mm cord), knife and razors to
shave the skin and make small incisions for the bamboo rods.
If I were a better wood worker/had better tools I'd smooth out the cuts when attaching the guitar keys.
Full dry skin (blocks to keep it from rolling for the picture)
Step 2: Finding the area of skin you want to use, cutting it, soaking
the skin, cleaning it, and ripping off some of the under-layers that
prevent it from being as elastic as possible.
I have never found a good method for getting those layers off, nor have I really searched. I just remember with Sekou tearing off those layers, and it's incredibly hard. I change out the nasty water and soak the skin overnight. Sekou wrapped our skin in a plastic bag after it had been soaking and buried it overnight. The thinnest part of the skin tends to be around the shoulder area and neck and and if you can get off those under-layers it will almost be transparent in parts.
Step 3: Attaching the skin.
While the skin is still wet, align it over the hole in the gourd and tap in the first tacks to anchor the skin. Then in a star pattern, stretch the skin over the gourd, pulling as hard as you can and tapping in more tacks. Other methods would be to thread some cord through the fringes of the skin, like a draw-string, and pull the skin taught underneath and then start to plug tacks in.
Step 4: Insert the bamboo rods.
The bridge will eventually sit in the little square that is delineated by the four rods. This time around I aligned the rods that run perpendicularly to the neck a little further back on the gourd but usually put them about half distance. There is no particular reason to do this, I haven't noticed a difference. If you align it closer to the neck and therefore pluck the strings closer to the bridge it might have a twangier sound, which could be nice.
Step 5: Secure the parallel bamboo rods to the neck.
Since I'm a rock climber I like using climbing cord whenever possible and tying climbing knots. You could even use a series of rubber bands to secure the rods, or tape, or whatever you want. These two are important because you hold onto them to play the instrument.
This is what the ngoni looks like so far (below). Eventually the skin dries around the gourd and becomes crispy again. You can trim the skin to make it look neat but I liked all the directional lines created by the edges of the skin and on the top (couldn't get all the layers off, which is the difference between the colors on the skin).
Step 6: Attach and secure the bridge.
This step is a sequence of back and forth between the strings and the cord used to counter-anchor the bridge. First I loop cord around the head of the bridge and the butt of the neck that sticks out of the bottom of the gourd, angled back. Next I thread two strings through the bridge up to the guitar tuning keys and tune them till they're fairly taught. If needed I'll adjust the cord because even though it is capable of holding hundreds of pounds of force, it has some elasticity to it and eventually will be pulled forward.
Step 7: Tune the rest of the strings and finalize the bridge attachment.
The light purple cord on the left and right of the bridge doesn't really do much after the bridge is pulled into place from the front and back, but initially it helps keep the bridge upright as a left or right string is tuned tight. Again, since I climb and like knots I get overly-fancy with the finishing touches. Something much simpler will work. The black spot on the bridge is a spot pickup available at guitar shops, commonly used to amplify violins or other acoustic instruments. It gets really good sound.
And the finished product:
It takes a few days to fully tune the thing, since the nylon strings continue to stretch. Eventually they max out and it will stay in tune and taught. I like the strings to be super taught to get good harmonics that add little "pings" among the other notes played. I've tried using guitar strings but don't like how they sound. I also bought a pack of six strings and used every one of them. It might have worked better to only buy one guage so they have mostly equal tension and don't sound like plucked rubber bands. If anyone tries let me know!
Here's a good alternative video and perhaps more "authentic". His final product looks like what you see in the big market in downtown Bamako. I guess mine is in the style that Sekou puts them together.
When I initially started posting digitized tapes of West African pop music I waited for the right moment to post my recording of Sekou Kouyate, whose image (until yesterday) adorned the top of this blog. While the moment right now might not be significantly more right than any in the past, it is as good a time as any to finally post Sekou's tape. What's more is that this session was recorded probably within a week or two, five years ago in Yanfolila, Mali (May, 2007).
At the time I spent several hours everyday with Sekou doing anything from eating lunch, talking with Papa Sidibe's friends at the garage next to the market, playing checkers with Ancien Coulibaly's family at home, playing kamelengoni for a few hours everyday, and talking about music all over about a two month period. Together we built an instrument for myself (he did just about all of the work) and we started hammering out songs, which are typically just any number of variations on central rhythms/melodies. Sekou barely spoke a word of French and I spoke even less of Bamana, so
communication involved a lot of hand-waving and
head-nodding-affirmations implying that we understood each other or at
least had a vague enough idea to start piecing together whatever
was being expressed. Over the two months, with the help of some
in-betweeners, we were able to learn quite a bit from each other.
In
total I learned rhythms in three tunings.
He taught songs by playing them and expecting me to figure it out and jump in when I could, which worked out more often than not. Sometimes what he was playing was just too crazy to be able to just "figure it out" and Sekou had the incredible ability to break the song down to it's most base parts and play them over and over until he was numb (thanks Sekou). Once I could finally fall in sync with the rhythm, he'd start throwing out variations on top of everything and screw me up. Everyday we'd run through every song we learned, and the list grew everyday. Meanwhile all the kids at the house would be running around screaming, crying, dancing, fighting, playing soccer. Ancien would be dozing, laying down next to his handheld radio on a mat under a thatch canopy to protect from the direct sun, donkey's screaming themselves hoarse, women pounding grain into powder or scrubbing clothes on a washboard..
Meeting Sekou was just as lucky and random as meeting the person who introduced me to him. I had some Senegalese friends in Bamako whose neighbor had moved to the city from Yanfolila, in the southwest corner of Mali, and the largest town in the Wassoulou region. I initially heard donso music exploding out of the blown speakers of a Taxi, then told the neighbor from Wassoulou that I wanted to learn about donsongoni music and the instrument and to make recordings (even though I had heard the donso musicians wouldn't let you record them, (but I really think they would if circumstances were right)). At the time I really didn't know much about the kamelengoni (pictured below) or have much interest in it, even after having listened to some of the remastered Oumou Sangare albums and known about Issa Bagayoko and Kokanko Sata, whose pop/dance music didn't really resonate with me (although the Honest Jon's release of Kokanko Sata's album is awesome acoustic music). All of a sudden this friend was on the phone with one of her friends in Yanfolila and said that I would be coming down and needed a place to stay. His response was "what do white people eat?". By some glorious moment of chance this neighbor had called Papa Sidibe, who turned out to be one of the most genuinely kind people I've ever known. It was through Papa I was eventually introduced to Sekou Kouyate, a local player. (Here's Papa at work).
Sekou plays in the older, original style of Wassoulou kamelengoni
which is more similar to stuff heard on Coumba Sidibe's early tapes, or Alou Fane and Sali Sidibe, Bintou Sidibe, Allata Broulaye, and Oumou Sangare, and even Seydou Kamara
as well (who is newer), rooted in the hunter's mystique and power. A little more straight ahead driving rhythm
than newer players on records like those of Djoss Samake, Souley Kante, Nabintou Diakite, Mariam Sidibe, or Doussou Bagayoko to name a few, whose are
more melodically driven (by more strings) than straight hard rhythm. Maybe analogous to country-blues versus slick Chicago blues, who share a direct line, like that of Wassoulou kamelengoni versus Bamako kamelengoni, which was influenced by other cultures mashed up within the city.
Sekou's fast personality translates directly to his playing style, too.
He drives it fast and hard and his variations and solos are sitting
right on top of the beat. He's up in your face and stepping on your
heels if you can't keep up. Even the dancing style that goes with both
donsongoni and kamelengoni music is fast and light off the ground.
Watch the dancers a few minutes into this amazing video provided by Ngoniba,
dancing during a donso event; they kick their heels into the air on the
accented beats and shuffle their feet to every single triplet the ngoni
player can roll out in-between, kicking up clouds of dust, almost floating above the ground. It also reminds
me of a bull setting it's hooves before a charge, kicking up dust right
before it explodes with pure energy, the moment the dancers drop out of
the spotlight in the video.
That Sekou electrified his instrument does not make him unique. His
little speaker spit out a grungy, distorted, gnarly sound
that had an amazing effect (not entirely distinguishing by itself, either). I had been playing with him for weeks,
unplugged at Coulibaly's house, before the first time I heard him plug
in at a party (using someone else's huge sound system powered by a
generator, under a mango tree. A crowd of at least a few dozen people,
lots of children, circled around us on a dusty street corner and the one
spotlight suspended on a branch of the mango tree illuminated all their
eyes and teeth against the pitch-black night. Sekou gave me a small
speaker that could thankfully barely be heard over his, as I played next
to him and Solo, who ground out the rhythm on the metal tube (they
called karinye). As people danced inches in front of us, dust would
obscure everything until the girl returned to pour water down on the
ground to keep anymore from kicking up), and my mind was absolutely
blown.
The recording I made was two months after we started to play
together. Day to day it was just me and Sekou, but during performances
Solo Sidibe, Sekou's tube player, came to play. I'd run into him around town too but when we talked about recording he was rather reluctant to be recorded.
The day I was going to record them, Solo went to work in the fields
chopping mangoes for the market. So Sekou scrambled to find
Yoro Diallo (not the famous one), who used to play the tube with
Sekou (but wasn't as good, according to Sekou). We made the recording
out of the normal milieu that Sekou would play, meaning there was no audience
beyond me recording, and Papa and Ancien watching as Sekou and Yoro
played for over an hour inside an unfinished, open ceilinged mud-brick
house with fresh and old donkey shit everywhere. That place had amazing acoustics,
though. I
think the unfortunate part of recording in isolation like this was that
Sekou wasn't influenced by dancers, who could push the musicians into
playing more intensely so that they dance more furiously (watch the video above and tell me you wouldn't feel intensifying energy as a musician or dancer). I made the decision to record in this setting, without background noise, because the microphone I was using would pick up everything that made a
noise, drowning out the instrument with children screaming and crying,
donkeys hee-hawing, and men greeting each other, endlessly asking
about each others family and work, as they do. To balance the sound with the limited equipment I had at my disposal (Sony Minidisc MZ-RH10) I had Yoro sit a few feet further
back than Sekou (who did all the singing), and put Sekou's speaker in
front of him, closer to me, to balance all the sound...again, not the
most natural setting. But listen to the recording and you'd never know, because it's clear that
natural or not, these guys came to fucking play. It is, afterall, their profession and trade.
I don't know how many people besides me, if any, Sekou has taught to
play. We played on instruments with 6 strings, while most modern pop
musicians have at least 8, and I've seen up to 14 (although at that
point the playing becomes to melodic that it can start to sound like
kora music to me, exception being someone like Vieux Kante who plays many strings but maintains fundamentals of kamelengoni music). Sekou's
set up is pictured below.
From what I can tell the electronics he rigged up are mostly homemade. The pickup
that sits on the bridge-piece that anchors the strings against the head
of the gourd looked to be made out of the metal disc inside a digital
wrist-watch, with wires soldered on to connect it to a guitar chord
input. The cord plugs into the 6x D-battery pre-amp that looks to be home built, too. This is then wired into the grungy stereo speaker that spits out the fuzzy sound.
The neck is made from a broom handle, although mine was a
straight bamboo-ish type stick. The guitar-style tuning heads were carved from
the same type of wood and a the holes were burned through the neck with an
iron rod that cooks red hot in a bed of coals. The skin is from
antelope and the cross bars supporting the skin and those that you grab
while playing are made from bamboo too. The bridge is just a piece of
wood cut to shape with smaller holes burned through in two columns of
three strings (or however many total). I used 3mm climbing cord to anchor my bridge from the sides and rear, while people used
all sorts of other alternatives, from metal wire to cotton string (common in the Bamako market). The
strings themselves are typically high gauge nylon fishing line.
I think kamelengoni music naturally creates a feeling of a sort of
country-bounce, trotting and skipping down a dusty road, with quick
jittery flurries of melodic rhythm. It is when the little fills and quick fluttery
variations are thrown on top of that base, trotting rhythm, which can
already be complexly organized and timed (off syncopations, staccato rhythms, with
muted and open strings playing against each other) that keeps the music endlessly
interesting and individual to the player; no one plays the instrument the same. I think it was in either an interview with or an article by Graeme Councel that I read about how important and encouraged improvisation
is throughout Mande music. What I like about Sekou's style is how spaced-out it can get during the obvious extended and improvised sections of his dance music. He'll keep a root rhythm going, just hammering out the muted rhythm like someone could clap on a bass string, while at the same time he let other strings drone and play out into overtones, or use harmonics to pierce space.
Enjoy the tape! And it also just occurred to me that some of you may have missed Aichata Sidibe's great cassette that I snuck into the end of an unrelated post about art.
Here is some other interesting info about Sekou. One thing that occasionally made conversation difficult with Sekou was that he had a severe
speech impediment; he would stutter harshly through some sentences. Someone described
Sekou as being tooquick. While he may have struggled in
some conversations, he was flawless while singing and playing music (I don't understand Bamana well enough to know what exactly he's saying, but I can't hear any stuttering). I
attribute this to something I saw him do one day. While sitting at the
garage on a market day as well as the day of a performance, Sekou sat
down with a half-gourd (a bowl) and a tied bag of fresh cow milk. No
one seemed comfortable explaining the whole thing to me, and I'm not
sure if it's because they thought I wouldn't understand or if they were
actually uncomfortable talking about spirits and other mystical realms
for which Mali and much of West Africa is partly known. What was
explained was that Sekou takes the gourd and milk out to the forest to
protect himself. That coupled with him wearing leather bands around his
biceps and waist, and wearing a leather-bound mirror around his neck,
I'm willing to believe it. It's not inconceivable to think he may have
made these trips to the forest in part to aid with his speech, as his
profession was public performance. (Anything people had to say about
wearing the mirror was: "If you see someone wearing a mirror around
their neck, be careful").
Sekou's father is fairly a fairly well known griot among people in
Yanfolila, and Sekou was frequently hired to play in some of the surrounding
villages. He wanted me to play alongside
him for his performances within Yanfolila, which I did about 4. Every time peoples' reactions were the same: "what the hell is this guy doing here?". I think the party of French bird hunters were most upset because they wanted an "authentic" experience. (The soccer field on which we played was behind their building and the field was littered with feathers and bones). For performances outside of Yanfolila, in the villages, he
would leave so suddenly. He and his rhythm
guy Solo Sidibe would ride bikes miles out into the forest to a village
to play for a night and come back pretty haggard in the morning. It
would have been wild to travel to a show with him but I never did.
Back to Sekou's father/family for a moment: one day I was asking about Sekou's family
history and we didn't have anyone to help translate between us as we got into the gritty details that were harder to express beyond vague hand-waving. What I took away from
that conversation was that Sekou's family (not just in name), played for
some important people in Kankan back in the day. If you listened to
the music program about Mali on Afropop's Hipdeep website, you'll remember professor Cherif Keita
telling us that after the Mande empire had passed, Songhai royalty and
nobility were groomed in Kankan, Guinee before going up to the northern
territory. Perhaps Sekou's family were involved with the royalty around
Kankan at the time. Or, less appealing but probably more realistic is that maybe Sekou didn't understand my question and
told me that he grew up in Kankan and his dad moved to Yanfolila (not
very far away and the main road goes straight there). When I returned
to Yanfolila to visit Papa in 2008, I was trying to track Sekou down and
I eventually learned he was somewhere in Bamako playing for money. In
order to track down his brother, wife, and kids in search of some sort
of contact info, it was easiest for Papa and other friends to first ask
for his locally well known father, who was a respected griot, and then inquire about Sekou. Some people liked
to joke and say, "Ah, Sekou? You mean Jeliba Kunjan" as they erupted with laughter. (The Griot with the Big Head...but his
head really wasn't that big). Unfortunately none of his family had a phone
number or any way to contact Sekou in Bamako. Recently though, I talked to Papa on the phone and he told me Sekou came back, but I've yet to talk to him. Before I returned home in 2008 I left a small guitar amp and spot-pickup with Papa to give to Sekou, which would be as equally transportable but significantly louder than his set up that I saw.
Some day I would love to go back and visit, coup or no coup (there was a recent coup d'etat in Mali). I still keep telephone contact with Papa and other friends from the University of Bamako when I was working in the HIV lab. They tell me that aside from all the news about the recent coup and the declaration of Azawad independece, their lives haven't been affected too severely. A few were even happy to see then president Amadou Toumani Toure get kicked out of office just a few weeks before he was going to step down anyway for the next round of democratic elections. While symbolic, I think it was just silly timing...forcing out the president just weeks before a scheduled election?
I am also fairly skeptical about how this is all going to pan out in the long term. I get the impression that the lingering presence of coup leader Amadou Sanogo foreshadows continued activity. And at first he was asking for help to push back the Touareg, and now he is rejecting any assistance from ECOWAS? Doesn't make sense (the stated reason to throw a coup was dissatisfaction with the amount of resources invested in the Malian military to defend against the occasional Touareg unrest in the north, as well as widespread corruption and inactivity of the governing body). The most interesting thing to me about the Touareg's recent push is how it came to be in the first place. The Touareg have felt marginalized since Mali's independence in the early 1960's and would occasionally launch a "rebellion" to no significant effect. This recent push and march to take over the northern territories in Mali and officially declare independence was made possible indirectly by the late Lybian dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The Touareg have supported Gaddafi in return for his support for their movement. And now, even in death Gaddafi was able to destabilize a country thousands of miles away, connected by vast expanses of desert. The Touareg took control of abandoned Lybian weapons caches stashed throughout the desert to help arm their independence movement and reinvigorate it enough to overwhelm whatever Malian military was in place (not much and poorly equipped, hence dissatisfaction and eventual coup), and to take over the entire northern territory of Mali, down to Timbuktu, which is collectively known as Azawad (their political/"rebellious" name is the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad).
We can thank the Berlin conference, who sliced and diced that great African cake into what it is now!
Anyway, if you've read this far you're very patient. Hopefully you got something out of it.
