Friday, March 8, 2013

Funteni Wati


It's March in Mali, and things are heating up.  Daytime temperatures are routinely in the 90's, and even at night rarely dip into the 60's.  Up North, French, Chadian, and Malian troops are slowly grinding down the terrorists, who have holed up in the caves and gullies of the mountainous Adrar des Ifoghas, north of Kidal.  The Chadian government claims to have killed two of the major terrorist leaders, Mokhtar belMokhtar and Abou Zeid, while rumors are rife that Iyad ag-Ghali, the last of the triumvirate, was killed somewhere between Timbuktu and Gao.  Certainly, it's been a bad month for the terrorists.  

Here in Bamako, outward signs of the troubles in the North are few.  Security at the embassies has been beefed up, and the French Cultural Center, one of the major cultural hubs of Bamako, is closed "for renovations."  We hear the planes though, at all hours of the day and night.  The roar of French jets, the dull throbbing of C130's and other big transport planes, and the occasional Air France or Air Maroc flight are part of the audial background.  Other than that, it's back to business as usual in Bamako, though with nothing near the frenetic energy of last year.  With the loss of aid money and tourism, Mali is just a lot slower these days, in the streets, in the clubs, in the markets.  Still, with any luck the worst is over, and elections can take place in July as interim President Traoré has indicated.  With all the foreign troops here, another coup d'état would be tricky to pull off, though even last year's seemed impossible right up until it happened.  If the elections come off without any major problems, the aid money will begin to flow again, and everyone will breathe a little easier.

On the musical front, I've been delving into some of the more obscure pockets of Mandé music, learning songs which have rarely, or never, appeared on CD or LP.  Many of these songs come from my kora master, Toumani Kouyaté, though I've also gotten some from the archives of Mali's national radio station, l'Office de Radiodiffusion et Télédiffusion du Mali (ORTM).  My favorite find so far has been the unreleased recordings of Djelimory "N'fa" Diabaté, one of the greatest kora players of the previous generation.  Pretty much his only recording which is findable in the West is the classic "Cordes Anciennes," which also feature Sidiki Diabaté and Batourou Sékou Kouyaté, the other two master kora players of that generation of Malian musicians.  However, Djelimory also did at least one recording session at ORTM, as far as I can tell in the 70's or 80's, and some of his tracks are gorgeous, particularly "Duga," "Macky," and "Guede."  His playing is very reminiscent of Batourou Sékou Kouyaté, though slightly more florid.    

So far I've personally recorded 53 songs which I would consider part of the Mandé canon.  Many of these are standards (i.e. "Kaira," "Lamban," "Mali Sadjo"), but some are less popular ("Amadou Bamba," "Gansana") and some I've never run across on any recording, like "Sama Donna Nyo-tula" ("The elephant has entered the millet field," which is an awesome title).  All of these songs are constantly being recycled, reworked, revitalized and played again on stage and on CDs.  It's been one of my great pleasures, as I enter more and more deeply into Mandé music, to hear variations on the same songs by many different musicians, not just from kora players but n'goni, balafon, and guitar players, not to mention singers, who have the dual creative possibilities of changing/adding to both the text and the sung melody.  When you add together half a dozen professional musicians, all of whom are working extra hard ("ka djija" in Bambara, a word I hear a dozen times a day as an apprentice musician) to put their special touch upon these songs, it's easy to understand why a canon of maybe 100 songs, as best I can tell, can be perpetually renewed without growing stale.  

This is a very different musical paradigm than the American traditional music I've played which, although possessing some sort of canon of songs, is and as far as I can tell, was much more open to the creation of new songs and less "tight" organizationally than the Bamako music scene, where everyone knows everyone.  "Traditional" Malian music is in a constant state of flux, with new instruments (guitar, keyboard, kamelen n'goni, Autotune) being added all the time, and new variations upon the old griot instruments constantly surfacing, like the additional strings of the Kita-style djeli-n'goni, the increasingly popular bass n'goni, or using two balafons to get all the notes of the chromatic scale.  

The musical scene in Bamako, the only place where a Malian musician can hope to make a decent living, can be incestuous.  The inevitable steam-roller of globalization/capitalism/modernism/whatever you want to call it is in the progress of mashing lots of the less virile strains of Malian music, but the flip side is that there's a lot of cross-pollination happening in Malian music right now.  To site just a few examples, there's a huge craze for Senefo-style balafon now in the Bamako street parties called sumus, despite the fact that the music played there is usually of Mandé, i.e. non-Senefo, origin.  The two musics have little to do with one another, but the Senefo stuff makes everyone dance, so that's being incorporated into the mix.  I've also run across several n'goni players who can play multiple styles of n'goni, including Peul, Bambara, and Mandé, as well as modern, Bassekou Kouyaté-style electric shredding.  Of these, I consider Barou Kouyaté, formerly of Bassekou Kouyaté's group N'goni Ba, to be the supreme example, though there's certainly others, notably Kandiafa, reggae superstar Tiken Jah Fakoly's n'goni player.  The facility, dynamism, and imagination of this up-and-coming generation of n'goni players is one of the things that gives me hope for Malian music in the 21st century; with players this good, the world will come knocking.  

All of which is to say, as I've mentioned previously, that traditional Malian music is by no means static and, at least in terms of technical ability, Malian musicians are actually improving.  Heady stuff.

As always, comments, questions and the like can be directed to waraden.diabate [at] gmail.com.  Have a nice weekend!