For this and next week's post, I thought I'd talk about the practical mechanics of traditional Mandé music as I understand them from a player's perspective.
A fruitful way to analyze Mandé music is through the interaction of back-up and solo musicians. Many types of music around the world (jazz, bluegrass, certain types of rock, etc.) have a tradition of solos, i.e. a single instrumentalist playing a sort of song-within-a-song, many times improvised, while the other musicians of the band play some sort of backing. In bluegrass, for example, backing musicians try to provide a solid rhythmic base for the soloist, as well as playing chords to let the audience know where in the song they are. Mandé music is similar in some ways: only one musician takes a solo at one time, and the other musicians back him (the vast majority of Mandé instrumentalists are male) up.
In the Gambia, there are specific Maninka language terms for kora solos and backup; kumbengo (an accompaniment pattern) and birimintingo (a fast, improvised solo), but in Mali the French terms accompaniment and solo seem pretty universal. I asked all of my teachers which words they used, and solo and accompaniment were the only answers I ever got. As those are the terms I'm familiar with, those are the one's I'll use here.
Solos in Mali (and throughout the Mandé music-playing region) serve pretty much the same purpose as everywhere else: they break up the song and spike audience interest, and they give skilled musicians the chance to show off. Generally, all of the members of the group will play their instrument-specific version of the accompaniment while one member takes a solo; if there's a singer, solos are taken between verses. If there's a particularly skilled player, he may be given more, or even all, of the solos. However, it's more common to rotate between all the competent players and give solos to each in turn. There's a strong current of egalitarianism and respect for each member of any group in Malian society, and this applies to the musical community as well.
Accompaniments, however, work a bit differently in Mandé music than other genres. Whereas the basis of Western music is often the chord structure, Mandé music is based more upon melody and counterpoint. This is not to say that there isn't a chord structure to Mandé music, or that Mandé musicians never play chords (they often do, at least on guitar and keyboard). However, since both the n'goni and the kora tend not to use chords, and since Mandé music in general is more interested in counterpoint (the interplay between multiple melodies) than harmony (the sounding of multiple notes together in a single melody), chords aren't the best way to think about Mandé music in most cases.
A quick word here about Mandé song structure. While Mandé songs tend to be long (often in excess of 15 minutes when played at a wedding or public event), the underlying melodic structure (essentially the accompaniment) tends to be short, sometimes as short as a few bars of music. Thus, the same (often simple) melodic cycle is repeated again and again. Much of the genius of Mandé music is in keeping the audience from becoming bored by the repetition of a short melodic line.
This is accomplished in several ways. First, each Mandé musician knows several (generally at least three) accompaniments for any traditional song that are unique to his instrument. Skilled musicians will also know several more, and will often have devised their own accompaniments over the course of their musical career. The best musicians can even come up with improvised accompaniments on the fly. In a common ensemble with kora, n'goni, guitar, and balafon (or bass) and drums, each musician will start with one accompaniment, then switch to another when the time feels right. The group can practice beforehand and decide when to switch the pattern, or, more commonly, the musicians will simply change the accompaniment based on what the other members of the band are doing. In other words, in the best ensembles, each musician is listening to all the others, and changes his accompaniment to fit what everyone else (both back-up musicians and soloist) are doing. Accompaniment patterns fit together and mutually complement each other, which is a great part of Mandé music's incredible catchiness. Each accompaniment is, in itself, a catchy, usually two-part call-and response melody. When three or four or more of these accompaniments are played together, the groove can be unspeakably good.
In some ways, Mandé music can be a little like modern jazz, in which each musician knows the underlying chord structure, but often substitutes other chords for the original ones to make the song more interesting. Everyone knows what the original chord/chord structure is, but no one actually plays it. In Mandé music, the basic melody of the song is known to all the musicians, but each approaches it in his own way. The overall spirit of the song is carried forward, but the song mutates over time as the musicians change their accompaniments, thus creating interest in a song that might otherwise become boring after two or three minutes.
Some good audio examples of this interplay between solo and accompaniment can be found on the albums Djelika (Toumani Diabaté, Kélétigui Diabaté and Bassekou Kouyaté), the ensemble album Kulanjan (Toumani Diabaté and Taj Mahal) and pretty much anything from the Rail Band or Les Ambassadeurs du Motel. A more in-depth and scholarly discussion of this interplay can be found in Charry's Mandé Music.
There's a tendency among the latest generation (maybe generations?) of Malian Mandé musicians to focus more on hot solos than solid accompaniments. The older musicians that I played with disapproved of this pretty strongly, and even made fun of musicians who couldn't step aside musically and back up someone else's solo or singing. When I first started studying this music seriously, I constantly pestered my teachers for solo techniques. The universal response was, "practice the accompaniments, and the solos will come on their own." This has turned out to be mostly true in my case, although it could be incredibly frustrating playing the same simple patterns over and over again while listening to my kora teacher noodle like a rock god. Still and all, accompaniments are the heart of Mandé music.
This is a lot of material to cover in one post; next week, I'll analyze a Mandé song (or several, if I'm ambitious) and try to show some of what I've explained in action. Questions/comments can be sent to waraden.diabate [at] gmail.com
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