Clifftop

I'm mostly recovered from a week's worth of overstimulation, sleep deprivation and general partying at Clifftop, a.k.a the Appalachian String Band Festival.  Clifftop is the biggest oldtime music festival in the world, with some 3600 attendees this year.  Many people come for a week or more, camping under the trees up in the West Virginian mountains and playing music for hours every day.  Great musicians come from all over the U.S. and beyond to play there, so even if you just wander around listening, it's hard to get bored.

Clifftop also has one of the largest oldtime banjo contests, and many of the best players (Walt Koken, Reed Martin, Adam Hurt, Paul Brown, etc.) regularly compete there.  There were some 40+ contestants this year, each of whom played one tune to qualify for the finals.  Once in the finals, the top 5 players each get the chance to play an additional two tunes for their chance at ultimate oldtime banjo glory (such as it is).

This was my first year in the finals, and I ended up getting third place.  My campmate Andy Fitzgibbon got 2nd, and Tim Bing (a melodic clawhammer player) got 1st.  I've wanted to be in the finals since I first came to Clifftop at 13 years old, so I was pretty excited.

I've posted the audio of my two songs for the finals: hope you enjoy them.  I'll be back next week with another Malian music-related post.  And big thanks to Pete Marshall (of WTJU and Mando Mafia fame) for passing along the recordings he made!  Thanks, Pete!

A brief analysis of a traditional Mandé song

As a follow-up to my last post, here's my analysis of a song by the Mandé supergroup, Djelika.  Djelika (also the name of their sole album) was composed of Toumani Diabaté on kora, Kélétigui Diabaté on balafon, and Bassekou Kouyaté on n'goni.  These are the three traditional melody instruments of Mandé jeliw, played with great skill by some of Mali's greatest musicians and recorded for this album with perfect fidelity.  The musical interplay amongst the three is careful and subtle, but perfectly comprehensible with a little explanation and some careful listening.  I've linked to a youtube video of the track below, but if you enjoy the music, I strongly recommend buying the full album which, in addition to seven group tracks, also includes the excellent solo kora track "Cheikh Oumar Bah" (actually the traditional Mandé tune "Lamban" played in an alternate key).

"Kandjoura" is a version of the well-known Mandé song "Tonya Le" or "It's the truth!" in Mandékan, the dominant language in and around Kita (the hometown of both Toumani Diabaté and Kélétigui Diabaté).  The song begins with an introduction, in this case a call and response melody involving all three instruments.  It's also common for just a single instrument to play the introduction.  The introduction (in my experience) is often written by the musician(s) playing it.  This gives a chance to the musicians to put their own spin on a song by adding an entirely new melody; essentially, it's another way to show off musical skill.  

Around 0:12, the song begins to take shape.  Keletigui takes the lead, playing a strong accompaniment pattern that shows the basic melody of the song, while Toumani and Bassekou play minimalist backup that accents Keletigui's playing without being true accompaniments.

Around 0:31, Keletigui effortlessly lifts himself out of the accompaniment pattern he had been playing and begins a short improvised solo, while Toumani and Bassekou support him with the same minimalist accompaniments.  By 0:36 he's already back within the accompaniment, though he changes the pattern slightly, though the song remains recognizably the same.  

At 0:43, Toumani begins adding short bursts of melody with his kora, accenting Keletigui's strong balafon accompaniment.  These are fragments of kora accompaniment patterns, very recognizable around 0:57, which interlock perfectly with Keletigui's playing.  By 1:25, he's back within the accompaniment, and Bassekou has his turn to do an improvised solo at 1:30.  As he plays, Keletigui provides the accompaniment, while Toumani essentially just strums the kora to add sonic interest.  

There's no break between solos as Bassekou smoothly steps back into the accompaniment at 2:22 and Keletigui takes his first long solo.  He's done by 2:53, and he and Toumani immediately begin mixing and matching different accompaniment patterns, giving both listeners and musicians a short break before Bassekou takes another solo at 3:30.

The song continues in this vein, with the musicians passing the solo "spotlight" amongst themselves and playing a variety of interlocking accompaniment patterns.  As you can see, too, there are also short breaks where essentially the whole trio is playing nothing but accompaniment patterns.  The overall feeling of the song is very organic, as opposed to the comparative rigidity of bluegrass or oldtime music, where one part follows another in lockstep.  Since Mandé music usually has just one part, endlessly repeated, it flows quite differently and, as I hope I've shown, the logic is somewhat different, as well.  

I'm off to Clifftop (the biggest oldtime festival) for a week; I'll be back next Monday with a post.  Any questions or comments may be sent to waraden.diabate [at] gmail.com.  Thanks for reading!

How I think about playing Mandé music (pt. 1)

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

Some solo kora to start the week off right

Greetings all.  It's wet and dreary in Virginia and I'm thinking of sunnier days in Mali.  Here's a solo kora track off my new demo CD, recorded one hot night in January.

Also, I've been doing more and more contemporary African music radio shows on WTJU of late.  My last show (of W. African electric epics) was on Radio Tropicale on Wed. 26 June.  If that sounds interesting to you, feel free to check out the Tape Vault (WTJU.net/vault) where you can listen to old shows, free of charge, for up to two weeks.  You can also stream shows live as they're happening; I'll try to figure out a widget to put up on this blog to let you know when my next show is.

Have a great week.

Album Review: Amadou & Mariam, Sou ni Tilé

This is the first of an occasional series of African CD reviews.

Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia, better known as Amadou & Mariam or "The Blind Couple of Mali," are two of Mali's best and best-known musicians.  They rose to international prominence with their Manu Chao-produced 2005 album "Dimanche à Bamako," and have since released several commercially successful crossover albums, most recently 2012's "Folila," which featured such varied artists as Bassekou Kouyate, TV on the Radio, and Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters.  

Commercially, the duo has never done better, but aesthetically, they're continuing to drift further and further from what I think of as their core sound.  Frankly, I'm not a fan of A&M's post-"Dimanche" albums, so I've decided to go back to the roots of their career with a review of their first album.  

"Sou Ni Tilé" ("Night and Day" in Bambara) was Amadou & Mariam's first international album, released in 1998.  It's a big album; more than an hour long, and filled with A&M's musical influences, both Malian and Western.  Amadou's understated, solid accompaniment and solo guitar is supported by drums and flutes of every variety, brass, harmonica and Hammond B3 organ.  This is a studio album par excellence, with a host of supporting musicians including "Mr. Matu" aka François Matuszenski, the current keyboard player for perennial French New Wave rockers Indochine, and the classically trained Hindi violinist Johar Ali Khan.  

The sound presages that of later A&M albums like "Tje Ni Mousso" (Men and Women) and "Wati" (Time), but hits harder than either.  The duo's distinctive sound, built on Amadou's pentatonic call-and-response electric guitar melodies and Mariam's piercing, nasal voice (which sounds much better than my description!) is even present on the heavily-produced "Dimanche à Bamako," certainly their best-known album.  But to my ears, "Sou Ni Tilé" is the purest mix of A&M's songwriting and aesthetic with Western artists.  There are love songs ("Je pense a toi," "Mon amour ma cherie," "On se donne la main"), songs exhorting the listener to work ("Baara"), songs about the necessity of courage and solidarity in the face of life's difficulty ("Combattants," the refrain of which translates as "Life is a fight, and we're the fighters" and "C'est la vie"), and praise-songs for groups as diverse as the Dogon ethnic group ("Dogons") and employees of the national radio station, ORTM ("A radio mogo").  Rounding out the album are a few all-Bambara language tracks and the excellent "Pauvre type" (Poor guy), a minor rocker (in French) detailing the preparations of a penniless Bamakois for a weekend party with his buddies.  

Having honed their chops and written new material in Ivory Coast (see the Sonodisc release "Se Te Djon Ye"), A&M were if anything over-prepared for their first international album.  Of the pre-"Dimanche" albums, "Sou ni Tile" is by far the strongest.  The first track, "Je pense à toi," remains one of their most durable hits both in Mali and abroad, along with the classic (and thematically similar) "Mon amour ma chérie " (My love my dear).  Another song I heard a lot on ORTM (Mali's national radio station) was "A Chacun son Problème" (To each his problem), which twists a traditional Bambara proverb to ask the rhetorical question "Be kunun kunan t'i ka sogoma da wa?" (Whenever you wake up, isn't that your morning?).  The mix of Western elements, including the electric guitar, organ, and harmonica, and Malian elements, like A&M's constant use of proverbs, call and response guitar phrases, combine to produce a universal album on such themes as love, human responsibilities, and the necessity of struggling against a difficult world.  Amadou & Mariam are at the pinnacle of Malian rock right now, along with Bassekou Kouyaté, and for anyone who's been seduced by their pentatonic grooves, "Sou ni Tilé" is a must-have album.  Highly recommended.  

Endless Rounds of Tea

Greetings once more from the States.  The blog's been down for a bit while I readjusted to life in America, but I'm back now, and the plan is to post at least once a week from now on, and with more varied content.  I feel I've arrived at a level of understanding of Malian music such that I can explain some of its basic mechanics and aesthetic, so there will be some analysis posts, as well as CD and concert reviews.  On that note, stay tuned for a review later this week of one of my favorite Malian albums, Amadou & Mariam's "Sou ni Tilé."  In the meantime, enjoy the video below of my kora teacher, Toumani Kouyaté, recorded at his house in Bamako.

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!