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Out of Africa, unplugged
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Newsday (New York City), Out of Africa, unplugged >>
by Marty Lipp
The story goes that when music from Africa and other countries began to break out in the United Kingdom and the United States, some record company people gathered in London to figure out a catchy name under which to sell the new genre. The result was the short-lived "worldbeat" - short-lived in part because it implied that all the music was dance-oriented, ignoring the quieter, acoustic artists.
In fact, for every lambada or macarena, there were successful artists such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo or Bebel Gilberto, whose music was a soft sell, so to speak. In Africa, the first music to be exported successfully was the whirlwind dance style from Zaire called soukous. But in recent years, acoustic music from Africa has been reaching more and more ears, and in next Saturday's 13-artist Globalfest at The Public Theater in Manhattan, two artists show the charms of unplugged Africa.
Rokia Traore was born in Mali, but her diplomat father took the family to live in several European cities. Traore said that because her parents were from a small village in Mali, she feels she has musical roots in two disparate worlds: rural Mali and cosmopolitan Europe. With that unique background, Traore created a small revolution in Malian music, taking traditional African instruments and putting them in more Western arrangements.
"It easier if I did music like soukous, with more electric instruments," Traore said, "but it would be less interesting for me."
While Traore's voice can be either keening or angelic, her singing is not what sets her apart: it's her ability to create songs that are intimate and interesting, that meld African and Western music so well that when the Kronos Quartet slides in behind Traore, as they do on her new album "Bowmboi" (Nonesuch), it seems completely natural.
Her music is quiet, but not in the chill-out lounge sense - more like your archetypal guitar-wielding, socially conscious singer-songwriter type. Her use of Malian instruments makes her music sound, to Western ears, very African, but to Malian ears, it is quite new.
"We had to create a style," Traore said, "and then create an audience for that style."
Asked if she thought her music was old or new, she said, "I'm trying to make more respected something old."
Mory Kante of Guinea was born into a family of traditional African singer-storytellers called griots. But he made his reputation in 1979 with the international dance club hit "Yeke Yeke," which put the 21-string harp-lute called the kora into the middle of a bristling, electrified wall of sound.
On his latest album, "Sabou" (Riverboat), Kante plays acoustically, with only the occasional electric bass. Although the album is acoustic, the production is so full and percussive that many of the tunes seem as vibrant as his electric music.
"In contemporary African music, more and more frequently musicians are playing the parts of traditional acoustic instruments with electric instruments," Kante said. "With my album, I wanted to show that the traditional acoustic instruments of the griots still have a place in contemporary African music today."
Although he grew up in a griot family and first played the xylophone-like balafon, Kante said this new project had him doing extensive research.
"The traditional instruments play differently from the electric instruments, and I almost felt like a painter mixing his colors to get a final color result. I spent a lot of time at home with my Powerbook and a technician working on sounds before I went into the studio to record. My wife was beginning to worry that I had lost it with all the time I spent working at home with the instruments."
While electrified music is here to stay, acoustic music - from Africa and elsewhere - is often the music that traces the contours and secrets of a culture's heart, and that makes it worth cozying up to, whether in an intimate concert setting or through the modern magic of our electronics-filled homes. 01/02/05 >> go there
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