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Global Hit
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The World (Public Radio International), Global Hit >>
Our global hit today shows what can happen when two cultures are forced to collide. The results can be unsatisfying. But as The World's Marco Werman tells us, a new CD by French musician Marc Minelli and Malian singer Mamani Keita won't let you down.
It's odd that Marc Minelli, a relative new comer to jazz, would create a sound like this.
Marc Minelli: I'm coming from rock music. I used to be a fan of Beatles, Rolling Stones, and I wasn't very very specialized in French stuff nor in world music. World music is very new for me, as well as jazz.
And that makes the global-jazz sound on Marc Minelli's CD "Electro Bamako" even more curious.
Jazz, for Marc Minelli, was background music for housecleaning. Then about five years ago, he went to a record store and bought three albums, one by John Coltrane, one Miles Davis, and one Charles Mingus.
Marc Minelli: I started to clean the house, as usual, and, well...I stopped moving and I started listening, and after that I bought a hundred jazz records maybe one per day, and I was really into it and I was really discovering every day which is a thing I like in music.
Being open to discovery was a good thing for Marc Minelli. After digging in to the world of jazz, a producer persuaded him to explore another world, world music. The producer wanted Marc Minelli to work with a Malian chanteuse named Mamani Keita. Minelli met Mamani, they spoke, they had a mind-meld, and she gave him raw tapes of her singing accompanied by a Malian guitarist. Marc Minelli's goal was to use those sounds as the basis for jazz compositions. He worked mostly by himself, occasionally bringing a jazz group into his studio to lay down tracks.
Marc Minelli doesn't speak Bambara, the West African language that Mamani Keita sings in. So the biggest challenge came once Minelli started to cut up Mamani Keita's vocal samples.
Marc Minelli: With a good instinct, it's like you don't understand the words but you understand where it starts and where it stops.
Marc Minelli: If I cut into words I could change the sense of it. And I was really worried about that. And I wasn't working with her at the time, so it could have been difficult.
A few of the tracks that Marc Minelli constructed around Mamani Keita's voice are highly produced. Others like this one are what you might called unplugged. But the overall effect is the creation of a clear bridge between anywhere in the west and Mali. Minelli had never been to Mali and its capital Bamako until the completion of "Electro Bamako." He says if you sense the African vibe in the music, it simply reflects what he imagined Mali to be.
Marc Minelli: Sometimes when you dream about things you are much more into reality than when you think. And this is what it was. I was in my room with my computer, and I was dreaming about what was Africa and all that. And when I came there, I thought it was close to reality.
Marc Minelli's imagination gives Electro Bamako a big lift. On this track, "N'ka Willy," Minelli folds in a sample of dialogue from a movie. He doesn't know what the film is. All he knows is that by accident he found the audio track to the movie in a record store.
Marc Minelli: I was buying a Skatalites cassette, and there was a mistake. It was a film on the tape. And of course the reaction would have been to go back to the record store and to tell the guy, can I change it.
But Minelli didn't do that. He made a loop of an angry outburst of dialogue from the unknown film. Mamani Keita's voice comes in as a soothing counterpoint to the madness.
"Electro Bamako" came out in 2001 in France, and it's just been released in America.
For The World, I'm Marco Werman. 06/09/03 >> go there
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