|
|
 |
Interview
|
| Click Here to go back. |
Play It All Night Long, Interview >>
My preview of Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba's concert will run in this Friday's Post-Dispatch. Here's the full transcript of my interview with Kouyate, which was conducted by email and translated by his kind and patient manager.
Kouyate's new album "I Speak Fula" is a stunner. Definitely check it out, as well as his upcoming concert at the Touhill.
Tell me about the music that you heard growing up and how you learned to play the ngoni.
I grew up in a griot family that practiced traditional Bamana music that had been handed down for centuries with no outside influences on our village in the country around Segou which had been the capital of a wide area, but had gradually lost its political position although the traditions remained. That does not mean music did not change because our musicians were valued for their capacity to compose both music and lyrics.
There was no school in the area, and I learned to play the ngoni with my father as teacher and he had a great reputation in the area, being invited to other villages and to Ségu to play for other communities. He had very high standards and so I was taught in the pure tradition of Bamana music.
What can you tell me about the ngoni itself?
The instrument is now recognized as being the ancestor of the banjo, and it was made out of local materials: a calabash, a wooden post, cow skin to cover the open side of the calabash, and gut strings. However, bit by bit, we began to use a hollowed wooden resonator in the place of the calabash, goat skin instead of cow skin because it is more accessible, and nylon strings.
The ngoni is very ancient: and goes back to beyond the thirteenth century. A form of the instrument is found all over West Africa and as far north as Mauritania and Morocco. In most of West Africa it is recognized as the working instrument of the djeli praise singers. If they were passing through conflict zones, the djeli had no trouble passing frontiers: people immediately recognized his role in society because of the ngoni slung on his back.
It’s my understanding that in the past the ngoni has traditionally not been a lead instrument, yet you have changed that. What gave you the idea to do that? What impact has that had on the instrument itself and people’s rediscovery of it?
The ngoni was originally the principal accompaniment of a djeli singer or a reciter of praise songs and traditional stories. Often the same jeli played all these roles, and the performance was aimed at one or a very few patrons. As performances became more elaborate, the ngoni took a role as both accompaniment and continuum during performances with several vocalists, and additional instruments, such as the kora and finally percussion.
One of the particularities of the djeli ngoni player was that he would sit on the ground at or just beneath the patron’s eye level. My innovation was to play standing up, using a strap to support the instrument. Why did I do this? Frankly it was because I felt I had as much to contribute as the other instruments in the Super Rail Band where I was playing at the time, and I thought it was possible for the ngoni to take its turn playing solos, just like the others. So I stood up and played. This was the first time the public and indeed other musicians had seen this type of playing, and it led to recognition of a more virtuoso role for the instrument.
Your music is part of a long tradition, yet you have done much to expand that tradition and make it your own. Was it important to you to update the music and connect with a new generation? Is it a struggle to do that and still respect that tradition?
It seems to me that this is just a part of what the djeli have done in Bamana music for centuries, because they are real artists who create music, and have added technical developments like using a wooden resonator, changing the types of strings, adding strings to the instruments (my father used four strings, but his father used only three). Technical changes have opened new doors to the ngoni, and to other instruments, particularly because of amplification. Just as the guitar has developed from its acoustic form to electronic ones, the ngoni has gone from its more traditional form to being produced in various sizes and ranges of sound, and to using purely technological developments, such as the wah wah pedal to give it special effects.
If you are brought up, like my family, in the tradition of how to play the ngoni, you have a very solid grounding in Bamana music and you respect it, but if you want your instrument to speak to modern audiences, particularly the new generation and those outside West Africa, then you naturally update the style of performance, but the tradition is still there as a basis.
Tell me about your meeting with Taj Mahal in 1990. Was that your first exposure to American blues?
It was an extraordinary event. I was just 19 and I was identified by an American researcher visiting Bamako as someone who showed where the roots of the banjo and its music came from. They must have told Taj and one day the American Embassy sent for me to come and collect a visa and sent me off to Tennessee for a series of concerts on the roots of American music. The journey in itself was quite an adventure with late flights, threats to send me back from France before I even got to the US, arriving in New York when nobody knew I was coming, and wandering around the airport until I found a Senegalese man who spoke French and helped me get to the festival.
Then I met Taj, on stage, for a rehearsal, without knowing who he was, or what the blues was. It just sounded like my Bamana music, so I played along and Taj thought I had learned the blues somewhere. In the end we played together and understood each other, and he declared that he is convinced he is from Kouyaté stock so he’s my brother.
You have played with some great master musicians, such as Toumani Diabate, Ali Farka Toure and Youssou N’Dour. What was it like playing with them, and did those collaborations have an impact on your own playing.
I think it was summed up by Ali Farka when we met to do a recording. The producer had allowed time for rehearsals which lasted about five minutes before Ali said “Right, we’re ready to record!” He explained to the producer that when two artists meet, their performance is not something they learn, but a matter of how they react instinctively to each other’s playing.
Toumani is a marvelous musician who is excited by new sounds, knows the kora as a master player and can go on to create music with other players. He does this with individual musicians (for instance Bjork – from a totally different background), but also with quite large numbers of instrumental players and vocalists in his own Selectic Orchestra. He is a master in the sense that the Mande Empire recognized back in the thirteenth century when they fixed the rules to run their society and told people to respect the ‘nyara’ master artists, and leave them free to create music for the rest of society.
More recently, you’ve worked with Bela Fleck. What do you see as the benefits of mixing musical cultures as you’ve done with him and others?
First, the mixing is not of totally different cultures: as I’ve already said, the banjo is the descendent of the ngoni and shares its range and some of its repertoire. The benefit of meeting up after several centuries is first that Bela is so sensitive to the ngoni: he really listens to it, and this inspires Ngoniba to listen carefully to him, as well. Between us, this leads to a fusion and creation of new kinds of music: it is as if the banjo had never left the West African tradition while the ngoni kept its original form when it arrived in America, so now they can carry on a conversation that was never interrupted.
Your new album and tour are making an impact in America. What do you hope to accomplish by being heard here?
To have American audiences get to know the ngoni and realize that traditional instruments can be just as exciting as modern ones, and that Bamana music is a force to be reckoned with. Music is one of the gifts that West Africa brings to the world: people already know the rich Mande tradition, thanks largely to Toumani Diabaté, and music from the North thanks to l Farka Touré and to Tinariwen – but we have lots of other traditions and styles waiting to be discovered, too. 03/31/10 >> go there
|
| Click Here to go back. |
|
 |
|
|
|
