[Dixielandjazz] The Birth of the Blues?

[Steve barbone]

CAVEAT - VERY LONG ARTICLE ABOUT AFRICAN MUSIC IN MALI, The home of the
music of "griot". Based on the pentatonic scale. Then why this post?

Because the music of Mali is very much like THE BLUES. In fact, there is a
growing body of jazz music historians that liken griot music to the blues
and postulate that here, on the banks of the Niger River, the blues, (also
based on pentatonics) were born. Note that John Lee Hooker, has been to Mali
to listen and jam, as have many other world famous musicians.

Interesting read if you are a historian, (or a fan) who travels the world in
search of musical knowledge. If you dig the blues, you might enjoy visiting
Mali. Maybe some enterprising cruise promoter could combine a cruise to Mali
with a bunch of blues oriented OKOM bands? :-) VBG.

Best quote in the article from a Mali musician: "Today people want 'world
music,' mixing the old and the new, but you have to remain true to yourself.
If you forget the past, then you'll lose your way in the future."

In any event, Mali sounds like a fun place to hear the music and may well be
worth a trip for those of us who are still adventurous. (coolest in Jan-Feb)

Cheers,
Steve 


The Siren Song of Mali

NY TIMES - By JOSHUA HAMMER - April 2, 2006

WE were walking down a dirt road in a neighborhood of Bamako with the
mellifluous name of Badalabougou, following the rhythmic beating of a bongo
drum. Then we saw it: down an alley lined with dusty neem trees and
flowering jacarandas, a few hundred wedding celebrants had gathered under a
canopy made from scraps of United Nations-issue sheeting, intently watching
a local percussion band play a rousing music known as deedadee.

Lithe male dancers wearing leather headdresses, cowrie-studded orange vests,
burlap shorts and iron bangles leapt and shook rice-filled calabashes known
as yabbaras. A jembe fola ("he who talks with the drum") pounded on a bongo
fashioned from sheets of horsehide stretched over a gasoline can. Another
percussionist banged a grooved metal cylinder called a karinyan.

Then the dancers disappeared and a petite female singer moved in, circling
through the crowd and singing praises to relatives of the bride and groom.
Suddenly, she began gesticulating in our direction, while guests looked on,
amused.

"She is singing about you," one told me. "She is praising you for visiting
Mali."

The band had been playing for six hours when we arrived, at 4 p.m., and the
music would go on until long after dark. As the light faded, people spilled
out of their houses and gravitated toward the tent. Street vendors
circulated on the periphery of the crowd, selling peanuts, chewing gum,
bananas, tea, firewood, sandals, toothbrushes and sunglasses. The whole
neighborhood had turned out for the show.

"This band usually plays at weddings for people from Bamako who have roots
in the Niamala region," said my companion, Paul Chandler, an American record
producer and schoolteacher who has lived in Bamako for several years, "but
their music is free to everyone who wanders by."

Bamako, a hot, dusty city that sprawls along both banks of the Niger River
in southern Mali, near the border with Guinea, does not, at first glance,
bear the markings of one of the world's great cultural capitals. Although it
is the capital of the former French colony and has a population estimated at
more than a million, in many respects the city feels like an overgrown
village, with a handful of high-rises along the wide and murky Niger, goats
grazing at roadside and a sprawling market, the Grand Marché, filling much
of downtown. Yet its musical tradition goes back at least six centuries, and
public open-air performances by itinerant musicians, like the one we saw,
are as much a part of life here as pickup games of le football. Moreover,
during the last decade, the city has undergone a transformation.

A Malian music boom that began in the 1990's, when the soulful vocalist
Salif Keita and the singer-guitarist Ali Farka Touré achieved international
stardom, has brought an influx of tourists, record producers and aspiring
musicians seeking to emulate the stars' successes. (The news of Mr. Touré's
death on March 6 from cancer resonated around the world.) As a result,
Bamako has become a meeting place and incubator for West African talent, and
one of the best places on the planet to hear live music.

Bars and nightclubs have sprung up, often intimate venues with thatched
roofs, bare scuffed walls and a few dozen rough wooden tables and chairs,
where some of the biggest names in Malian music drop by to play when they're
in town. (Several of these establishments, including Mr. Keita's Mofu and
Oumou Sangare's Hotel Wassulu, are owned by musicians.) Such Western artists
as Robert Plant, Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker and the French
Basque star Manu Chao have visited Bamako to jam and record with the local
stars.

The city has become a cultural hothouse, in which singers and
instrumentalists from Mali's myriad tribes ‹ the Tuaregs of the Sahara, the
Sorhai of Timbuktu, the Malinkes from the border region south of Bamako, the
Dogon cliff dwellers, the Wassalous near the Ivory Coast, the Peuls of
central Mali ‹ mix and fertilize one another's art.

"The number of ethnic groups here is vast, and each culture is distinct,"
said Mombé Traoré, a dreadlocked disc jockey in his 30's known as D. J.
Vieux who agreed to be my guide during several days of sampling the music
scene in early February. "Everyone meets up in Bamako."

Mali musical tradition goes back to the height of the Songhai Empire, in the
early 16th century, when a caste of itinerant entertainers ‹ oral historians
called griots ‹ emerged in the villages along the Niger River, the third
longest waterway in Africa. Known as jeli in the local Bambara language, the
griots developed musical narratives whose aim was to celebrate the
achievements of kings and to chronicle the culture and history of their
communities.

"If you think of West Africa as a body, then the griot is the blood," I was
told by Toumani Diabate, a virtuoso of the 21-string, harplike kora who won
a Grammy this year when "In the Heart of the Moon," a collaboration with Ali
Farka Touré that the pair recorded in Bamako, was named best traditional
world music album. "We are the guardians of West Africa's society. We are
communicators."

Mali's griot music has developed many permutations over the centuries, but
common denominators still exist: a hypnotic, haunting melody based on a
pentatonic scale, the piercing vibrato of the kora, energetic drumming and
the plaintive wail of the singer-narrator. (The griot still ranks low on the
social hierarchy, however: Salif Keita, a descendant of a royal Malinke
family, earned his clan's scorn when he chose the career of the griot.)

I arrived in Bamako at the end of the cool, dry season, when tourists from
Europe and, increasingly, the United States converge on Mali to hike among
the villages of the animist Dogon tribe, or to venture to Timbuktu and the
Sahara beyond. Bamako used to be just a way station, but increasing numbers
of tourists are staying a few days to check out the music scene.

Bamako remains one of the poorest capitals in West Africa (Mali has been
independent since 1960). But it is also perhaps the most welcoming, and
visitors find almost none of the hassles encountered in other cities in the
region.

After having my credit-card number stolen at one of the best hotels in
Lagos, Nigeria, and after bribing my way past roadblocks manned by drunken
soldiers and club-wielding teenage vigilantes in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, I
found Bamako a relief. Taxi drivers are generally honest; street hawkers
back off after a single polite "non, merci"; the streets are safe after
dark. And if you can speak a little French and drop the names of one or two
Malian musicians, you'll find yourself engaged in animated conversations at
every turn. 

At 11 p.m. on my second night in Bamako, Vieux, which my dreadlocked guide
goes by, pulled up in front of my hotel on an aging Chinese moped and told
me to follow him in a taxi. His peacock-blue traditional robe, a bubu,
fluttered in the breeze as we rode through dark streets to Élysée, a
barnlike club on the outskirts of town.

Dimly lit, it was packed when we arrived, filled with young Malian couples
who danced slowly on a rough mosaic floor or snuggled on banquettes. (Mali's
men and women, despite living in an Islamic country, are relaxed about
displaying affection in public.) A popular local singer, Lobi Traoré, no
relation to Vieux, sang melancholy tunes in Bambara, backed by a percussion
band and two electric guitars. The music, which Lobi Traoré called the
"Bambara Blues," contains striking echoes of American R & B, and, like that
genre, is filled with themes of shattered romance and unrequited longing.

Lobi Traoré is not the first musician to cite parallels between the music of
the Mississippi Delta and that of the Niger River. The late Ali Farka Touré,
a Sorhai who grew up on the banks of the Niger south of Timbuktu, once said
that the American blues were born along his bend in the river. Robert Plant
found similarities between the assouf music of the Tuaregs and American
blues when he played at the Festival of the Desert near Timbuktu in 2003,
one of several multiple-day outdoor concerts that draw thousands to Mali
each year.

The next night our destination was the Cheval Blanc, an open-air bar in
Badalabougou owned by an American woman and her Malian husband, Lorelei
Frizzell and Ssasi Traoré. Under a ragged thatched roof, we sat on plastic
chairs at a crude wooden table, ate brochettes of beef and downed cold
bottles of Castel beer while listening to a husband-and-wife band, Adama
(Star) Dramé and Marium Koko Dembele.

A Dogon who grew up in the remote cliffs of central Mali, Mr. Dramé
fashioned his first guitar out of tin cans, he told me during a break, and
had done so well that he was recently hired as a guitarist by Mali's
National Orchestra. A Dunhill dangling from his lips, he moved effortlessly
and eclectically from reggae to Led Zeppelin-style blues to Dogon melodies,
accompanied by percussionists, a xylophone player and Marium's throaty
vocals. 

Some of the biggest stars of the Malian music scene, including Amadou and
Mariam and Habib Koité, were away at the Festival on the Niger, a three-day
outdoor concert in Ségou, 150 miles northeast of Bamako. But Toumani
Diabate, the kora virtuoso, had skipped the event so he could prepare for
his trip to the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

Vieux wrangled me a rare invitation to meet Mr. Diabate at his home on the
outskirts of Bamako. I arrived at 1 on a Friday afternoon and waited for
about two hours in an anteroom; then Mr. Diabate, a slender 40-year-old,
appeared at the door and invited me to sit with him on a veranda and share a
lunch of capitain, a succulent white fish netted from the Niger.

We ate communally, scooping the fish and rice with our fingers from a large
metal plate. In the adjacent courtyard, a half dozen female relatives,
including one of his two wives, were pounding millet, soaking string beans
and simmering a stew over an open fire. It could have been a scene in any
village in rural Mali, except for the occasional reminder of Mr. Diabate's
celebrity. In the middle of our meal his cellphone rang: it was his producer
from Nonesuch Records calling to finalize Mr. Diabate's flights to Los
Angeles via Paris the next day.

The scion of 53 generations of kora players from the Malinke tribe, Mr.
Diabate grew up in Bamako and began studying the instrument at the age of 5.
He came to artistic maturity just as Malian music was gaining exposure in
the United States, and played his first American concert at a club in New
Jersey (he doesn't remember its name) almost 20 years ago.

Since then, he's performed "in 47 states," he said. He sponged up reggae,
pop, jazz and soul influences during his travels, and has collaborated with
the likes of Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder and the jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd.

"I take the old Malian songs and give them modern arrangements, and I set
new compositions to the old music," he told me. "Today people want 'world
music,' mixing the old and the new, but you have to remain true to yourself.
If you forget the past, then you'll lose your way in the future."

Although he has had ample opportunity to emigrate to the West, Mr. Diabate
remains firmly rooted in his birthplace; shuttling back and forth, he
explained, keeps him energized and inspired.

"I could never move away from Bamako," he said. "To me, it's the most
beautiful city in the world."

MR. Diabate was scheduled to perform that evening with his band, the
Symmetric Orchestra, at Le Hogon, one of the most popular music clubs in
Bamako. I followed Vieux's moped along the north bank of the Niger, arriving
at the club shortly after midnight. In contrast to the scruffy bars I'd been
visiting, Le Hogon was a flashy, sumptuous place. Hundreds of patrons sat in
the warm night on three open-air verandas, each topped by a thatched,
Dogon-style roof that swept upward into a witch's-hat peak.

A few couples were intertwined on the terra cotta dance floor. Behind it,
bathed in hot-pink light and arrayed in two neat rows, the 10-member
Symmetric Orchestra performed energetically. Four percussionists stood in
the front row, beating on jembes and dununbas, slim tapered drums that fit
snugly in the armpit. Behind them, their backs against a colorful mural of
Dogon village life, sat acoustic, electric and bass guitarists; a
clarinetist; a balafonist (playing a kind of xylophone); and a kora player,
plucking at the long-necked instrument almost imperceptibly with both hands.

The only ingredient missing was Mr. Diabate. "He likes to sleep in the
evening, and he usually doesn't get here until 1 o'clock or 1:30," Vieux
said.

A griot, swathed in a dazzling white bubu, swept across the dance floor, his
melancholic voice reminiscent of Salif Keita's. The glittering notes of the
kora cut through the pounding percussives and guitars. People left their
seats, embraced the griot and stuck money in his gown, repeating a pattern
that has played out for centuries.

"It is in our culture to reward the griot for giving us knowledge," Vieux
told me. "In the villages, they give cattle or even houses, depending on how
rich they are. It's not obligatory, but it is expected."

By 2 a.m., Mr. Diabate had still not arrived. During a break in the set,
Vieux conferred with a friend in the Symmetric Orchestra and returned to the
table with bad news: the virtuoso would not be showing up. "He says he's
sick," Vieux said skeptically.

The disc jockey suspected a different reason: Mr. Diabate was involved in a
running dispute with the owners of Le Hogon over the size of his fee, he
speculated, and had decided to boycott the event. "He's a big star," Vieux
said with a shrug.

Then the lights came back up, the band began to play, and soon, Mr.
Diabate's absence seemed hardly to matter at all.

Visitor Information

HOW TO GET THERE

The two easiest ways to get to Bamako from New York are on Air France
(www.airfrance.us) through Paris, or on Royal Air Maroc
(www.royalairmaroc.com) via Casablanca. Fares for late April recently
started in the $750 to $850 range.

Americans can get visas ($100) from the Embassy of Mali in Washington
(202-332-2249; www.maliembassy.us).

WHERE TO HEAR MUSIC

The dialing code for Mali is 223; many clubs do not have listed numbers.

Bamako is a city for night owls: the music doesn't usually start until 11
p.m. and goes as late as 5 a.m. Many streets in Bamako do not have names,
but taxi drivers usually know how to find the hot spots. Even the best live
music clubs rarely charge admission of more than 2,500 CFA francs, $5 at 500
francs to the dollar.

Le Hogon, in the N'Tomikorobougou neighborhood, is the most upscale of the
clubs. Modeled after a Dogon village, it's the regular Friday venue of
Toumani Diabate's Symmetric Orchestra and, on increasingly rare occasions,
Mr. Diabate himself.

Savana (631-4156) in Korofina Nord. On Wednesday nights, a popular
singer-guitarist, Djibee 5, draws Bamako's hip young crowd with an eclectic
mix that ranges from Bob Marley to "House of the Rising Sun" to traditional
Bambara tunes.

Djembe, in Lafiabougou, is a scaled-down version of Le Hogon with griot
music in a casual open-air setting. It's open nightly, but the best bands
play on Friday and Saturday.

Wassulu Hôtel Résidence, Route Aeroport, Place Sogolon (228-7373 or
228-7474; www.hotel-residence-wassulu.com), is owned by the Malian diva
Oumou Sangare, who often performs there on Saturday nights.

Espace Bouna, in ACI 2000 Hamdallaye (229-5467), is a large open-air club
where Habib Koité, a renowned Mande singer, plays the music of a variety of
Malian ethnic groups on Saturday nights. Amadou and Mariam, the well-known
blind musicians, occasionally show up, as does Toumani Diabate.

Cheval Blanc in Torokorobougou, on the south side of the Niger River, is a
new open-air club with crude amplifiers, a ragged thatched roof and a Friday
night lineup of up-and-coming young musicians.

Élysée is in the Samé neighborhood on the "ancienne route de Kati" and is a
dim, barnlike club with a funky atmosphere where Lobi Traoré is a regular
performer.

There are also several music festivals each year in Mali. Perhaps the most
prominent is the Festival of the Desert (www.festival-au-desert.org;
232-1804), which is scheduled for next Jan. 11 to 13 in the Tuareg village
of Essakane, two hours north of Timbuktu.

Then on Feb. 1 to 4, the Festival on the Niger (www.festivalsegou.org) is
scheduled in Ségou.

And the Paris-Bamako Festival is taking place this week at the school for
the blind in Bamako (www.les-paris-bamako.com).