Sunny,
spring day in Beijing. The dust
has yet to assert itself fully after the previous day’s rain. I have the window open. Workers are building someone’s porch
outside, across the way.
They are working hard and they are spitting hard. For the first seven or so epic hahcks I roll with it. Then, I find I’m thinking about the
spitting rather than my work.
Another one. And then,
another one. Suddenly I’m a
teenager again. I wait for the
next expectorate lunge . . . here it comes, then, without showing my face, but
at the top of my lungs I imitate the sound and drag it out for twenty five
seconds or so, my voice trailing across the courtyard. Silence. Coincidence?
Cough man waits a bit and then, a few moments later hahcks again. I repeat my mating call response, with all my might
like a bull frog whose life depends upon getting noticed. Dead silence. We have communicated.
Funny, like throwing wet toilet paper out a New York apartment window on
pedestrians below, but not especially productive. I reach for my noise reduction headset. I have something else I want to listen
to.
The people of the Sahel would have a thing or two to say
about yellow dust, living as they do, on the edge of the Sahara. I rode across Burkina Faso in 1992, the
year before I first came to China.
I traveled in overland from Mali by bush taxi and made my way south from
Ouagadougou to Tamale in Ghana. I
was on a rather low-budget and “dinner” seemed to regularly end up being “rice
with fish sauce” from a cart. Ahh,
but the music . . . Every city, had unique music. And I would always ask, to find cassettes for vinyl of music
from 20 years earlier. I still
have the tapes somewhere, waiting to be digitized.
One night I was in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso, and I was
looking for live music. I was
directed to a hotel that would have been a bit pricey for me at that time. In the lobby they had the obligatory
“live drumming show” or some such thing.
It felt like watching dolphins in captivity at Sea World. Certainly it was a performance with
leopard skins and fire dancing, but there was nothing spirited let alone
genuine about it and I walked home, in the dark, grumbling at having wasted my
money.
Then, off in the distance, I heard it. A live beat from somewhere and the
sound of distorted guitars.
Hmm. I headed in that
direction. Traipsing around the
unlit streets of West African cities by oneself after dark was something I’d
already learned could be a bit of a gamble, but this was truly a Siren song,
undeniably 改弦易辙[1]and
I was going to follow it to its source. Off to the left, up to the right, passed potholes the
size of automobiles. Then, there,
up ahead, there was a clearing with a generator humming powering two streetlights,
and two amps and there were a two hundred people surrounding the band. Wild dolphins, swimming freely.
The band consisted of two drummers as I recall, banging out
a funky irresistible beat with the two warmly distorted guitars playing
cyclical loops in the high registers over the top. I’d love to say there was a thumping bass player and a
syncopated brass section, but I think that was about it. But nothing else was needed to get the
line of thirty some odd women dancing in a circle in the center, backwards with
their generous backsides leading the way, in groovy lockstep, back, turn, spin,
clap.
If you put on music from Mali in the 70s, like the Bamako
Rail Band, there is a distinct, broad savannah view sound with lots of guitars
and polyrhythmic flourishes minimized. Once you hear the music of Ghana with
the celestial harmonies and apogee-like refinement of Ashanti drumming it can
only be from one country. Burkina
lies between them and frankly I would have been hard pressed to blind-test identify
the sound.
At that time Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s Ivory Coast was by far
and away the most developed, modern country in the region. And when you spoke to Invoirians about
their music they would often say that the best performers were all the
Burkinabe’ from the north. I had
more than a few Ivoirian cab drivers in NYC corroborate this. I had a few cassettes I’d gotten there,
during the trip, but nothing like what I knew must be out there, given what was
everywhere surrounding the arid plains of Upper Volta. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Houphou%C3%ABt-Boigny
And today, when I called it quits on dueling throat calls, I
reached for some music of Burkina that I’d heard yesterday. This is the grand project compiled by
the ethnomusicologists over at Analog Africa. This their 10th release, “Bambara Mystic Soul
(The Raw Sound of Burkina Faso 1974-1979).” Raw indeed. Dig
the yell at the beginning of the tune “Tink Tank” by Afro Soul System. Dig the infectious positivity on “Rog
Mik Africa” by Orchestre CVD. My
personal favorites are the irresistible “Dambakale” by Compaore Issouf and his
lilting female back up singers, and the pièce
de résistance English number “Love, Music, Dance” in which one Mamo Lagbema
invites the lass to come up to his room, listen to great music and make
love. “Love, love, love in
my room yeah. Music, music, music,
in my room yeah!” Ripe, it was,
for a Jackson Five cover.
To my earlier crossroads suggestion there are beautiful
hints of the surrounding scenes in all this music and yet something core and
notably upbeat about the Burkina sound.
I travel all the time for business but West Africa never winds up being
on the agenda. I sure do wish I
could grab some rice with fish sauce to-go, and head back out to the that block
party in Bobo, which has certainly packed up and been replaced by now with
something very different.
[1] gǎixiányìzhé：change of string, move
out of rut (idiom); dramatic change of direction / to dance to a different tune
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