Great Spirits

Cheikh Lo

    Certain musicians make music as easily as they breath. Indeed music flows from them naturally,
seemingly effortless. Everything they do is musical.  It doesn't matter what such artists play--what instrument, what composition, what style. Genres and styles mean nothing to them. Their music-making flows and overflows artificial stylistic boundaries. Any such musician automatically makes any group he or she plays with better. The groove becomes tighter, more kinetic; the textures better defined.  You can find such musicians anywhere in the world but they also stand head and shoulders above the general run of musicians.
    Cheikh Lo is one such musician. The first time I was conscious of hearing him was in the early 90's
on an album called "Na La Thiass", his first international release, produced by Youssou N'dour. Though
the album had much mbalax, the Senegalese national popular style spearheaded by Youssou N'dour,
as its core, it had a very different feel from other Senegalese recordings.  There were many elements
that were not particularly mbalax. The music was subtly unclassifiable....it was riverine, it just flowed.
It made me smile. And it was richly satisfying, like a well-prepared meal. A few years later, Cheikh
Lo released Lamp Fall, an album even more eclectic, drawing substantially on Brazilian music. It was
sublime.
    Where does Cheikh Lo get his uniqueness?  Though Senegalese, he was born in an area close to the
border of Mali and grew up speaking Bambara, as well as Wolof and French. He was therefore from an
early age bathed in the currents of music emanating from Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinee. When he moved to Daker in the Seventies, he played in resident club and hotel bands for many years. In the hotel bands he played a wide-ranging repertoire including many songs from around the world. And of course he was immersed in the Afro-Cuban and Congolese styles that were so popular in Dakar. At this point he was mainly a drummer, though sometimes also a vocalist. His palette expanded again when he moved to Paris in 1985, becoming a session drummer on an infinity of sessions, including many Congolese and Camarounian recordings.
    When he finally got around to recording, his vocals came to the fore with a beguling vocal sound
that was less spectacular than some of the leading lights of Sengelese and Malian music--but throughly inviting. His music has an uncanning way of subtly sweeping you along in a warm, gently stimulating
current.
     Another aspect of Lo's uniqueness stems from his religious faith. He is a Baya Fall Muslim, a particularly Senegalese variety of Islam, an adherent of the Mourid sect founded by the mystic
Bamba in the late 19th Century, a manifestiation of the anti-colonial movement. Many of the Baya
Fall wore their hair in long dreadlocks--this predates Rastafari by several decades.
    I recently saw Cheikh Lo on tour as part of Still Black And Proud: An African Tribute To James
Brown, a quite wonderful collaboration between former James Brown hornman Pee Wee Ellis, who
has worked with many West African musicians, some other James Brown alumni, such African
musicians as Vieux Farka Toure (the son of Ali Farka Toure) and Cheikh Lo, and some European
musicians--playing the repertoire of James Brown, who of course was hugely popular in West Africa
during the late Sixties and Seventies. When Cheick Lo stepped forward and sang "It's A Man's Man's Man's World" in Wolof, it brought the house done. Somethng that could have seemed comical became in
Lo's performance eminently soulful. 
    So do yourself a favor; check out the music of Cheikh Lo. It doesn't matter if  you're particularly
into African music. If you love music, you will probably enjoy his music!

THIS WEEK'S MUSICAL TREAT

    In memorium of roots reggae great Vivian "Yabby You" Jackson, who passed away this past week in Clarendon, Jamaica, we offer this week's musical treat which is a mix of three great songs by Yabby You: "Fleeing From The City", the title cut from his rare, out-of-print 1984 album; "Deliver Me From My Enemies", the title cut from 1977 classic; and "Blessed Are The Meek", an extended 12" version featuring the dee jay Trinity of a rare single by Yabby You & The Prophets. Just click on the "Musical Treats" category on the right to access and download this mix!

Yabby You Is Gone!

     Roots reggae great Vivian "Yabby You" Jackson is gone....he passed away in Jamaica last night according to reliable reports. I have not yet learned the cause of his passing but he had suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis among other ailments for many years. When I had last spoken to him by
telephone a couple months ago he had been experiencing a lot of pain. Now his pain is over and
he has transcended to the higher plane that he always aspired to in his life.

     Yabby You was one of the most spiritual people I've ever met. What do I mean by that? It was
not simply that he focused on matters spiritual, talked about them and made music that was intended
to be a conduit for spiritual expression. His very presence was a strong, benign, calm, beneficent,
ego-free kind of being. He radiated serene knowledge, which he would pass on to you but not in any proselytizing way. It his spiritual strength that motivated him and enabled to create some of the most
profound reggae music ever made--even though he was not a musician and had never intended to
be a singer. He was known as "The Jesus Dread" because although he was a dreadlocks man he was a Christian.

     Yabby You's music was distinguished by deep, powerful rhythms, rhythms which sent vibrations
deep in to the earth as well as the belly and breast of any listener. Then there were his melodies,
tuneful, often sprightly, but sometimes minor-key chants. Many of his songs were hymns, based either on old church hymns or his own conception of hymns. His first recording, "Conquering Lion", recorded in 1972, was utterly hypnotic and one of the most unique pieces of music ever recorded. It was replicated in many different versions by Yabby and other--including the legendary Big Youth--and is a  classic of
Jamaican music. Then there were his almost journalistic accounts of decadance and oppressive living circumstances, songs such as "Fire Fire", "Fleeing From The City", and "Judgement On The Land."
And there were love songs, often wistful. Much of his best work was done in association with the legendary King Tubby, with whom he created some powerful dubs. For me, the song "Deliver Me
From My Enemies" was his most monumental hymn.

     Yabby You's music has usually been hard to find. The UK label Blood And Fire did a great job
of re-issuing his music on CD but the company has now gone out of business so you should snap
up available copies on the internet while you can. Shanachie Entertainment, the company I
work for, released two collections of his music, both now out of print. Maybe we'll have to do
something about that.

    When I think of great roots reggae masters I think especially of Burning Spear, Culture, Augustus
Pablo and Yabby You. Spear is the only one left. The others,  died too young ( I consider Joseph
Hill, the leader of Culture who passed recently, to be the essence of Culture).  Music such as these
men made will never come again. Yabby You was the least know of them but every bit their
equal. Long live Yabby You!

PS: for a more detailed presentation of Yabby You, check out the chapter on him in my
book Great Spirits...
utterly hypnotic,

Great Spirits Back On KPFK

    Randall Grass will again be a guest on Yatrika Shah-Rais' Global Village show on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles on Wednesday January 13th at 2:30PM East Coast Time (11:30AM Pacific Coast time). Listen online at www.kpfk.org!

Nadia Gamal: The Ultimate Middle Eastern Dance Diva

     Last week I had the pleasure of being a guest again on Yatrika Shah's Global Village radio program on KKPFK-FM in Los Angeles.  The topic: ultimate Middle Eastern dance diva Nadia Gamal. She is the only dancer featured in my book Great Spirits: Portraits Of Life-Changing World Music Artists and many people want to know why I decided to write about her. I have several answers to that question. First of all, Nadia Gamal was truly a "great spirit" whose impact on many of the people who witnessed her performances was truly life-changing. She was a great diva of Middle Eastern dance--hardly the only one but possibly the one who did more to elevate women's Middle Eastern dance to the level of high art. Then too a great dancer is necessarily a great musician whose instrument happens to be his or her body. This is especially true of Nadia Gamal, whose sensitivity to the dynamics and colors of the music she danced to was extraordinary. She always insisted on performing with live musicians and she directed them as much as she responded to them. In performance she is one with them. Finally, very few people outside the Middle Eastern dance community and Arab communities know about Nadia and very little has been written about her. Much of the information about her has been scattered and fragmentary. Therefore I felt a compulsion to attempt more comprehensive account of her. She is often referred to as "The Legend" but like many legends, the reality of Nadia's greatness has not been well communicated. My account is in Great Spirits. I was fortunate to be one of a relatively small number of people in America who actually saw her perform (until recently I thought I had witnessed her only U.S. performance--at Town Hall in New York City in 1981. I recently learned that she gave a smaller scale public performance in Los Angeles around the same time). So in a way, my writing about Nadia Gamal is my way of bearing witness to the great impact she had on me.

      Let me try to encapsulate the magic of Nadia Gamal. She was a striking-looking woman, petite even in high heels, with long dark flowing hair streaming down her back during most of her life. She moved with liquid precision, which you might say is something any great serious dancer would achieve. But in the context of Middle Eastern dance she stood out with this precision because the repertoire of movements can easily be entertaining without being precise. Danse Oriental (or raks sharki, as it is called in the Middle East) is a dance of storytelling, of dramatic impact and of overt passion and so Nadia excelled because she possessed great dramatic ability (she in fact appeared in a number of Egyptian films both in dance scenes and as an actress in featured roles). As the dancer and scholar Andrea Deagon recalled the impact of seeing a television broadcast of one of Nadia's performances which involved a re-enactment of the possession of a woman by an evil spirit, Nadia's dramatic ability was such that "you saw the exact instant that the spirit entered her body."  The best way I can describe the impact of Nadia's dancing is by saying that I felt a physical impact from her movements, even though she might have been thirty feet away. It was as though the energy of her intense passion was concentrated and focused through the precision of her movements into a force that generated shockwaves through the air.

         It is surprising, even amazing, how meager the filmed record of Nadia Gamal's performances is. There is an excellent clip of her doing danse oriental(filmed by Ibrahim Farrah in the early 1970's in Lebanon) in the DVD entitled Rare Glimpses which is available by mail via the internet. There is a full-length performance by Nadia shot in a Lebanese nightclub in the mid/late 80's, which is entertaining but not exceptional. And there is a DVD of her giving a dance workshop, but it features very little dancing by Nadia. Several clips (including a couple from her film performances) of Nadia performing are available on YouTube....you just go to YouTube and search on "Nadia Gamal."  Beware, one or two are actually of Samia Gamal (no relation), a top Egyptian dancer. These offer some glimpses of her greatness. But the best performance footage of Nadia(also shot by Ibrahim Farrah) resides in the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Libary, which is located at Lincoln Center. You have to go there to see it. None of these truly compares to witnessing Nadia in live performance...something that is no impossible since Nadia died in 1990. All we have are limited footage mentioned above along with the indelible memories of those who were fortunate enough to see her perform. I am privleged to have been one of those people.