Some folks trace the origin of the blues—and, by extension, rock ‘n’ roll-- to
the West African savannah or Sahel region, which stretches from Chad through Northern Nigeria, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, northern Ghana and into Guinea and Senegal. This is a crossroad area, the nexus between North Africa and “sub-Saharan” Africa, the meeting place between the heavily Islamic and the notably Christianized, the mixing trough of Arab and African cultures. The ancestor of the banjo originated here as did a call-and-response style of music-making between singer and instrument, that sounds very familiar to blues lovers. So Paul Oliver wrote in “Savannah Syncopators” that the headwaters of
the blues lie here.
For me, the case for this connection springs from a personal encounter. While living in Kano, Nigeria, an ancient city of the Sahel, I saw on local television a man playing a one-string fiddle, backed by an array of percussionists, some playing “talking” drums,
others calabash percussion, and also a vocal chorus who echoed the riffs he played on the amplified fiddle. He was playing lines worthy of Albert King one moment and in other, wilder moments, distorted, overtone-driven lines worthy of Jimi Hendrix. Who was it? I had to find out. I was told the fiddle player’s name was Garba Leo. I asked my friend Ed, who was more conversant with local culture and more fluent in Hausa than I, where I
might find Garba Leo. He told me I could find him right there in Kano, playing at a club in Sabon Gari, the “new city” portion of Kano. Needless to say I went to hear Garba Leo and he was even more fantastic in person, playing his fiddle with a microphone stuck
inside the gourd sounding chamber and connected to an amplifier that blasted the screaming electrified fiddle through a couple of ancient P.A. horns. Later, sitting with
Alhaji Leo in a bar over beers, the bar’s sound system was playing Albert King’s performance of “Crosscut Saw” from the Wattstax soundtrack. Alhaji Leo said to me “I can play that.” And indeed he could! I went in to become his student on goge’ for awhile, but that is another story. I was able, with Ed’s assistance, to record a studio version of Alhaji Leo’s music for Folkways Records; the record showed his virtuosity but lacked the wild edge since I had not had the foresight to have him bring his amplifier to the studio.
It is easy to jump to conclusions about whether there is a direct connection between the “savannah syncopators” and African-American bluesmen. There are points and counterpoints to the argument. Also it important to realize that the musicians of the Sahel, as in much of Africa, have been listening to American blues and soul and rock for three or four decades at least. So the great Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure’ sounds like John Lee Hooker in part because he has been listening to –and influenced by—John Lee Hooker’s recordings. But then John Lee’s playing may have been rooted in music brought from Mali to America by African slaves. There are Taureg musicians now playing a traditionally-rooted kind of desert rock but many of them heard cassettes of Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana during their exile in Libya. Maybe they find something familiar in it. The music goes round in circles! But no matter which way the influences run, it is undeniable that West African sahelian and desert musicians have been making a rocking style of music for many decades.
One of these musicians is Lobi Traori of Mali, from the region of Segou, who passed away recently at the age of 52. Moving to Bamako in his youth, he took up electric guitar and began playing in the city’s many bars. He has acknowledging listing to “a lot of blues” when he was young. He began recording in the early Nineties, with some of his breakthrough recordings produced by Ali Farka Toure, including the classic mainly acoustic “desert blues” album “Bamako” from the early 1990’s. Lobi Traore is interesting because he moves so easily from deeply traditional to wildly contemporary. The writer/musician Banning Eyre, who spent considerable time in Mali, says this dichotomy extended even to his manner of dress. A short (barely 5’ tall), eccentric man, his free spirit comes through in his guitar playing. A particularly amazing album by Lobi Traore is “Bwati Kono” (“In The Club”), his last recording, made shortly before his death in 2010. Recorded in two different locales—inside a club called Espace Adaemie, where he and his band played for a couple years, and in the courtyard of a “well-known”, according to liner notes, but unidentified hotel in Niger—Lobi and his small band crank up intense tracks crackling with energy. The instrumentation is an interesting combination—electric guitar, acoustic guitar, electric bass, trap drums, balafon and djembe (drum). The opening track, “Makono” hits with a kicking groove, a kind of Malian stomp beat, with Lobi playing intense, slashing guitar lines reminiscent of a hard rock guitarist. His guitar tone is overdriven, distorted, sometimes phased; he uses a fuzz box as well as feedback. The individual riffs might not be fresh but his phrasing drives them home with great power. “Banan Ni” ramps up the hard rock vibe even more over clattering percussion, with sustained vibrato guitar notes and power chords. Even when he slows things down on “Saya”, which has a drier, more traditional desert sound, keening vocals and keening guitar licks explode over the groove. Elsewhere “Ya Time” moves from the stately desert rock of the Taureg bands to majestic Hendrixian wah wah runs. In short this is at timeless album, both ancient and modern that is a classic of Africa’s desert rock.
Another album from the “desert rock” spectrum is a new recording by Tal National from Niamey, Niger. Niger is overshadowed by Nigeria to the South and Mali to the West. An extremely poor country with only three significant cities on the edge of the Sahara, its contemporary music scene is limited and hardly any of it’s musicians have emerged on the international scene. Tal National has been around for over a decade with up to thirteen band members, though usually only six or seven are onstage at any one time. Sometimes they split up to play two gigs in the same time slot; in any case, any one gig might last five continuous hours, so sometimes the band members swap in and out. They mix electric guitars and electric base with trap drums, multifaceted traditional kalangui (talking drum) and percussion and chanted vocals. Their sound has a distinct slant due to a strong Hausa influence; Hausa music is not much heard outside its home region of Northern Nigeria and Southern Niger. Their latest album, “Kaani”, was recorded in primitive conditions in a broken down studio in Niamey. In fact, the studio equipment was largely non-functional but the band brought an engineer from America with recording equipment. The studio doors and windows were left open for ventilation (there was no air conditioning) and this added a great ambient effect to the sound. They recorded during the day before going off for their regular nighttime gigs. While the riffs are not as obviously blues or rock-based, they are played with rock ‘n’ roll abandon as the percussionists churn up a rollicking groove. You can easily picture a crowd dancing themselves into ecstasy. Apparently a previous album ,, “A Na Waya”, was recorded the same way and I’m going to seek it out!
Blues, rock, traditional sounds and rhythms of the Sahel—all of these elements swirl and recombine in the hands of these and many other musicians who increasingly have come to the forefront during the past decade. Though Congolese music and Ivorian pop, not to mention reggae and African hip-hop have far greater popularity across Africa, the desert rock and blues has found great favor in the West, far out of proportion to its impact in Africa. Westerns can hear themselves in the music and yet it is something different, something strange, almost mystical. The desert casts its spell across oceans and around the globe!
Comments