Tag: world music

STREAM: Secret Museum of Mankind – Atlas of Instruments: Fiddles Vol. 1

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Album: Secret Museum of Mankind – Atlas of Instruments: Fiddles Vol. 1
Release Date: September 15, 2023
Label: Jalopy Records

In Their Words: “The museum’s musical atlas of instruments continues with the opening of another wing, the first in a series on bowed instruments. To stretch boundaries over the earth and over time is to forsake them; whether it is a matter of Synchronizität or just the plain unconscious. In Western cultural history, the bowed instrument is a late installment, after centuries, of an almost primordial vibration that we imagine in sound; see in the old paintings; and yet can sample in the remnants of the ancient world captured on gramophone records.” – Pat Conte, curator

“The Secret Museum series is legendary. It opened up new possibilities for me when I first heard it in the 1990s. The curator is Pat Conte, he did something remarkable, even more so because it was before the internet: Starting in the 1970s he began assembling the first and arguably greatest collection of world music recorded in the 78 rpm record era of the 1920s – 1950s, give or take. He did it by casing junk stores in Queens, New York, the most diverse place in the world, and by maintaining letter correspondence with collectors and dealers across the globe. That is the music you will find on the Secret Museum of Mankind albums.

“Conte programs the records by feel, not with a predefined structure. The records are not meant to be academic, they are meant to move the listener. The movement is emotional, using music that was recorded in different places and at different times. Each listener will experience the sequence in their own way, and each track is its own world.

“The Secret Museum of Mankind: Atlas of Instruments – Fiddles, Vol. 1 continues the series and presents fiddle sounds developed and practiced across the globe. The compilation, drawn from Conte’s pioneering and remarkable personal collection of 78 rpm discs recorded in the 1920s – 1950s, offers fiddle music recorded across the world from Crete to Madagascar, Mexico, England, Sicily, Norway, India, the USA, Cape Verde, China and more.” – Eli Smith, producer

Image courtesy of Jalopy Records, Nick Loss-Eaton Media

WATCH: Calvin Arsenia + Ramy Essam, “Toward the Sun أخر العتمه نور”

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Artists: Calvin Arsenia + Ramy Essam
Hometowns: Kansas City, Missouri, and Mansoura, Egypt
Song: “Toward the Sun أخر العتمه نور” from Folk Alliance‘s Artists In (Their) Residence program
Release Date: August 24, 2021

In Their Words: “Ramy Essam and I met at the Folk Alliance International Conference in February of 2018 through a magical encounter that unfolded into cascades of beautiful music filling the halls of the conference hotel. I have always admired Ramy for his work in social justice but I am most impressed by the peace he carries with him in spite of the tumult he has and continues to endure. It is an honor to finally have a musical piece to call ours after years of sharing stages together across the globe. Ramy and I have played together in Kansas City, Tulsa, Montreal, and Gothenburg, but this is the first time we have written a song together.

“Ramy came to me with the guitar part and his verses after a few false starts of other songs. It was important to both of us to sing in our mother tongues and to showcase a hopeful message that can ring true for people around the world. My friend, Dr. Ezgi Karakus of Turkey, adds even more world flavor joining us on cello. I hope listeners feel as hopeful and inspired as I did when I met Ramy. It is a joy being his friend. Even in the face of severe persecution; beauty, love, and hope still triumph.” — Calvin Arsenia

Learn about the Folk Alliance Village Fund.

Photos provided by Folk Alliance International

Bluegrass is Trance (And Old-Time, Too)

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Bluegrass is trance. Old-time, too. 

With a slightly more zoomed out perspective, this fact comes into focus pretty quickly. American roots music and its precursors, especially their string band forms, have been interwoven with dance for eons. Before the advent of recorded music, when the popular musics of the day could often only be consumed by upper classes, dancing and other social group activities were the center places music inhabited. Before radio shaved popular music down into bite-sized, three-minute chunks, the tunes would last as long as necessary to provide a backdrop for a reel, a hornpipe, or a square dance, extending fiddle tunes into ten- to twenty-minute, cyclical, musical meditations. “Turkey in the Straw” as mantra, “Chicken Reel” as a slightly wonky, onomatopoeic sound bed.

Detached from dance, it’s easy to forget that string band music has been designed with trance embedded within its structures. Chris Pandolfi is a banjo player who’s explored quite a bit in trance and trance-adjacent music with the Infamous Stringdusters, a seminal jamgrass band with a level of bluegrass’s technical virtuosity that’s unmatched in all but a select few ensembles in a similar vein. Pandolfi’s new record, Trance Banjo, which was released under his solo stage name, Trad Plus, moves further and further beyond American roots aesthetics, cementing the banjo and its musical vernacular within trance – the electronica variety as well as the age-old, human kind.

Trance Banjo, and tracks such as “Wallfacer” — whose trippy visualizer music video almost cements this article’s central argument — recalls albums by Scott Vestal, or live shows by post-metal shredders like Billy Strings, or experimental, avant garde compositions by cattywompus flattop mashers like Stash Wyslouch. It’s not just a simple coincidence that so many players from bluegrass and old-time backgrounds find themselves dabbling with trance.

John Mailander, a fiddler who’s toured with Molly Tuttle and Bruce Hornsby and has been hired as a side-musician with many a jamgrass-leaning band, is comfortably uncomfortable in a very similar musical realm as Trance Banjo. On an EP of sketches and improvisations released last summer (from the same sessions and experimentations that became his upcoming album, Forecast) Mailander and his bluegrass-veteran backing band play with trance centered on sparseness, vacancy, and negative space in a way that’s engaging and baffling, both. Mailander’s rubric of vulnerable, emotive, and transparent expression as a foundation for improv is key here.

That personal touch, the personality endemic in these trance experimentations, is certainly what makes them most compelling and it must be, at least in part, what ties these songs to the centuries-old tradition of music as meditation. Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi make more than just a musical brand of showcasing their personalities and identities in the music they create, it’s more like a mission statement. Giddens has an incredible aptitude for writing and composing music based on empathy and human connection and Turrisi holds expansive knowledge of world folk music and percussion.

Their compositions and collaborations illustrate that, when we connect our music to dance, percussion, and trance, we’re connecting it to thousands and thousands of years of history — of humans of all ethnicities, cultures, backgrounds, and identities, gathering, connecting, sharing, and loving through music, dance, and trance. On stage, Turrisi and Giddens deliberately connect these dots as well, utilizing stage banter to educate their audiences about these exact connections.

While old-time has held onto its penchant for movement and choreography through the generations, bluegrass continues to grow distant from this and many of the other cultural phenomena that gave rise to it. Trance Banjo, and projects like it, while they seem to gleefully run away from what we perceive as “traditional” aspects of these genres, are in many ways guiding us right back to the very folkways that birthed them. 

Photo credit: Chris Pandolfi by Chris Pandolfi

WATCH: Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi, “Calling Me Home”

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Artists: Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi
Single: “Calling Me Home” (written by Alice Gerrard)
Album: They’re Calling Me Home
Release Date: April 9, 2021
Label: Nonesuch Records

In Their Words: “Some people just know how to tap into a tradition and an emotion so deep that it sounds like a song that has always been around — Alice Gerrard is one of those rarities; ‘Calling Me Home’ struck me forcefully and deeply the first time I heard it, and every time since. This song just wanted to be sung and so I listened.” — Rhiannon Giddens

Photo credit: Karen Cox

WATCH: Rising Appalachia Are Familiar and Fresh on NPR’s Tiny Desk

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Atlanta-based, globally-influenced string band Rising Appalachia bring a unique flavor to American roots music. Drawing on modern styles and traditional sentiments, they craft an original take on folk. Fronted by sisters Leah and Chloe Smith, the band has a sound that is at once familiar and fresh, incorporating various world percussion instruments, reggae-esque grooves, and fluttery melodies that deliver the songs’ meanings with clarity and precision. Like many folk artists before them, Rising Appalachia are no strangers to building art around their activism. One action the band prides itself on is the Slow Music Movement, an idea aimed at creating sustainable practices for touring entertainment acts and re-framing performance as a public service. Watch Rising Appalachia on NPR’s Tiny Desk.

Devendra Banhart Finds His ‘Ma’ Muse on Both Sides of the Pacific

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On Ma, the new album by folk-globalist Devendra Banhart, there are appearances by singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon and 1970s English folk-rock cult heroine Vashti Bunyan. Lyrics reference his love for Brazilian stars Chico Barque and Caetano Veloso as well as Japanese electro-art-pop pioneer Haruomi Hosono. And no less than Carole King is a presence in a co-write nod via lyrics drawn from “So Far Away.”

But when it comes to guest stars on the album, there’s one that’s hard to top: the Pacific Ocean.

Yup. That noted body of water is credited, fittingly, for “ocean sounds” on the song “October 12.” It’s a song of grief after the death of a friend, and Banhart, who spent much of his youth in Venezuela, his mother’s native country, sings it in Spanish.

“Actually, on every track there is the ocean,” he says, freshly landed at home in Los Angeles after flying across that very ocean from Singapore. “You don’t really hear it, but it is throughout the whole record. What inspired us to do that in the beginning, we recorded in a Buddhist temple in Kyoto with no walls. It is open to a garden. We wanted to create that feel on the album.”

Working with his longtime producer Noah Georgeson and several of his regular musical cohorts, Banhart was invited to record in that temple for just one hour, after a brief Asian tour. The experience was something they wanted to extend through the whole of the album, which they later accomplished by recording in a studio in a house along the Northern California coastline.

“You could hear the Pacific,” he says. “We had the windows open. That’s the big support system for the songs.”

It’s a nurturing presence, even in its most subtle ambience, it being the primal source of life. And as such, it represents the life-giving concept at the heart of the album: motherhood.

“Maternity is the theme,” he says.

There’s more than that here, of course. There is grief in songs such as “Memorial,” about his father, with temple bells mixed in the music, and “The Lost Coast,” about death and loss. The magic of serendipity permeates the album, as does the state of being open to what the world offers. None of the songs are explicitly about motherhood, per se. The notion, in many poetic manifestations, ties it together.

“There’s the relationship one has with a country,” he says, distressed about devastating political and economic strife of the nation in which he was nurtured. “Venezuela has been a constant issue on this record. Moments before now I was talking with my family and reading about what is going on there. It’s a truly apocalyptic situation. My way of writing about it is so related to my mother. At this point I can’t separate my own mother from Venezuela.”

His mother is not currently living there and the last time he visited was two years ago, but he has aunts and uncles and cousins who are there, seeing their country and its people suffer greatly. For him, it’s hard to separate that situation, with which he has such a deep personal relationship, from suffering elsewhere, whether from his own roots or in places where he has spent considerable time (Nepal and Tibet, among them) or that he has merely seen on the news.

“There is the insane suffering of the Venezuelan people, the political madness of the situation in the U.S., Duterte in the Philippines, China and Tibet suffering so much, and the people in Hong Kong.” Banhart seeks solace in the connections he’s made through music, “There’s music and art as the parent-and-child relationship. I turn to music to be consoled, to be less alone, to feel loved and nurtured.”

In that regard, few are more significant to him than Vashti Bunyan. The English singer came from the same folk-rock scene that gave us Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, and the Incredible String Band. Her 1970 album, Just Another Diamond Day, languished in obscurity until the late 1990s when it was “discovered” by musicians in a nascent movement that came to be called freak-folk, a young Banhart among its numbers. That brought about the album’s reissue, and various new recording projects, some involving Banhart. Now in her mid-70s, Bunyan sings with him here on the album’s closing “Will I See You Tonight?”

“Within that maternal theme, I don’t think anyone in my life encapsulates the archetype of the wisdom of artists as much as Vashti does, in terms of that nurturing quality of music,” he admits.

Banhart also seeks to make, or embrace, connections in music itself, some coming quite by surprise. This album is threaded with inspirations from and references to music from many lands and cultures, often connecting in ways wondrous, delightful, and serendipitous. Rarely is any of that planned — at least consciously.

“Sometimes the lyrics come first,” he says. “The music is a platform for the lyrics. As you start, as the song starts to take shape, there’s some collaborative element with other musicians, but also with the song itself, in that way. I don’t mean to be oblique, but it’s this strange way that it takes you in these certain directions. It’s out of your hands.

Sometimes it’s easy, he says, as in the song “Carolina,” which cites an earlier song that has influenced him.

“It’s a song for a song, a song written for the song ‘Carolina’ by Chico Barque,” he says. “It’s an homage to Brazilian music and South American music. There’s a samba feel to it, and me really singing about wanting to hear that song and saying I should probably learn Portuguese someday. In those lyrics it was easy to see the shape of that music.”

Others have more convoluted paths, but in them reveal the global pathways he has so openly relished in his music and in his life.

“In some songs I was quite surprised what was coming out.”

“Kantori Ongaku” offered several such surprises. In the chorus, sung in Japanese, he uses words from a song by Hosono, one of the founders of Japan’s landmark trio Yellow Magic Orchestra. At one point in the cited lyrics, Hosono sings, in English, the words “country music.” That planted some ideas for Banhart as he wrote his song although he wished to sidestep literalism.

“I wanted to do a Buck Owens thing here but that wouldn’t work out,” he says. “J.J. Cale was a great hero of mine so I took J.J. Cale as inspiration, not literally, but that kind of platform emerged for the song. Those things aren’t really done consciously. There are people who are inspirations I’ve been listening to for so long that it enters into the music, naturally.”

In some ways, Ma is a culmination of Banhart’s past work in a career from the two shambling albums he released in 2002 through 2016’s ambling Ape in Pink Marble that’s seen him go from neo-hippie troubadour to bossa nova evangelist, from playful folkiness to, well, playful electro-pop. He’s been a part of collaborations with kindred spirits from Beck to Brazilian tropicalia great Gilberto Gil, with whom he shared the Hollywood Bowl stage one highly memorable evening, to the Strokes’ Fabrizio Moretti to Antony and the Johnsons.

Yet the range and depth of Ma extends beyond even that, particularly in its emotions, the sense of loss in some songs not just complementing the joy in others, but expanding upon it in ways that truly honor the maternal wonder of the world.

How to make that work? How to bring all that together so naturally?

Well, now we get to the other concept of Ma. Yes, the title is a word generally associated with mothers. Banhart’s use of it comes from something else.

“The word ma is actually born from a different meaning,” he says. “It’s a philosophical term for space in Japanese. Starting the record in Kyoto, that’s where I learned the word. I’ve always failed but have strived to get a type of space in the music. How do you create spaciousness in music? Ma is a term of how essential it is to an object, and in music the space between the notes is essential. I really got into that word, and it also happened to be the perfect word for the theme of the album.”

Photo Credit: Lauren Dukoff

SMALL WORLD: Guitarist Lionel Loueke Brings Gentility to ‘The Journey’

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Lionel Loueke sat in a hotel room while on tour somewhere in Europe about a year and a half ago, watching the news on TV. The Benin-born guitarist, whose inventive playing has astonished many through his roles with Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard and his own band, was horrified by what he was seeing.

“It was a ship,” he remembered of the coverage. “A boat that came from Libya, I think. Many people died in the sea. I remember seeing kids, pregnant women in a boat and in very ugly conditions tossing the Mediterranean.”

It was a boat carrying refugees from North Africa to Europe, people trying to escape war and famine, only to perish on route. He was overwhelmed with emotion. He responded in the way most natural to him.

He picked up his guitar.

“I wasn’t thinking of composing that day,” he says. “Just playing some simple triads. I recorded myself improvising, all triads, more of a classical style.”

As much as what he was watching tore him apart, made him angry and pained by the horror and violence of it, the music he was making didn’t sound angry, did not reflect the violence and brutality. Instead it was music of gentility.

“I’m personally a non-violent person,” he says. “I practice Buddhism, with Herbie now for a few years. That comes through my playing and my music. There are other ways to resolve problems than violence. I think we touch more people this way — maybe the gentle part will catch more people’s attention than something angry and aggressive. That’s the way I see it.”

And that is exactly the tone throughout his new album, The Journey, which includes “Vi Gnin” (“My Child” in the Mina language of a coastal district of Benin), the piece that grew from those triads he played in the hotel room.

It’s a tone that tied to a lot of things for him as he watched and played that day. He thought of other ships, ships that took people from his home region in an earlier era across the Atlantic to be slaves in Brazil. And he thought of the music of Brazil of more recent times, echoing the earlier eras, sounds that thread through the album.

The album, the 45-year-old musician’s seventh as a leader, doesn’t start with slaves being taken to South America, though. It starts with some returning to Africa. Opening track “Bouriyan” is a lilting samba, inspired by those who moved back to Benin, once a Portuguese colony, from Brazil as slave revolts racked the country during its fight for independence in the 19th century. It’s something to which he feels a very direct connection, as many of those returnees settled in the town of Ouidah, where his mother grew up. Loueke has indelibly fond memories of his mother cooking feijoada, the Brazilian-rooted beans-and-meat stew. But of course he had no idea of those roots.

“For me, I thought it was from Benin!” he says. “That’s the real connection.”

It was the same with the music that came from the Brazilian ties.

“I grew up listening to Brazilian music, without knowing it was Brazilian music,” he says.

That came later, when he left Benin as a young man to study jazz at the American School of Modern Music in Paris. “I started hearing the Brazilian guitarists,” he recalls. “First guy I heard was Baden Powell. Then of course João Gilberto, Gilberto Gil. All those classic Brazilian composers.” And, of course, Antonio Carlos Jobim, the essential Brazilian guitarist-composer of “The Girl From Ipanema,” “Desafinado” and so many others at the foundation of the canon.

“Jobim! Jobim might be the second one I heard. I was already playing some of those standards, classic songs we all knew.”

For many, that connection may be a bit of a revelation. The evolution of some music back and forth across the Atlantic is well-known — the way Afro-Cuban music sprung from Yoruban roots and then returned to be embraced and reworked in various African locales, most prominently. But the sounds associated with Brazil on which Loueke draws for The Journey are lesser associated with Africa.

“You have the return after slavery, that part is not well-known,” he says. “But pretty much in every country where you have the coasts, some of the slaves who came back on different coasts got together and used the culture back from where they had come from.”

That all provided the starting point for creation of the music here, under the guidance of producer and co-arranger Robert Sadin, starting with Loueke’s guitar and vocals, with words in Mina, Fon, Yoruba and his own “language” of clicks, hums and sighs. They then brought in a variable cast of complementary, enhancing support, a wide-ranging roster including Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista, bassist Pino Palladino (the guy who, among many other things, stepped in to the Who when John Entwistle died), New York saxophonist John Ellis, Trinidadian trumpeter Étienne Charles, classical clarinetist Patrick Messina, versatile cellist Vincent Ségal and Benin-born percussionist Christi Joza Orisha, as well as Loueke’s long-time trio partners, bassist Massimo Biolcati and drummer Ferenc Nemeth.

“We didn’t think about who was going to play at the beginning,” Loueke says. “I was doing three days myself for the project, then we decided based on that who would be the right person to bring something magical. Choice was to find musicians who can bring something different, refreshing.”

Refreshing is a good description of Loueke’s whole approach to music, but also dazzling in technique and originality, something he developed from his youth when he came under the sway of the music of Wes Montgomery, Charlie Christian and Grant Green, then developed in his studies Paris, in Boston at the Berklee College of Music and in Los Angeles at the Thelonious Monk Institute — his audition at the latter being in front of a panel that included Hancock, Blanchard and Shorter.

All of that, all of him, is in this new album more than anything he’s done before, he says. It comes through strongly when he talks about the songs and their inspiration, what they mean to him.

“‘Kába,’ when something good or bad happens we look up or down,” he says of one. “Kába means ‘sky’ and it’s all about looking to the sky. We look for hope. We are thankful.”

Of another: “‘Gbé’ means ‘life,’ how life is beautiful at the beginning, but sometimes there are the roses and you have to be careful when you’re walking or step on the thorns.”

And another: “‘Molika’ is a song I wrote for my kids — Moesha, Lisa and Mika.”

He’s reluctant to call this a political album, despite the initial matters that spurred it. It goes much deeper than politics.

“It’s a very personal record for me,” he says. “I call it The Journey for that reason. It’s kind of a resume of all I’ve done from the beginning as a musician, and as a person, until today. And this is the right time to talk about these things. I’m not a political person. But to speak out, musically, to make a statement — well, after all for me we are living it, one way or another.”

Photo credit: Jean-Baptiste Millot

Small World: African Influences Shape ‘Remain in Light,’ Then and Now

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She is moving to describe the world
Night must fall now. Darker, darker
She has got to move the world, got to move the world, got to move the world
She has messages for everyone
— “The Great Curve,” Talking Heads

Remain in Light was, arguably, the album of the year for 1980.

Remain in Light may well be, arguably, the album of the year for 2018.

On the surface, it might seem obvious and inevitable for an African-rooted artist to take on Talking Heads’ landmark, even if it took 38 years. African inspirations, particularly that of Nigerian Afrobeat king Fela Kuti, are the alchemical core of the stunning amalgamation of African, Caribbean and American funk, experimental rock and David Byrne’s oddball, seemingly stream-of-consciousness poetry. It was the culmination of the band’s collaborations with Brian Eno and an album pretty much unlike anything else before it. And, in turn, it was if not the spark then at least a catalyst for an explosion of discovery and exploration of African styles among artists (Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon foremost among them) and fans alike around the world, an influence still reverberating today. Arcade Fire, anyone? Vampire Weekend?

But Angélique Kidjo has never, ever in her career done anything obvious. This is no exception. But it is hard to conceive of a better match of music and artist than this. Obvious? No. Inevitable? No. Perfect? Yes. Her highly personal re-imagining/repatriation (or rematriation) of this album is every bit as bracing and as revolutionary an artistic achievement as the original in its own right, and a fulfillment of that discovery and exploration that the original Remain in Light helped launch.

Kidjo didn’t merely extract the burbling rhythms and elastically elliptical lines and reshape them as Afrobeat or highlife. She applied her own depth of vision to the material, her own cultural roots, and her embrace of many musical streams to make something distinctly hers, in some places blending in the traditional tunes she grew up with in Benin, in others broadening the perspective to what might be called Afro-Global. And, crucially, she locked into the often-perplexing, arty off-kilter lyrics and invested them with her complex, incisive worldview, adding new words here in there, sometimes in Fon, the language of her father.

Most of the songs start with Kidjo’s voice, single or multi-tracked, chanting in Fon or Yoruban (her mother’s language) as if a call from Mother Africa, a herald for what is to come. The opening “Born Under Punches” becomes a fight against oppression (“All…. I want… is to breathe”). “The Great Curve” shapes Byrne’s amorphous imagery into a forceful paean to women’s empowerment, propelled on a rubbery bass line and blaring brass. “Seen and Not Seen,” given an almost rural sound with its percussion-centric mosaics, looks at the skin bleaching many have done in Africa under cultural pressures.

The biggest challenge may have been the album’s best-known song, “Once in a Lifetime,” famed for the indelibly quirky video that accompanied it back in the pre-MTV days. Where Byrne more spoke/yelped than sang the verses detailing a sense of modern existential confusion (“This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife!”) over an almost proto-techno roil, Kidjo turns it into a challenge to find meaning in the world, to create meaning, with a soaring, full-voiced melody on top of a rousing, rumbling highlife-derived tapestry.

Collaborating with producer Jeff Bhasker, whose credits include Rihanna, Kanye West and Harry Styles, she brought in an accomplished and fitting cast to help. Kuti’s long-time drummer and musical director Tony Allen is a driving force on “Houses in Motion” and “Cross-Eyed and Painless.” Kidjo felt inspired to add words from Kuti’s song “Lady” on the latter. Other guests include her fellow Benin-raised guitarist Lionel Loueke on three songs and Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend (whom she had sing on “Listening Wind” in Fon!)

Now, of course, Talking Heads had the benefit of working on a largely blank slate. Sure, there were many African bands that “modernized” traditional styles, most famously Kuti, who mixed hard James Brown funk and elongated electric jazz with fierce socio-political statements, running afoul of his country’s oppressive military government in the process. And the Anglo-Ghanian band Osibisa had at least moderate success in England with its mix of traditional rhythms and Western funk, though outside of the U.K. it was known more for its Afro-fantastical cover art by Yes’ designer Roger Dean.

There were the occasional hits that came out of Africa — South African singer Miriam Makeba with “Pata Pata” in 1967, her countryman and then-husband trumpeter Hugh Masekela with “Grazing in the Grass” reaching No. 1 on the U.S. pop and R&B charts in 1968 and Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango with “Soul Makossa” in 1971 (its “mama-say, mama-sa” chant made familiar to the masses when Michael Jackson used it, uncredited, in 1982 on Thriller’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Something”). But these were isolated and “exotic,” not part of a wave. And there were occasional, isolated experiments with uses of African styles, to varying effect. The most prominent and artistically bold was Joni Mitchell’s use of a field recording of the Drummers of Burundi as the primary feature of the song “The Jungle Line,” a stark portrait of suburbia from her 1975 album The Hissing of the Summer Lawns.

Talking Heads, working with English musician, producer and aesthetic philosopher Eno, had dipped their collective toe into these rich waters with “I Zimbra” from the preceding album, Fear of Music, and shortly before starting Remain in Light, Byrne and Eno had drawn heavily on African music, much via samples, on the experimental musical collage My Life In the Bush of Ghosts. Around that time, the band’s married bassist and drummer (Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz) vacationed in the Caribbean and became entranced with Haitian Voudou music, which they brought into the sessions for the next album, at which Kuti’s 1973 album Afrodisiac was also a constant presence. An unfinished outtake from Remain in Light, included in an expanded 2006 reissue, is even titled “Fela’s Riff.”

Where Fear of Music was about, well, fear, paranoia and isolation, Remain in Light looked out to the world with some perplexity, but ultimately celebrating its wonders in both the words and music. Byrne is revisiting much of the music now on his dazzlingly staged tour, the Remain in Light material perfectly complementing his new looks at modern life from his current American Utopia album.

Kidjo’s album comes, though, not just in the shadow of the original, but of a great wealth of other African and African-inspired music that came after. An early key was veteran Nigerian star King Sunny Adé’s Juju Music, with its buoyant rhythms and slinky Nashville-Hawaii steel guitar. Island Records founder Chris Blackwell had signed Adé in hopes to make him “the African Bob Marley,” this being shortly after Marley, his signature star, had died. That was an overreach, as Adé resisted most attempts to make his music, generally presented in long, sinuous tracks, more fitting for Western ears and radio programmers. Even with support from Stevie Wonder (whose unmistakable harmonica graces a song on the 1984’s Aura album), there was little-to-no chance of this music finding a spot in the American mainstream. It did, though, spur increased interest in African music, and many who saw Adé’s early-‘80s U.S. concerts cite that as a revelatory turning point.

Obviously, Paul Simon’s Graceland really got things going in 1986, both for the music itself and the debate stirred over the propriety of his methods and of his defiance of the cultural ban imposed on Apartheid-oppressed South Africa. Regardless, the music shined a light on the various South African musicians he used in the sessions and on the mbaqanga and other styles on which he drew.

After Graceland, the floodgates opened: There were dozens of releases from Africa (and elsewhere) on such dedicated labels as Island’s Mango imprint, Virgin’s Earthworks (which had already put out the landmark The Indestructible Beat of Soweto compilation) and, of course, Byrne’s Luaka Bop and Peter Gabriel’s Real World, the latter in conjunction with the WOMAD organization and its revelatory world music festivals. Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré teamed for the brilliant 1994 album Talking Timbuktu with American guitarist Ry Cooder. Kuti’s North American tours in the late 1980s and early 1990s are still talked about breathlessly by those fortunate to experience them, and the years since his death in 1997 have seen numerous reissue projects of his catalog and impressive music and concerts from his sons Femi and Seun, each both carrying on and expanding the legacy. And ultimately choreographer Bill Jones’ Tony-winning production, Fela!, a music-and-dance-filled account of life on Kuti’s compound outside of Lagos, brought his legend to a mass audience.

And there’s the extensive work of Kidjo herself, signed by Blackwell to Island in 1991. That launched a singular career of impact and innovation, of a distinctively creative spirit, which has seen her drawing on everything from Sidney Bechet to the Gershwins to Jimi Hendrix and Santana, to teaming with Philip Glass on a project setting Yoruba songs for a full orchestra, to 2014’s EVE, dedicated to the strengths of African women and built on a foundation of field recordings she made throughout that continent. In 2008 in the Staples Center press room after her Djin Djin was awarded a Grammy for best world music album, she sharply told this writer that she rejected the very term world music because it in its very nature lumped together many unrelated styles and artists and ignored the kind of individuality and reach she brought to her art.

“What does it mean?” she said, almost seething. “Why do we categorize people?”

She continued: “Through music, every one of us can take what is in us to proceed onward in our life and roll out improvement in this world… We all must be perceived for what we do. There is only one humankind.”

No wonder she heard something that spoke to her in Remain in Light. No wonder she was able to take that and make it shine with such fresh and intensely personal light. And it, too, will remain.

Photo credit: Danny Clinch

Colors, Textures, Rhythms, and Sounds: A Conversation with River Whyless

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It’s easy to look back on We All the Light, the second studio LP from River Whyless, and say it was all going to work out. After all, hindsight tends to offer that perspective so necessary to see the story for all its parts — as opposed to being stuck in the middle with the outcome still unknown. But when the band, which includes Ryan O’Keefe (guitar, vocals), Halli Anderson (violin, vocals), Daniel Shearin (bass, vocals bass), and Alex McWalters (drums), began working on that project in 2015, the narrative hadn’t yet reached its requisite end. Something wasn’t working, something wasn’t right.

Finishing We All the Light became a journey none fully anticipated. For starters, there was the issue of songwriters. In addition to O’Keefe and Anderson, Shearin brought an eclectic ear to the table, when he joined the band in 2012. But trying to make space for everyone’s voice seemed to be creating further chaos rather than helping refine an album. River Whyless eventually went back to basics, using “folk” as a starting point from which they could explore the many and abundant instances of that style around the world. Their new songs sought out folk in new languages. The touches they integrated are subtle, such as on “All Day All Night,” which finds a Malian influence from the very beginning between rhythmic chanting and a strong, desert guitar riff reminiscent of the band Tinariwen.

But it’s not all entirely new explorations. River Whyless re-recorded “Life Crisis,” which first appeared on their 2015 self-titled EP. Not much has changed about the song, but it’s a gentle, insistent reminder that the band, as a whole, is greater than the sum of its parts, even while figuring out how all those parts work together took a moment. With We All the Light, the band has made the connection from U.S. to world folk, the resulting sounds as shimmering as they are honest, that probity rippling forth from the band’s earlier music.

This was such a moment of experimentation for the band, which can be a huge risk. How did you build up the bravery to go there creatively?

Alex McWalters: We didn’t really have a choice, in a lot of ways. We’d been working on this for a couple of years, at least in thinking about it and trying to get the ball rolling. We struggled a lot with trying to figure out how to incorporate everybody’s ideas and voices. The end result was kind of the only way that we could make it work and have everybody agree on what felt good and sounded good. It was a long process. I think we reached a breaking point, maybe a year ago, where we thought maybe it would never happen because we kept hitting a wall, and then we let go. It was almost like we gave up, in a positive way, and that opened the door to something new. I don’t know if it was a conscious decision to experiment as much as it was the only way forward.

Daniel Shearin: I think we were doing what felt like the right choice. In a way, if somebody is expecting one thing from us, we may have disappointed them with this record, and I guess it could be brave to not worry about that or to think outside of that. I wouldn’t call it bravery, necessarily, as much as doing what we like the best.

The band has been transparent about the struggles involved with reaching this new creative space where collaboration fuels the music. Why keep pushing to work together?

AM: I think because we really believed that it would work, and it had worked in the past. I mean, there are always moments amongst that struggle where you’re like, "Yeah, this does work. There is still something here." It was a matter of pushing through that. Again, we didn’t know we would push through it, but we believed it could work. That was the thing that kept us going.

It’s always so funny, when you’re in the thick of it, you can’t see that narrative arc and the ending, but now that you’re on the other side, you can look back and say "Yes, we were able to push through."

AM: That’s very true. And, in hindsight, it’s definitely easier to say, "Oh yeah, we believed it! It’s simple. Obviously, it was going to work eventually," which was not the way we felt about the process. I do think we’re somewhat gluttons for punishment … me, especially. I almost don’t want it to be too easy, because it doesn’t feel as gratifying, which is a disturbed way of doing things, at times. That’s just kind of how I operate. I like to make it difficult for myself sometimes.

Dan, you’ve been with the band since 2012, so it’s unfair to still pin you as the new member, but how did you find the space to contribute your voice as a songwriter?

DS: We recorded the EP, and that was my first step. We had been writing music together for a couple years, at that point — nothing that had been released — but we had been writing some of Ryan’s songs and some of Halli’s songs. We took a song of mine [“Miles of Skyline”] that had already been recorded and revamped it and changed it a good bit. It felt like a really nice intro because the song had already been released and there was no pressure to make it the essential version. After that, we went back and started working on a group of songs that Ryan had been working on, and they weren’t quite hitting home the way we wanted them to, so we decided to open the floor, and everybody started throwing in ideas, bits and pieces of songs they’d done, or a whole song they’d done.

Alex, how did you challenge yourself on this album?

AM: For almost as long as we’ve been playing together, I’ve been challenged more by my bandmates than I have challenged myself, at least when it comes to playing percussion for this band, if that makes any sense. A lot of times — I don’t ever seem to learn this lesson, but I guess it’s all part of the process — I’ll spend a lot of time by myself working on something, like maybe it’s a particular groove or some idea I have that I want to incorporate into the music, and I’ll present that idea to the band and they’ll very quickly say, "No, it’s not working," or "No, we don’t like that," or "No, that’s not right." That kind of sucks, but usually it’s for the best. I’m usually challenged to step outside of my own head, and step outside of my comfort zone, a lot of times, and not play what comes easiest for me and do what fits best. That’s always been the biggest challenge for me is having to swallow that first moment of "Oh, it’s not working" or "Oh, you don’t like this," and having to go from there.

It’s one of the hardest things to hear as a creative individual. But it forces you to really push yourself.

AM: Totally, and I think that’s really the story of this record is all of us having to do that and to a new level. Just because we finally got to a point where we were able to be totally open and honest with each other, and just put it out there. Once we got over the initial hurdle and discomfort and tension of that, that’s kind of where it all changed. That’s where this particular group of songs started. We were all looking at each other like, "I hate you and you hate me," and now we can get over that and work together instead of trying to fight each other.

Music born out of — not animosity — but a certain tension.

AM: Tension and communication. Getting to a point where we’re able to say that to each other and it doesn’t ruin the relationship. That takes a long time to get to that point.

It’s like a marriage in a way, there’s a safe space to be critical and open and honest.

AM: It is, and that kind of reverts back to your other question about what kept us committed to it, and I think that’s part of what it feels like. You’re in this family, you’re in this marriage, and you have to give it everything you can before you say, "No, it’s not working." That’s how I feel about it anyway. It’s a commitment.

It speaks to your personality; you don’t seem to like taking the easy way out.

AM: Yeah, for better or worse.

Well, those are the vows.

AM: Yep, exactly!

We All the Light draws connections between the American folk tradition and world folk traditions. I love the Mali sounds and structures running through “All Day All Night.” Have you long been a fan of African music?

DS: Something about African music has always connected with me. I think it’s a lot of the rhythms that they use in different parts of Africa. I see myself more like a drummer, honestly, than anything else, which is funny because I don’t play drums at all, but I connect with drums in a very real way. When I listen to music, I’m usually listening to the bass and drums and everything fills in around it. If I really like the song, it’ll take me a few listens to understand what’s going on with the song. In terms of the world music, it’s something … the textures of it and the percussive elements of it and the rhythms of it always really called to me. Something about the soul of it feels really good. It’s true that I’ve listened to it for a long time, but I think everybody else [in River Whyless] has found it on their own terms. It’s something I think I’ve been listening to a little bit longer.

Where do you draw inspiration from? Is it a verbal or a visual thing?

DS: It is a visual thing for me. That’s funny: No one’s prefaced the question that way but, yeah, it’s very visual. And I don’t mean images so much as colors. I can picture colors and atmospheres very visually in my mind, when I’m working on a song, and that can change with the chord changes, that can change with the way it’s recorded. The songwriting is more impressionistic, I guess. I don’t always do this, but I rarely go into writing a song with an idea of what I want the song to be about. It’s more like I kind of accidentally start writing a song and then mumble jumble a bunch of words that don’t really make sense, and then piece together bits of the song after that, and then think about what it means to be halfway through writing it or something. It usually takes me finishing a song before I really understand what it is or what it means.

Have you heard of synesthesia, where people see colors when they listen to music? Not to say you have this.

DS: I haven’t really read about that, but I’ve heard people talk about it. To me, that seems like something you wouldn’t even say — it just feels so obvious. But maybe it’s not obvious. Maybe people experience this to a way more drastic degree than I do, but to me it’s like, "Well, yeah, of course … how else do you hear music without seeing all these colors flashing around?" It’s not like I’m tripping — it’s subtle. I’m not going through a crazy experience, when I listen to music. If I close my eyes, I can picture it all and these weird blobs and flashes and stuff. It could be that thing, but I haven’t read enough about it to know that’s exactly what it is. Listening to classical music and African music, they really tickle that more than anything else.

It’d be interesting if you tried to paint what you saw as you listened to a song.

DS: I could do it, if I were a good painter. I’m not much of one. If I had the skills to paint, I could literally paint you a moment of a song.

I’m curious about the album’s title. Why drop the verb in the phrase?

AM: In the first song of the record and the last song, there’s that line “We all deserve the light.” It’s a line Ryan wrote and we liked how that line resonated, in general. Something about taking out that word — which is how I view it, just taking out that verb “deserve” — it was opening up to be more inclusive and speaking to this idea of equality, both within the band and without. The biggest thing within the band was finding this new sense of collaboration and equality and having all of our voices heard, which was totally new to us and really exciting. And just the idea “We all the light,” which to me is really saying, “We are all the light,” and trying really hard to put that idea into practice, seeing everybody as equal and being as inclusive as you can.

That message, now more than ever, needs to be spread … and spread far and wide.

AM: That’s what we’re trying to get. Trying to have a little, subtle response to some of the stuff that’s been going on recently and trying to counter that in some way. It’s good to make an effort to say something. I think it’s a waste not to.

 

For more on the intersection of folk and world music, read our Squared Roots interview with Ryley Walker.

SHIFT LIST: Chef Amanda Cohen Reveals Her Dirt Candy Crushes

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Amanda Cohen may be a vegetarian chef, but she crafts the kind of comfort-focused, belly-orgasming food that has equal appeal for omnivores, stoners, and Saveur readers. At Dirt Candy, her award-winning restaurant on New York City’s Lower East Side, the visionary veghead serves dishes that proudly defy traditional meat-free cuisine, such as Korean fried broccoli — rightfully described on the menu as “crack in broccoli form” — and hot lava stone-charred Brussels sprouts accented with Yucatan style spices shoehorned into lettuce cups with toppings like smoked avocado and pickled jalapeño to create tasty tacos. (You can tackle some of her recipes by picking up her comic book cookbook. Yes, you read that correctly — Dirt Candy: A Cookbook: Flavor-Forward Food from the Upstart New York City Vegetarian Restaurant.) 

When it came time to create a soundtrack for her veg-centric eatery, Cohen had one goal. “I’ve wanted the restaurant to feel timeless and placeless,” she says. “You’re supposed to walk in and feel you’re on an island, in France or on a boat. You could be anywhere, anytime.”

To achieve that, the playlist is rich with globe-spanning world music, mostly of the happier, peppier variety. Cohen discovered many of the selections by listening to what New York cabbies were blasting, including tunes by Malian blues duo Amadou & Miriam and Argentinian ska band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. The playlist is equally inspiring for the staff in the kitchen. “There are times when the restaurant is really crazy and the music makes us go a little faster,” she says.

Personally, Cohen’s tastes veer back to the '80s. Dolly Parton’s “Nine to Five” is a long-time favorite and she still holds a candle for some of the first singles she ever bought during the "Me Decade," including Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin.” (One of Cohen’s first concerts was the Material Girl world tour.)

Though she never had any muso crushes growing up — “No posters I kissed every day,” as she puts it — she has been overjoyed when some of her childhood favorites have dined at the restaurant. New Kids on the Block’s Jonathan Knight has been in. So has Boy George, who asked a clearly starstruck Cohen, “Do you want to take selfies together?” “Yes, yes I do,” she quickly replied.

 

A photo posted by Dirt Candy (@dirtcandynyc) on

Unlike some other chefs, Cohen has no secret musical past — perhaps fronting a riot grrl band or playing bass in a garage rock trio. “I’m the least musical person, though I love listening to it,” she says. “I have no rhythm and I cannot sing. Actually, I love to sing, but I’m terrible at it.”

However, at the end of a long shift at Dirt Candy, Cohen has no interest in belting out a song or listening to an album to unwind. She craves nothing but silence. “I want it to be as quiet as possible,” she says, “so I can go to bed and get ready for another day.”

Photo credit: Stephen Elledge