World Music Matters

A decade after their acclaimed album Tweet Tweet, Abraham Inc. return with Together We Stand, using their eclectic mix of klezmer, funk and hip hop to show that different religions, ages, sexes and races get along. David Krakauer, Fred Wesley and Socalled talk to RFI about how the U.S. president’s “Muslim” ban got them back in the studio making great music.

 

“The band is kind of crazy mix of just about anybody you can imagine,” says Socalled, a Canadian beatmaker who’s been working with Krakauer on reinventing klezmer for over a decade. 

“Men, women, black, white, brown, Latino, Africans … we have basically Jewish culture and Yiddish culture meeting African American culture. And on the song Together We Stand we invited an Arabic percussionist Mohammed Raky, so there’s Arabic percussion.”

The title track was written by Fred Wesley, master funk trombonist and James Brown's former musical director.

"Together WE stand is also the peoples of the world," Wesley says, “all races and all nationalities and all religions of the world standing together in the name of peace.

"If we all could stand together, could listen to each other we would find out we have more in common than we have differences.”

“I’m a black man and you’re a white farmer, let me just tell you what I go through and you tell me what you go through.. and it’ll be the same thing you know,” he continues, in reference to some of the hate speech that's come out of the woodwork since Trump's election in 2016.

Lullaby for Charlottesville

Socalled wrote the song Lullaby for Charlottesville in tribute to Heather Hever, killed at a white supremacist rally in 2017. 

“It’s an ode to the memory of Heather Hayer, the young woman who was murdered by someone from the white supremacist movement that Donald Trump said “there’s good people on both sides”.  It sort of paints a story in music of voices coming together to pay homage to that tragic moment in American history.” 

The Hippies were right, weren't they? 

Krakauer wrote the song The Hippies Were Right. Though he was only a teenager at the time of Woodstock, he “marched against the war in Vietnam" and hung out in East Village, an old Jewish quarter of NY popular with hippies. He was inspired by the fact they believed they could change things.

“They were protesting the Vietnam war, they were talking about defending the environment, about love among people and I thought this makes sense.

"Politically they didn’t have muscle or power. It was sad that the actual pure message of the hippies, about living life, embracing life, got perverted and smashed and commodified.”

Trying to convince through music

“What Trump did was take the sheet off of people that were kind of racist  and people that were anti-Semitic, anti-peace, people that were pro-corporate America,” says Wesley.

"Trump exposed all of these people because they all came out of the closet. And these are the people we have to convince.”

While there's a fair amount of political commentary on the album, the band aims to convince by example not by preaching or banging the table.

The instrumental track B Flat à la Socalled is a fine example of the way they find harmony in their very different musical cultures.

“This album is pretty polemical and a bit of a pulpit cry, but hopefully it’s also musically an example,” Socalled says.

“If you see on stage a bunch of people, different religions, ages, sexes, just loving each other and creating beauty that brings people together, that’s the mission of Abraham Incorporated.”

Follow Abraham Incorporated on facebook

Together we stand is out on Autre Distribution

Abraham Inc. official website
 

 

Nick Gold has been at the helm of World Circuit Records for close to three decades. The label has produced some of the best world music around: Buena Vista Social Club, Ali Farka Touré, Oumou Sangaré, Toumani Diabaté, Cheikh Lô ... and most recently Trio Da Kali and Fatoumata Diawara. The London-based producer has a nose for talent but maintains being allowed to work with such artists makes him the lucky one. 

In 2018, World Circuit merged with BMG and together they recently released remastered versions of four of their cornerstone albums:  Ali Farka Touré's Savane, Omara Portuondo's Buena Vista Social Club Presents, Radio Tarifa's Rumba Argelina and Guillermo Portabales' El Carretero. 

Gold reflects on three decades of helping to get great music from West Africa and Cuba to western audiences even, as he says, the musicians in question didn't need reminding it could travel!

"Musicians from Cuba and Mali value their own music, they know it's incredibly important. It's not like they need validation from outside."

He also talks to us about the magic of recording Buena Vista Social Club in Egrem studios in Havana in 1996 and driving Oumou Sangaré's pink car on the streets of Bamako.

And he might never have recorded Buena Vista Social Club, the best-selling world music record ever, had it not been for Ali Farka Touré whom he met in London in 1987 when Touré came to record his debut album with World Circuit.

The two men would go on to have a long and fruitful collaboration. Gold "facilitated" the Grammy-award winning Talking Timbuktu with Ry Cooder in 1994 and which helped establish World Circuit as a big player in the recording business. But Gold says the Mali bluesman also acted as a kind of talent scout (A&R), introducing him to new music from all over West Africa. And, thankfully, Cuba.

"It was because of Ali that I worked with Toumani Djibaté, he introduced us to Oumou Sangaré, to Dimi Mint Abba from Mauritania. And he encouraged me to listen to Cuban music so he was very important as an unofficial A&R man as well. And a real inspiration."

Listen to what it's like being a leading world music producer and extracts of the great music he's helped get out there in this week's podcast.

Check out World Circuit Records here and follow them on facebook 

 

Raashan Ahmad is an American DJ, MC and hip hop artist with a big heart and a sharp mind. A thought-provoking rapper whose latest album The Sun explores joy and pain, hope and despair: the loss of his mum, the birth of his son. "Balance is something I've strived for... I can never get out of my mind how beautiful things are at the exact same time that they’re horrible." 

"Do you know what it feels like to be a black person?"  asks American comedian and civil rights activist Dick Gregory on the opening track No.   

Ahmad does and it hasn't always felt good. 

"The song's inspired by the police killing of black Americans in the United States," says Ahmad, "that’s pretty much it and my experience with it. I speak about being pulled over with my father when I was about seven and that was my first experience with the police."

He raps over a bed of free-jazz inspired saxophones.

"I love the Sun Ra Arkestra, Sony Rollins, Yusef Lateef ... these American jazz musicians who were playing this type of frenetic type of energy and I felt  like that was very relevant to how I felt about what’s happening now."

How do you not turn to hate when you're being singled out just because your black?

"I'm not sure how to get over that. I see the trauma and how it affected me and affects countless other black Americans. And these things are not taken into account, no one speaks about them really. You just have to bury and put it somewhere." 

Ahmad has put it into his music. The song Breathe reflects on how to cope with the physical stress that "holding in" can cause.

"Music has always been a therapy for me and I think for most musicians. And a place that feels the safest in a lot of ways."

One of his heroes is Nina Simone, a hugely talented but troubled soul if ever there was one. He does a version of her great song I Got Life.

"I love this song, she talks about the things she doesn't have,  and then she goes into all the beautiful things that she is and that she does have. It’s always touched me that song because it doesn’t leave out a part of emotion, you’re not just a happy person, not just a sad person and you can give thanks and be terribly saddened by a lot at the same time."

The experience of feeling both pain and joy, of what makes us human, is wonderfully rendered on the song The Day the Sun Came, with vocals from Keren Ann. It talks of losing his mother to cancer and the arrival of his son.

"I don’t know if I ever had the conversation I’ve had on that song with a human and so it’s very bittersweet and it’s hard to listen to, but also really joyous at the same time. 

"And the beautiful thing about this song, especially the verse about my mum passing has really touched a lot of people and it’s been really wonderful to get feedback from other people who’ve lost their parents."

Ahmad also sings on a couple of tracks, and in Wolof. Listen to the podcast to hear more about how Paris has opened up his eyes and ears to the African continent. 

Raashan Ahmad performs at Le Tamanoir, Gennevilliers on 19 October as part of the Villes Musiques du Monde festival.

Follow him on facebook

Dubbed "the golden voice of West Africa" Pat Thomas embodied the glory days of Ghanaian highlife in the 60s and 70s alongside the great Ebo Taylor. The music fell out of fashion in the 80s but Thomas never stopped singing. He made a much-praised comeback in 2015 with the Kwashibu Area Band thanks to Ghanian musician and producer Kwame Yeboah and together they've now released another gem: Obiaa! (Everyone). 
 

Listen to Thomas and Yeboah, two generations of highlife, discussing their love of the music, where the "high" in highlife came from and how the younger generation is discovering the importance of this music, the precursor to Nigeria's afrobeat.

"They themselves realise you have to go back to the roots," says Thomas. "We're doing lots of collaborations and it's working out good."

Obiaa! is out on Strut Records.

Pat Thomas and the Kwashibu Area Band are on a European tour. You'd be a fool to miss them live. Check out their facebook page for details.

Natacha Atlas began exploring jazz and Middle Eastern melodies on her 2015 album Myriad Road with Franco-Lebanese trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf. She goes one step further on Strange Days, co-written and produced with violinist Samy Bishai. An accomplishment for the vocalist at the height of her talents, but who says she couldn't have done it without Bishai.