World Music Matters

The Hot 8 Brass Band are from New Orleans. In the true black music tradition they mix the best of brass with funk, hip hop, heart-on-sleeve sentiment and loads of soul. RFI caught up with them at the Villes des musiques du monde festival north of Paris where their energy and charisma brought the house to its feet.

The Hot 8 Brass Band are from New Orleans. In the true black music tradition they mix the best of brass with funk, hip hop, heart-on-sleeve sentiment and loads of soul. RFI caught up with them at the Villes des musiques du monde festival north of Paris where their energy and charisma brought the house to its feet.

The Hot 8 Brass Band are an eight-piece band formed 20 years ago. They've played alongside Lauryn Hill, the Blind Boys of Alabama and Mary J Blige, bringing a raw energy -  and lots of sousaphone -  to covers of the likes of Marvin Gaye, Snoop Doggy Dog or classics of the gospel genre. They also write their own rousing compositions: call and response songs that enable them to strike up a real connection with audiences in their live shows.

Originally a more traditional brass band, they're moving more into song.

"We had to start singing and get ourselves involved with vocals to kind of be more of entertainers," says co-founder, tuba player and band leader Bennie Pete. "We can’t just be all music, it’d be like a musical. So the more we grew and matured into the music and saw we’d have to do more shows, we saw that we had to interact with the crowd."

The band made a huge connection with the audience at l'Embarcadère where they played on 6 November as part of the as part of the Villes des Musiques du Monde festival. Now in its 17th edition, the festival is committed to bringing high quality music to some of the poorest towns just north of Paris.

Playing to a rainbow nation audience "felt natural to us," says tuba player and co-founder Harry Cook. "It felt like being back in New Orleans. They were jamming, having a great time."

"It was more of a spiritual connection," says Pete. "That's what the music is about. That's why we have the jazz funerals [back home]. We play gospel, church, rhythm and blues. That's why they didn't just look like we were 'TV'."

Music inspired by hardship

Hot 8 are a polished but very exciting live act, based on a good deal of improvisation.  You sense the sincerity in every note played, every line slammed.

"The foundation and the main ingredient in our music is the realities we go through in our life, the mis-education, a lot of broken opportunities and hardships," says Pete.

After Hurricaine Katrina in 2005 Hot 8 were one of the first bands back in the city, ready to play. They weathered the storm but it took a heavy toll.

"It took a lot of band members away, spread them out in Houston, Atlanta...," says Cook. "But the impact [also] made us come together more and love each other more."

New Orleans has the highest crime rate in the US and the band has lost five of its members, the majority to street violence.

[We've had] a few tragedies but we’re still playing our music," Cook continues, "to think about them and keep the music alive and carry on their legacy."

"Everything we went though [meant] we had a lot to talk about," says Pete. "So we started putting the reality of our life and what we’re going through to the music."

The song New Orleans, after the city was inspired by Katrina, a way of saying they were back, proud of their city and couldn't imagine living anywhere else.

"We were born and raised there, we kind of understand what’s going on, lots of things, violence and crime," says Pete. "But besides that there’s a lot of great people and an atmosphere like no other. We all had a chance to travel the world and just like the song says, there’s no place like New Orleans."

Living the dream

"We are fortunate to live out our dream, and a vision we shared as kids," Pete continues. But in a poor town with high crime and still recovering from Katrina, others have been less fortunate.

"A lot of people close to us, next door neighbours, don’t have the same opportunities," says Pete, so true to the New Orleans spirit, they're trying to employ other people to share the dream around.

"We're in a position to be culture bearers," says Pete. "And continue that culture and have that torch. Because a lot of people died putting this music into American music, creating a whole genre of music by going through worse times than we’re going through now."

Working Together post-Trump

Pete and Cook didn't vote in the recent US elections -  they left for Europe before polling day - but say they wouldn't have voted for the Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Cook says he doesn't trust Trump, while Pete fears his plan is "awful trouble for us, for people of colour, people who’re living in poverty."

"I will most likely pray for us as a people, that we can just get ourselves together and make it together as a people and then we could live with whoever choses to live with us. But it’s first about us as black people."

While he describes the notion of 'black lives matter' as a "no brainer" given that "a lot of black people are getting gunned down by police officers for no reason" he's tired of hearing about it. 

"I hate the fact that media and people waste so much time and conversation on that statement 'black lives matter'. White lives matter, Indian peoples' lives matter, Muslims matter, everybody’s lives matter."

What would really make a difference, he says, is for black Americans to get acces to wealth and to be able to pass it on.

"I would definitely be in favour of selling black and buying black because that’s a part of our weakness as a people. We can’t have any wealth," he sighs. "It’s not about riches, it’s about wealth, so we can have generations of wealth, so that my grandchildren can have a foundation of wealth. That’s what we need amongst other things."

The band's most recent single, Working Together, points the way forward.

"It’s talking about us working together as a people," says Pete. "Making things happen, making change happen and not just talking about it."

Hot 8 Brass Band's fifth album On the Spot drops in Spring 2017 on the Tru Thoughts label. Follow the band on facebook

Sihasin means 'hope' in the Dine'/Navajo language and the sister and brother duo Jeneda and Clayson Benally do their name proud. Currently in Europe with their Sacred Horse tour, we caught up with them in Paris to talk about their blend of Dine' culture and punk rock. And why young people protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock is a sign of real hope for Native Americans.

Batuk are a South African collective with a post-modern approach to spreading pan-Africanism. Currently touring Europe with music from their debut album Musica de Terra, RFI caught up with them at the Mama music festival in Paris.

American singer-songwriter and guitarist Natalia M King has made France her home but her latest album BlueZzin' T'il Dawn sees her embracing the jazz and blues of her native Brooklyn. She talked to RFI about finding her voice in blues and why the "modern lynching" of the US's young black men has to stop.

Sudanese-born singer songwriter Alsarah heads the band The Nubatones. They sing in Arabic, are inspired by Nubian "songs of return" but have coined their sound East African Retropop. Alsarah talks to RFI about their new album Manara (Lighthouse), its stories of movement and migration ... and mermaids.

Alsarah is Sudanese born, raised in Yemen, and now based in Brooklyn, NY: the product of at least three cultures. And it shows.

“I’m a distinctly modern creature, a child of the diaspora,” she says, “we’re a cosmopolitan people that live in a global world so it’s natural you look like the environment you want to reflect.”

While she’s proud of her Nubian roots (the ancient Nubian people built a flourishing civilisation along the Nile in Northern Sudan and Southern Egypt), the band’s music (Nahid (vocals), Mawuena Kodjovi (bass), Brandon Terzic (oud), and Rami El-Aasser (percussion)) goes far beyond.

“I prefer to call it East African Retropop,” she says, “because we don’t make strictly Nubian music. My music is a reflection of all the different parts of me. That includes Nubia, Khartoum, my love for music in Zanzibar, my love for Nairobi, for Cairo. All of that East African sound.”

Songs of Return

The retro part comes from a genre of music heard in many Sudanese and East African living rooms during the 60s and 70s known as Nubian “Songs of Return”.

This body of songs emerged after communities located along the Nile River were flooded and displaced in the 60s by the creation of the Aswan Dam.

“It caused one of the largest displacements of Nubian people in their history,” says Alsarah. People resettled in Khartoum, Cairo and other cities in the Arab world.

“In Cairo, a lot of musicians started writing songs themed around the idea of going home or the idea of home that doesn’t exist anymore. These concepts of nostalgia and me also being an immigrant [meant], I could really relate to it on every level. Not just being Nubian but also having another immigration experience with it.”

The singer knows a lot about moving around. Her parents, human rights activists, left Sudan when Omar al-Bashir came to power in 1989 and moved to Yemen. It was there that she opened her ears to many different kinds of music.

“I started collecting music from Algeria and Morocco, India, and figuring out that different places have different sounds,” she says. “Understanding that at a young age made me want to learn more about different kinds of music.”

When civil war broke out in Yemen she moved to the US, aged just 12.

The migrant’s journey

The themes of home and displacement run through the band’s second album Manara (Lighthouse).

“Manara means the lighthouse and it’s sort of the idea of this journey we’re on, the idea of transit and transitioning,” she says. “Being a migrant is a journey.”

The title track begins with sound of waves lapping against the shore.

“As the sea takes us, Manara is the lighthouse anchoring our journey,” the liner notes read.

The gift of a song

Another notable song is 3yan T3ban. Alsarah learned it while visiting the Yusuf Batil refugee camp on the border between North and South Sudan where tens of thousands have fled fighting in the Nuba mountains.

Alsarah went there to collect songs.

“They have a whole body of songs, everybody there seems to write a whole lot of music.” Including young girls.

“I learned the song from three wonderful little girls, Mouna and her friends. These girls wrote the song and they taught it to me and I really wanted to make an arrangement on our album as an ode to them.” 

 The Mermaids

Alsarah studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, where she wrote her thesis on Sudanese Zār music.

“Zār is a spiritual sect that is matriarchal and matrilineal,” she says. “It uses music to induce trance to deal with issues of possession.”

She further explores her interest in women in the song 3roos Elneel (Bride of the Nile).

It was inspired by a traditional song into which she wove an old Nubian myth. The magic is strong, through far from demonic.

“It’s a really playful song for me,” she says. “We used to say that the Nile would flood up every season because the Nile gods were angry and lonely. And so the villages along the banks would sacrifice the most beautiful maiden to be the new bride of the Nile. I always found this story hilarious, because if you meet Nubian women you know that’s not gonna happen. We don’t get dumped into rivers!”

The myth got Alsarah wondering where the old wives ended up.

“I thought maybe they just kind of swim away and live in these matrilineal kingdoms underneath the sea and maybe that’s where mermaids really come from. Maybe Nubian people also gave us mermaids.”

Nubian New Yorker

NY is home for the moment and Alsarah says she’s found an open-minded, enthusiastic fan base, ready to soak up the Arabic language. But she has ambiguous feelings about her native Sudan.

“My relationship with home is really complicated, very much based on a lot of anger and rejection.”

So it was important to also celebrate the loving and joyous side of her country in the song Salam Nubia.

“It’s a kind of greeting song, I think of it as that first feeling you have after a long time of parting, that joyous moment. This song is about the joyous moments of home.”

Alsarah and The Nubatones are in concert on 11 October at Flow in Paris. Follow the band on facebook

Darya Dadvar was the first Iranian woman to perform on stage as a soloist in Iran, 24 years after the Islamic revolution. She loves her country but has made Paris her home. Blessed with a silky soprano voice, she moves effortlessly from Iranian folk to Autumn Leaves, My Fair Lady and Bizet's Habanera. RFI caught up with her after a recent benefit concert in Paris in support of the Maison des Femmes (Women's house) which cares for victims of sexual violence. 

 

Davdar sits casually on a bench in the corridor post-concert, still dressed in a strapless long black taffeta dress. We're regularly interrupted by a flurry of women who come and thank her. 

"Magnificent, so moving" says one elderly woman, her voice trembling. Davdar touches her chest in recognition.

The young soprano sang Dota cheshme sia dari, accompanied by pianist Vadim Sher and violinist Dimitri Artemenko. 

"This song is one of my favourites," she says. "It’s a man talking to a woman saying 'You have beautiful dark eyes, you have such a power on me that I sometimes feel you are in competition with God. And in such a bad world with so much war and injustice, I’m just happy looking at you, being with you. How is it possible with these deep beautiful dark eyes that you don’t see that?' "

The song, by the late Iranian composer Bijan Mofid, is one of many folk songs she grew up with.

"My mother was a singer and after the revolution, when it was forbidden to sing, we were continuing to sing at home," she says, her own dark eyes sparkling.

She watched a lot of movies, especially musicals like My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music, which had been very well translated into Persian.

"I was singing all the songs in Persian and then I asked to watch the original in English. Then I was mixing it all the time. In parties, with my family, I was just like a cassette. My mother said 'Darya sing it in English, now sing it in Persian'."

Eight years study in France

Davdar left Iran in 1991 and moved to France where she spent eight years studying music at the conservatory.

In 2003 she sang in Tehran with the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra directed by the Armenian-Iranian conductor Loris Tjeknavorian. The first Iranian female soloist to perform there since the Islamic revolution, she believed it was the beginning of a new era. 

"I thought doors are opening, but after that everything closed again. It became even worse," she says.

When Hassan Rohani was elected president in 2013 Dadvar once again thought the situation for women singers would change. 

"I thought Iran is opening the doors to foreigners, to tourism, they’re signing [deals], they’re coming out of these miserable closed frontiers and now I hear again that girls cannot do cycling," she sighs. "I don’t know what it is, because they’re listening to all these women’s voices and they listen to my voice and then they say 'no she can’t sing' [in public]."

Social media may bring change

While Davdar is frustrated at the situation for female singers in Iran, she believes it will ultimately change, partly thanks to the social media and internet revolution. In the meantime she's built up a  large fan base here in Europe, drawn to her classical arrangements of Iranian folk music and the way she blends opera, jazz and even blues.

"I began as an opera singer," she says, "but now I consider myself just a singer because I use the technique of opera to pass [on] a message."

She says she simply wants to bring people together.

"When you are in my concert you don’t feel the difference between languages, it's just a feeling that's being communicated."

Persian, French, English or German "is just the surface" she says, and what's important is underneath. "We’re all people, we all have pain, we fall in love, we’re all the same."

Follow Darya Davdar on Facebook.

After taking an active part in the so-called Jasmine Revolution in 2011, Tunisian musician Haydar Hamdi moved to Paris and formed an oriental dub band with four friends. They've forged an original "wierd" sound, Tunisian Dub, blending reggae, electronic effects and oriental scales.

Haydar Hamdi is a five-piece band: Hamdi (vocals), Nidhal Jaoua (qanun), Slim Abida (bass), Narjess Saad (percussion), Tarek Maaroufi (drum set, guembri).

Their unusual sound comes from their very different musical backgrounds.

"When you hear that skinky reggae, with a like ska bass on drums doing on a dub sort of thing, Nidhal with the qanun - the oriental touch - it’s a very weird sound," Hamdi explains with his customary flow.

After four years they're finding their public and have performed in some of the biggest Paris venues, including Casino de Paris. And having played in big alternative festivals back in Tunisia in 2015, they're making inroads there too.

"When you see youth playing guitar on the streets they are playing our music, so it's very cool."

And it's music with a message. Active in the 2011 protests in Tunis, Hamdi was arrested and spent five days in police custody.

"I was on the street, with everybody,  they take you to the post office and type in Haydar Hamdi and say 'oh your facebook is quite revolutionary, come here'. And we stayed for five days. So I feel like a child of that revolution."

The main thing that came out of it he says is freedom of expression. "Now everybody in Tunisia can tell whatever he wants."

The problem is they're not using it to change the situation many young people find themselves in. For example, jobless.

"There’s an economical crisis, work crisis, social crisis, people need a lot of things, but when you ask them what they want now they have freedom of speech, everybody’s talking and nobody’s concentrating on what we can do to resolve those problems."

The band's edgy, thought-provoking debut album Fikra (Idea) pulls no punches in recounting the daily problems facing young people .. and the post-revolution disappointment that followed.

In the song Memory Hamdi addresses influential musicians on the alternative scene in Tunisia who've failed to used that hard-won freedom of speech.  "Where is the dream? I feel so alone" he sings. 

"We're telling them 'four years later we look at you and you’re still the same'."

Hamdi says the band is trying to change things in their own way, giving an alternative "idea" of how things could be through their music. But they feel let down.

"We feel so alone because we were dreaming about the same things at that time, and now we find we’re the only [ones] who are remaining."

Their music, however, is anything but mournful. Driving rhythms, black humour and sheer energy on stage is their potent antidote to apathy. One of the band's early hits is called "Soldier of Sound".

"In our music, we can talk to the people, tell them that problems are still here," he says. "And at the same time we make them dance. Making the people dance and telling them something important, I think you can be a soldier like that."

Haydar Hamdi play Paris's Alimentation Générale on 5 October. Follow the band on facebook

Doolin' are a six-piece French band from Toulouse and they make Irish traditional music. The Irish Times says they do it "brilliantly". Who are we to argue? They have solid credentials - brothers Josselin and Jacob Fournel are tin whistle and bodhran laureates in Ireland - but they've brought in jazz and rock riffs to create a sound that's very much their own. Guitarist Nicolas Besse talks to us about the band's new, fourth, album Doolin - inspired by the 1845 Irish potato famine. What's more, 10% of sales go to the Grameen Foundation in support farming projects in west Africa.

A great live band, they're currently on a European tour. Dates and more info on facebook

Franco-American percussionist and composer Steve Shehan has spent the last decade expanding the possibilities of the Hang - a wok-shaped instrument, akin to a steel drum but played with the hands. He's taken it off the streets and into concert halls as a bone fide part of the classical instrumentarium. RFI met the musical alchemist at his workshop south of Paris ahead of a concert with his latest band, the Sunshine Quartet.

 

The Hang was created by a Swiss couple - Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer - in the late 90s. As such it's one of the newest and most exciting of musical instruments.

"I thought it was a major invention," says Shehan. "And how ironical, with no electronics, nothing, just on the eve of 2000, it was incredible."

Shehan was introduced to it in 1999 while touring with Paul Simon. "Suddenly this very strange, peculiar wok- flying saucer thing got into my hands, I tried it, thought it was interesting. The only thing was the tuning, the very first ones were tuned a bit like the steel drums, like Caribbean scale. It's nice but gets a bit boring."

So Shehan contacted the Swiss couple and encouraged them to develop Hangs with different scales. Hungarian, Puri... he now has a fine collection. And undertakes the challenging exercise of mixing them in his concerts.

"There are no marks [on Hangs] really, just these pressions and depressions, so you have to learn the geography of each one, [...] learn the positions of your hands by heart, that's the hard thing about it. But that's when it becomes really exciting."

Shehan has successfully adapted the Hang to composition. "Making it part of a whole instrumentarium was something that would really inspire me. It took me five or six years to work seriously on it, to adapt some techniques."

Techniques that have allowed him to work with bands like Hadouk, trumpeter Jon Hassell, Rokia Traoré.... His album Hang with You features some great collaborations with the likes of jazz trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf and actress Golshifteh Farahani. He sets the wise words of Touareg singer-poet Baly Othmani to powerful musical effect.

But Shehan says the Hang's loyal, quasi-cult following has not always taken kindly to his approach.

"A lot of people were shocked by the fact that with the Hang you can go through classical music, jazz or make melodies and chords."

He says the album is beginning "to move a bit now" but the purists didn't really understand it. "Maybe they thought it was pretentious, but that wasn't my goal. I was just having fun with the instrument and trying to see how far I could bring it."

In its short lifespan, the Hang's already become a hugely popular "traveller's" instrument:  light, melodic, great for busking on street corners. "In Spain I've see hundreds of guys like this," says Shehan. 

But in Russia the Hang has cult status.

"There are sects, hang followers, it's almost religious out there," he says. "You can pay just to see the instrument. In Siberia I saw people standing in queues to pay a bit of money just to go and touch it."  

While the Hang has a "mystical aura" about it, Shehan says attempts to give it Shamanic powers are unfounded and serve to stop the instrument evolving.

"There are people who think it's mystical the way it is, and they invent some pseudo mystical background that doesn't exist. It's bullshit. We have to be more honest, it's a new instrument, there's an open and wide road in front of us to search and develop. We have to invent the history of this instrument. There are a few people working on that: Vladiswar Nadishana, David Hykes, Manu Delago... They're trying to bring it to somewhere else." Like Shehan himself.