World Music Matters

Hugely popular across the African continent in the 70s and 80s, the music of Khartoum was almost extinguished in 1989 when the hard-line religious government took over. Now that rich musical heritage is available on a new compilation - Two Niles to Sing a Melody: The Violins & Synths of Sudan. Its producer, music collector Vik Sohonie, tells RFI about the golden age when singers like Mohamed Wardi packed out a 60,000-seat stadium in French-speaking Yaoundé.

BCUC aka Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness from Soweto in South Africa have an explosive live sound they've called Africa Ngungungu. They initially struggled to find a public for their 20 minute long trance-inducing songs but now with two albums recorded and produced in France, their high energy cocktail of tradtional percussion and hip hop is packing concert halls. RFI met three of the band members before a sell-out concert at Jazz à la Villette festival in Paris.

Seven years after her acclaimed debut album Fatou, the Malian singer songwriter and actress Fatoumata Diawara has released Fenfo meaning "something to say" in her native Bambara language. The Paris-based star talks to RFI about taking pride in African heritage, sexuality and why it was time to forgive her parents for the past.

Seven years after her acclaimed debut album Fatou, the Malian singer songwriter and actress Fatoumata Diawara has released Fenfo meaning "something to say" in her native Bambara language. The Paris-based star talks to RFI about taking pride in African heritage, sexuality and why it was time to forgive her parents for the past.

"Fatou was about introducing myself, telling people who I am," Diawara told RFI. "Fenfo is telling people what I've become."

For a start she's become a mother and is proud of it. She's also enlarged her essentially wassoulou folk repertoire to include blues, afrobeat, rock and pop.

Fenfo was co-produced with France's Mathieu Chedid aka M and he's clearly fuelled the funk-rock side. She's also worked alongside British singer/producer Damon Albarn on Africa Express, Nigerian afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, Herbie Hancock, Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca and French cellist Vincent Segal.

They've all "fed into the album in some way" she adds.

While many African artists with international careers record at least a few songs in English, Diawara celebrates her native Bambara.

"My relationship with music is all about healing, sharing energy, connecting with people, being generous," she explains. "When I’m on stage, even if it’s only for an hour or so I want people to travel with me, up into the clouds. So if I can’t be in my element, there’s no point. When I sing in Bambara I feel real."

Diawara has become a significant voice on the African continent, something of a role model for many young people.

"I’m a survivor, I’ve battled all my life," she says in reference to bouts of depression after being abandoned by her parents.

"I try to dialogue with young people, to be their voice and represent all these women who quite simply haven’t managed to be everything they wanted to be because they’re weighed down by tradition. And not just in Africa!"

Diawara performs at Jazz in Marciac, 8 August; Le Trianon, Paris, 11 December.

Watch the standout video for the song Nterini, shot by Ethiopian photographer Aida Muluneh.

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Singer Carmen Souza was born to Cape Verdean parents in Portugal. Her latest album Creology mixes the Creole language and rhythms she learned at home with the jazz she's learned to love in Europe. She talks to RFI about conveying the joy of Creole culture and having fun imitating instruments with her unusual, beguiling voice.

Singer Carmen Souza was born to Cape Verdean parents in Portugal. Her latest album Creology mixes the Creole language and rhythms she learned at home with the jazz she's learned to love in Europe. She talks to RFI about conveying the joy of Creole culture and having fun imitating instruments with her unusual, beguiling voice.

Creology is Souza's eighth album and was co-written with her mentor and longtime musical partner Portuguese bass player Theo Pascal. They’ve worked together since her debut album Ess ê nha Cabo Verde was released in 2003.

She’s since become a leading light on the Cape Verdean musical scene, praised for her innovation in mixing rhythms like Batuque and Funana from Cabo Verde and other former Portuguese colonies like Angola, Mozambique and São Tomé, together with Afro-Brazilian and Cuban sounds.

The album takes us on the musical journey of her ancestors, travelling across continents and, as descendents of slaves, all the way to the shores of New Orleans.

“Creology expresses the joy of being creole and the joy of this mixture," Souza told RFI. "And basically celebrates the good we can do when we’re together.”

Her previous album Epistola was more explicitly jazz, but Creology has kept the spirit of vocal improvisation Souza loves and is so good at.

“I do sing in a different way because I think that I can express myself differently imitating instruments, either saxophone or trumpet," she adds.

"And also the Creole language gives me freedom to express [myself] differently. Because of the different accents from different islands, I can express more melodically or [in a] more staccato way. That gives me a lot of freedom to just go anywhere.”

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Susheela Raman releases her seventh album Ghost Gamalan. The songs were written in the UK but a fortuitous meeting with gamalan musicians while on holiday in Indonesia transformed the project. Raman and guitarist/producer Sam Mills talk to RFI about the funny things gongs do to your brain and getting under the bonnet and tinkering around with all of that new sound.

Susheela Raman releases her seventh album Ghost Gamalan. The songs were written in the UK but a fortuitous meeting with gamalan musicians while on holiday in Indonesia transformed the project. Raman and guitarist/producer Sam Mills talk to RFI about the funny things gongs do to your brain and getting under the bonnet and tinkering around with all of that new sound.

 

Travel has long been a source of inspiration for Susheela Raman, an Anglo-Indian singer-songwriter raised in Australia.

"Sam and I like to travel together," she told RFI, "we love working with people from other cultures and we've done that a lot."

On a trip to Indonesia in 2015 they were introduced to Gondrong Gunarto - a leading contemporary player of gamelan: a traditional ensemble from Bali and Java using metallophones, xylophones, voices and especially metal gongs.

"The gongs are very stunning, actually just sitting next to them; the frequency, the vibration, they really have a great effect on your whole being somehow."

Gamelan has two streams: the traditional stream as practised in the courts and Balian temples and a contemporary stream known as kontemporar of which Gunarto is a part.

"They have a real sense of the avant garde and a sense of theatre so in contemporary gamalan things are allowed," says Raman, "they're allowed to set fire to the ukelele or whatever!"

If you're musically curious you can't avoid gamelan

Raman and Mills were drawn to the sense of atmosphere, theatre and community in gamalan, but it was the rapport they built up with Gunarto that would determine the next phase.

"You're not saying you want to work with this or that tradition," says Mills, "it's more that you meet somebody and something clicks. It's the personal dimension that's important."

So they returned to Java in 2016 and recorded a version of John Lennon's Tomorrow Never Knows with Gunarto and gamelan musicians from Surakarta (Solo).

They say they became so "addicted" to the sound that when they finished writing material for their new album they wanted gamelan on there.

They follow in a long line of western musicians - Debussy, Satie, John Cage, Steve Reich - who've fallen under the gamelan spell.

"Gamelan has had a really profound influence on all kinds of music and I think on the most interesting kind of music makers of the 20th century," says Mills.

"Olivier Messian is very explicitly influenced by gamelan, so is John Cage, and then later on a lot of post-rock stuff is very indebted to gamelan.

"I think it's because of the sense of musical texture and the whole idea of ambient music, a lot of electronica, EDM [electronic dance music]. As soon as you start programming music in a loop the idea of gamelan comes. If you're musically curious you can't avoid gamelan."

Gruelling rehearsals

But as with any cross-cultural musical project worth its weight, there were hurdles to overcome.

The duo's eight songs used all 12 notes but gamelan has  only "seven or eight maximum," says Mills. "And they're not in the same place so your ear has to adjust with the tonality."

"They have two main scales and one of the transgressive things we did was to combine them because we needed all those notes," Raman adds, "to make something closer to the kind of notes we needed.

"Sometimes they'd think 'oh that's interesting' but other times things would just sound very wrong to them.

"We had very intensive sessions," she adds "20 gruelling rehearsals trying to create arrangements for everything."

"I think they thought we were pretty strange, but they went with it" admits the guitarist and album producer.

Hacking pitch and sculpting metal

After two months spent recording the body of the gamelan section, they returned to the UK and began shaping this "very peculiar and interesting source material".

"You become a sculptor in a way, sculpting this strange metallic stuff," says Raman. "The tunings were so wierd you'd be working on something and you'd go and have dinner and come back and it would sound completely different."

Mills says the experience of working on instruments that are tuned in a completely different way from their western instruments was stimulating in several ways.

"You realise working with it that a lot of our perception of pitch, of things being in or out of tune, is a kind of negotiation because we're used to certain things."

In reality he says nothing we hear is ever perfectly in tune and in fact if it didn't have odd harmonics it would be "almost unlistenable, like a casiotone on a telephone answering service. It has no soul almost."

It's your brain, he says, that does the work of putting things in tune.

"We almost felt we were hacking the idea of pitch and "in-tuneness". It was wonderful making a record that sort of plays with the idea of being in tune and being in time because nowadays so much music is done with computers and everything's fixed."

We airbrush visual imperfections, auto-correct auditory ones.

"People have got used to this sound. We're culturally brainwashed with a particular system we grew up with and became the norm, but it's not a given thing. So it's very interesting to get under the bonnet and tinker around with all of that. It creates a kind of magic."

Ghost gamelan

So what did all this tinkering under the bonnet lead to?

"The record is evoking strange and ghostly presences," says Raman when asked about the album title. "All of the songs have this ethereal, spooky feeling about them."

The song Beautiful Moon is "about trying to strive for something you can't quite achieve". As such it's every bit as melancholy as the other tracks.

The gongs give added resonance to that sense of longing but "they were already melancholy," laughs Raman.

"A lot of the songs are reflecting on mortality," she adds, "so it may be exploring that liminal space which is somewhere in between."

"In between being and non-being," says Mills, demonstrating, not for the first time, the extraordinary complicity this couple share.

"Gamelan refers not only to the music, but to the actual instruments and the ensemble," he goes on, "so there's this sense of 'we're all linked up to these people'. It's almost like this music's being played in Java, but also in London, in Paris and somehow it's all occurring simultaneously. There's a sort of in-betweeness to the whole thing."

A spooky thought, beautifully rendered in music and song.

Susheela Raman and Sam Mills perform at the Seine Musicale in Paris on 29 June.

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After setting the poetry of Afrikaans writers like Breyten Breytenbach to music to great acclaim, South African singer and composer Laurinda Hofmeyr has turned her talents to poets from French-speaking Africa. Backed up by Congolese vocalists from Cape Town, she talks to RFI about the Afrique Mon Désir (the longing for Africa) project and recently-released album.

After setting the poetry of Afrikaans writers like Breyten Breytenbach to music to great acclaim, South African singer and composer Laurinda Hofmeyr has turned her talents to poets from French-speaking Africa. Backed up by Congolese vocalists from Cape Town, she talks to RFI about the Afrique Mon Désir (the longing for Africa) project and recently-released album.

The album brings to life the pain, visions, and longing of some of the most respected francophone and Afrikaans poets.

Pride of place goes to Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo, considered to be the father of modern literature in his native Madagascar. But also Véronique Tadjo (Côte d'Ivoire), Ousmane Moussa Diagana (Mauritania), Nimrod Bena Djangrang (Chad), Alain Patrice Nganang (Cameroon).

Three works by Afrikaans poets Breyten Breytenbach, Antjie Krog and Eugene Marais are beautifully interpreted.

Congolese musicians from Cape Town Music Academy accompany Hofmeyr notably in lingala while Madagascar's Régis Gizavo underscores the songs with haunting accordion. His sudden death just weeks after recording makes his performance all the more moving.

The Afrique Mon Désir Ensemble are currently touring France but without the Congolese musicians due to visa restrictions. Hofmeyr told RFI they "thought of cancelling" but happily three Paris-based singers: Junior-Arnold Mulongo (Congo), Milan Nzelo (Congo) and Niclle Adjabe (Cameroon) stepped into the breach and did their absent compatriots proud.

Laurinda Hofmeyr and the Afrique Mon Désir Ensemble perform at Paris's New Morning (15 June), La Quintaine in Chasseneuil du Poitou (20 June) and Theatre Jean Ferrat in Ruelle sur Touvre (29 June).

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