World Music Matters

Singer-songwriter and guitarist Sam Tshabalala is a former member of the Malopoets - a leading South African anti-apartheid band in the 70s and 80s. After close to three decades living in exile here in France he recently returned to his native South Africa to record Back and Forth with other ex-Malopoets and musicians from the younger generation. He talks to RFI about going back to his roots.

Singer-songwriter and guitarist Sam Tshabalala is a former member of the Malopoets - a leading South African anti-apartheid band in the 70s and 80s. After close to three decades living in exile here in France he recently returned to his native South Africa to record Back and Forth with other ex-Malopoets and musicians from the younger generation. He talks to RFI about going back to his roots.

Tshabalala's journey started at home, in South Africa, with the Malopoets, the first black group to play at the prestigious Market Theatre in Johannesburg in 1985.

His musical journey continued in exile; in 1993 he founded the band Sabeka with other African musicians here in France.

Back and Forth recounts this journey between South Africa and Europe. The nine songs on the album (sung in Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, Shangaan and English) were composed in Europe and recorded in Johannesburg.

Tshabalala tracked down former Malopoet bass player Pat Mokoka and Eugene Skeef - who wrote some of the band's early tunes - penned the new song Africa (My peace with life). He also enrolled the talents of Zamo Mbutho who did backing vocals for Myriam Makeba.

On Humelela (Asking for love), sung in Shangaan, Tshabalala talks about family big and small.

"The first lines I talk about my family: 'I think of you day and night' and after I think of their friends, and friends of their friends and South Africa. And after it gets large, talking about Africa. I believe we have to share, if people in Africa are in difficulties we have to welcome them."

The mix of South African sounds like mbaqanga and kwela with jazz, soul and pop shines on tunes like Kunzima (Hardtimes) and Ke Sone Sebe (Wrongdoing) .

What Tshabalala describes as "the dream" of returning to Johannesburg to record with other South African musicians was made possible thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign and the backing of Paris-based South African artist Bruce Clarke.

"If people give you money you want the results to be good," he says, "so I hope, and from what I hear, they're happy about it."

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Listen to The End is Near, one of the Malopoets' most prophetic songs.

Our guest in this week's edition of World Music Matters is young Franco-Greek singer Dafné Kritharas. Definitely one to watch, she talks to RFI about her new album Djoyas de Mar, a captivating reinterpretation of Greek rebetiko and Jewish-Spanish songs written in the 1920s and 30s. Songs of love ... and exile.

Our guest in this week's edition of World Music Matters is young Franco-Greek singer Dafné Kritharas. Definitely one to watch, she talks to RFI about her new album Djoyas de Mar, a captivating reinterpretation of Greek rebetiko and Jewish-Spanish songs written in the 1920s and 30s. Songs of love ... and exile.

Djoyas de Mar means jewels of the sea and these particular gems are Greek and Jewish-Spanish songs of the Aegean.

It was here, in the 1920s and 30s, that a form of Greek blues known as rebetiko emerged.

But the Aegean region was also home to a large Ladino community: descendents of Spanish speaking Jews who'd been driven out of Spain in 1492.

Kritharas was born to a Greek father and while she had no “direct connection” to Ladino found meaningful links between the two cultures.

“I discovered that many of those [Ladino] songs were written at the same period as rebetiko: in the 1920s and 30s in Salonica and also in Smyrna [now Izmir]. So it has a quite deep connection with Greek rebetiko," she says. "And also Sadik y Gazoz [Sadik Gershon and Moshe Cazes], two composers and writers of Jewish-Spanish, took some rebetiko songs and re-wrote the lyrics in Ladino."

One such is Mi chika flor (my little flower) which Kritharas sings in both Greek and Ladino. In the rebetiko version, flor (flower) becomes kouklaki (doll).

“When Ladino people were speaking they’d use the word kouklaki, they were using the same words,” Kritharas explains.

Songs of yearning and displacement

At just 26, Kritharas is not afraid to take on Ladino classic La Roza Enflorece and do it justice, but most of the Ladino songs she reinterprets are more recent.

The song Sien Drahmas, one hundred drahmas, is a love song written in the 1930s in Salonica (Thessaloniki as it is known today), home to the world’s largest Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jewish community at the time.

“It was a period in Salonica when there was many massacres of Jewish people," Kritharas says, "so it’s a song about wanting to leave, to find a place where they could be welcomed. The idea is like ‘we are in misery but there we will [earn] money, we will have a better life. I will be able to offer you a bed’ the man says.”

On the rebetiko side, the song Kaneloriza shows how this musical form also reflects a painful period in history. Like many rebetiko songs, it came from the coastal town of Smyrna, modern-day Izmir.

“Before 1922, Smyrna was a multi-cultural city where Greek people, Armenian, Ladino people were living and in 1922 it was burned by the Turks and Greek people had to back to Greece,” Kritharas explains. “So people brought this music from Smyrna, all this oriental tones and met the people of Athens who were poor people and they built rebetiko.”

The song is also a fine example of Kritharas and Berreyre’s startling talent for two-part harmonies.

A no-borders band

Kritharas has no formal vocal training, can’t read music, but has sung for as long as she can remember. She developed a taste for rebetiko during long annual holidays in Greece thanks to her French mother’s desire to keep the Greek connection going.

But she’s also had the good sense to surround herself by a talented band of  musicians: Camille El Bacha (piano), Paul Barreyre (vocals, guitar) and Naghib Shanbehzadeh (percussion).

“I’m half Greek singing Ladino songs, there’s an Iranian percussionist and Camille is half Lebanese. It’s a multi-cultural album,” she says, “we don’t want to put up any frontiers.”

Rebetiko revival

Kritharas returns to Greece every year and will perform at the Icaras festival on the island of Ikaria this summer.

“For sure I feel more moved when I sing to Greek people because it’s my direct roots,” she says “but French people are starting to be really enthusiastic about rebetiko too.”

Kritharas believes it’s linked to the Greek crisis.

“Rebetiko is today still very played in Greece and new songs have started to emerge from rebetiko because the meaning today is kind of strong in the context of the Greek crisis. People have to know Greece today is totally different [from Ancient Greece] and out of the chaos some art was born.”

In concert 19 June 2018 Café de la Danse, 75011 Paris.

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Ethiopian vocalist Etenesh Wassié began her career in Addis aged just 15 singing in traditional music venues known as Azmari Bet. She's now building a successful career in Europe singing azmari songs and working, notably, with French musicians. Her second album Yene Alem is out in June.

As war raged through Europe, a group of Soviet Yiddish scholars began recording stories, poems and songs by Jewish men, women and children living - and dying - in Nazi-occupied Soviet Union. Never published, they were rediscovered in Kiev in the late 90s. Now these moving, stirring and sometimes slapstick songs have been brought to life through an international recording project.

Maryam Saleh, Tamer Abu Ghazaleh and Maurice Louca are established solo artists on the alternative Arabic music scene. Together as Lekhfa they draw on Egyptian shaabi, pop and psychedelia to produce an off-kilter sound. Their new, eponymous album uses the edgy dystopian poetry of their contemporary Mido Zoheir to remarkable effect.

Maryam Saleh, Tamer Abu Ghazaleh and Maurice Louca are established solo artists on the alternative Arabic music scene. Together as Lekhfa they draw on Egyptian shaabi, pop and psychedelia to produce an off-kilter sound. Their new, eponymous album uses the edgy dystopian poetry of their contemporary Mido Zoheir to remarkable effect.

"The name [Lekhfa] literally means 'to make something invisible'," Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, the band's vocalist and composer, told RFI. "It was more of a joke at first and then it turned into something that each of us saw as relevant to the music in a different way."

The three band members enjoy successful solo careers in Egypt but wanted to work together "out of curiosity", says vocalist Maryam Saleh, who has marked herself out with a combination of electro pop and street poetry.

The band's blend of genres: working class political music from Cairo known as shaabi, to psychedelia and pop, and using instruments like slide guitars, oud and buzuq results in an exciting, dissonant sound.

"Playing oud with shaabi beat and singing with a shaabi beat aren’t done that way usually," says Ghazeleh. "When we each did what inspired us from each other's work, it came out as something very weird at the beginning."

But gradually "something special" came out of the combination of layers of sounds and instruments.

"It represents what we in our worldwide generation of internet users like to hear," the Palestinian-born composer and multi-instrumentist continues. "What influences us in that region is that mix of things: it’s not one culture or the other."

Dystopian poems, broken rhythms

The lyrics were all written by local poet Mido Zoheir.

Saleh had worked with him extensively and saw an opportunity to bring some of his unpublished works - with their images of betrayal, madness, demagoguery and doubt - to the fore.

"The lyrics are the heart and soul of these songs," she says. "We all believe Zoheir expresses what we think and feel."

Saleh points to a "philosophy of dark comedy" in the opening song Kont Rayeh (I was on my way) in which the speaker's been sabotaged by his loved ones and "snared by a beast" just when he felt able to take on the future.

"I was going I was going / I was all set to speak / I was feeling well again / truth was on my side / in my heart a vast yearning," it begins but concludes "It seems the burdens are immense / it seems that I will not speak."

Lekhfa performed one of its most political songs Ekaa Maksour (Rhythm Broken) at the album launch in Cairo's Azhar Park in September 2017.

Audiences sang along to "Rhythm broken into four quarters / drilling illusion into listening ears / a devil in lies / a long arm in tyranny / you the sultan / the people public property."

"It's cheerfully sarcastic about something - not very cheerfully - problematic," says Ghazaleh. "The magic of Mido Zoheir!"

There's no mention of politics, no direct shouting down of the government but you don't need a degree to detect a certain spirit of revolt.

"I think it’s also very social, not only political, because it’s related to a certain social mentality", says Ghazaleh. "It’s about how people treat each other or others."

A connected post-Arab Spring generation

This kind of cross-genre, cross-continent alternative music has grown in Egypt in the wake of 2011's so-called Arab Spring.

Lefkha have found enthusiastic audiences in theatres and festivals and are supported by El Genaina Theater in particular. Ghazaleh admits they have to leave out some of the bad language from songs like Teskar Tebki (Drunk, you weep like a child).

"We sing the clean vesion in Egypt [but] the audience doesn’t like that and ends up singing the explicit words themselves for us."

Despite the recent crackdown on freedom of expression in Egypt - in Februaary this year singer Sherine Abdel Warhoub was given a six-month jail sentence for "insulting" the river Nile - Ghazaleh says social media and music platforms online means they have few problems getting their music out.

"I can create my music, can share it with people especially online and I can see people relating and reacting," he explains.

"With online networks, internet etcetera, it’s less in the hands of someone to tell people what to hear and what not to hear. And this is in itself what's keeping everything going."

Ghazaleh says the real challenges are related to the region's underdeveloped industry.

"The technology is there, [the problem is] the ability to get funding, to be able to sit and create music, to get produced, to record and distribute."

Thankfully they have large, appreciative, thirsty audiences.

"[The fact that] the audience is very thirsty for new kinds of music and new experiments and alternative means of expression keeps us going and makes up for the fact that the industry isn’t as developed as it should," Ghazaleh says.

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Senegalese bass player, composer and singer Alune Wade began his professional musical career as guitarist to Ismael Lo. He's played alongside big names like Youssou Ndour, Cheick Tidiane Seck, Oumou Sangare, Blick Bassy, Joe Zawinul... The jazz-inspired African Fast Food is his latest, and third, solo project: a huge canvas which includes tributes to both Miles Davis and a religious leader of the Mourid Brotherhood.

Senegalese bass player, composer and singer Alune Wade began his professional musical career as guitarist to Ismael Lo. He's played alongside big names like Youssou Ndour, Cheick Tidiane Seck, Oumou Sangare, Blick Bassy, Joe Zawinul... The jazz-inspired African Fast Food is his latest, and third, solo project: a huge canvas which includes tributes to both Miles Davis and a religious leader of the Mourid Brotherhood.

Alune Wade's father was an officer in the Senegalese army and conducted a symphonic orchestra. So music, especially classical, filled his childhood growing up in Dakar in the 80s.

"On Sundays in the living room there'd be Beethoven, Bach, classical and western music on one side," he told RFI. "On the other my mother would listen to Youssou Ndour and Malian music. My sisters liked Florent Pagny."

Alune preferred "music from Detroit like Motown, and reggae". He wanted to play drums but his mother was opposed: "she said it was too noisy, too expensive". In fact she wasn't keen on him going into music at all.

"In the 60s and 70s, the African or Senegalese musicians they were just like the Rolling Stones, it was really rock and roll or very dirty stuff."

His dad encouraged him to experiment though: rock, jazz, classical. He began with piano, but then another musician lent him a bass and he never looked back.

"All bass players at the time played like Jaco Pastorius [American bass player with Weather Report] but I didn't want to play like the others. I was influenced by the sound of Marcus Miller and Stanley Clarke."

African Fast Food

Wade's played with a host of big names, but over the last decade has increasingly worked on his own projects. African Fast Food is his third.

It was inspired by the atmosphere in fast food joints in west Africa: sociable, open places where people drop by and discuss anything: music, sport, politics, films. He wanted to create a similar atmosphere on the album and invited the other musicians to "contribute ideas" for arrangements.

Afro-fusion, Afro-Cuban and freer jazz sounds found their way into the pot thanks to a very cosmopolitan line up: pianist Léo Genovese (Argentina), trumpettist Renaud Gensen (Madagascar), drummer Mokhtar Samba (Morocco/Senegal), percussionist Adriano Tenorio DD (Brazil)... as well as Daniel Blake (USA) on saxophone, Francisco Mela (Cuba) on drums and Brian Landrus (USA) on bass clarinet. Kuku (Nigeria) and Oxmo Puccino "the wise man of French rap" provide additional vocals.

Puccino does spoken word on the track How Many Miles.

"This song I wrote for Miles Davis but I wanted to find a funny name," says Wade. "Like how many miles to catch Miles Davis. How far away to go and understand [his] music."

Wade says Davis has been an influence, but not every period. "I love Kind of Blue, [his work] with Gil Evans, and then with Marcus Miller in the 80s."

The Mourid Brotherhood

Wade sings hauntingly in his native wolof on the track Mame Fallou: a tribute to the son of Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, a Sufi religious leader in Senegal and the founder of the large Mouride Brotherhood (the Muridiyya).

"Mame Fallou did a lot for humanity, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish. He welcomed everyone and was very open. It's rare nowadays to have a religious guide with so much influence."

"When I was young I did a lot of Coranic song at the mosque or at home. We did it every Friday and Wednesday. It's a bit like the griot families in Senegal and Mali, we have high-pitched voices, we can sing both powerfully and softly."

"Mame Fallou is a tribute to him. I sing in wolof, but the way of singing is more Arabic."

Paris is like Africa

Wade is now more or less based in Paris but says he has more contact with African musicians here than he would back in Dakar.

"We can find Algerian, Tunisian, Senegalese, Malian here. That’s why I think we’re lucky to live in Paris because we’re still connected with Africa. I [made] more connections with African musicians in Paris than when I was in Africa."

Now you have to do everything yourself

While there's no shortage of good musicians to collaborate with here in Paris, the challenge is getting published. Wade has honed the necessary skills to be independent: writing the music, lyrics and doing arrangements.

"I didn't set out to try and do everything," he says, "but it became necessary. When you can’t find a producer or arranger, you have to do it yourself."

Things were different in the golden 80s when Senegal's Youssou Ndour and Touré Kunda made it big.

"In the 80s it was easier for them, it was time of discovery. African music got promoted as part of francophony. But now you have to do everything: you’re artist, bass player, composer, you dance."

Wade has no regrets however and says it's been a good school, allowing him the freedom to make the music he wants.

"I’m trying to do my music very well so it can still be alive in 30 or 50 years."

Alune Wade's site

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