African Jams: The Artist and the Audience

I've got a heresy to confess: Until recently, I've never really liked traditional African music.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Wait up. Let me explain. I love Amadou and Mariam. They put on a hell of a show.

I think Tinariwen are alright, but for my money, I’ll bank on Bombino.

I’ll get down with some Nigerian club music, especially P-Square. It takes me back to my days in Niger and the creepy David Lynch room at Pub 227.

And if you’re looking for a real killer beat. You have to check out The Very Best.

These, however, represent African artists who've crossed over and blended much of the best from their homelands and from the West. Amadou and Mariam latest album was a killer that brought in big names like Santigold, TV on the Radio, and Scissor Sisters. Bombino just burns it in a distinct departure from his forebears, and his first album brought him enough accolades to team up with Dan Auerbach from The Black Keys. The Very Best teams Esau Mwamwaya from Malawi, with the Hackney hipster duo Radioclit (I assume they're a bit hipster, I mean, isn't everybody in Hackney just a little bit hip?). And if you've seen any of P-Square’s latest videos, they've dropped a lot of their local flavor to mimic the flash and muscle of American hip hop artists like Kanye West or Lil Wayne (who The Very Best mock to no ends in the above video).

But these aren't the artists you hear on a daily basis in Africa. These aren't the people who have their music pumped out of crap kombi speakers or blasted from store fronts in crowded markets. Instead, that’s where you’ll hear Lesotho famu, Nigerian Hausa music, and high-pitched ululations from heavyset diva vocalists. It’s a piece of everyday life in much of Africa, but one that I never appreciated.

Then I met Simba.

Simba is from Bulawayo. He’s a member of the Hloseni Arts Group, a traditional music and dance troupe formed in 1997. They've toured all over Africa and Europe, performing in a mixture of Shona, Ndebele, Tswana, and Kalanga. If this sounds familiar, it’s because he didn't harvest my organs. He invited me to watch one of their rehearsals, where I was struck by the hospitality and generosity of everyone present. They all wanted to shake my hand, and everyone wanted to know my name. If I was going to watch something I normally wasn't a fan of, at least I’d been welcomed and treated like an old friend.

The Hloseni troupe blew me out of the water, and I realized why I’d never enjoyed this type of music. Traditional African music is as much performance as sound. It’s dance, it’s life, and it doesn't lend itself to Western music culture for a variety of reasons.

Primarily, I think the greatest challenge African performance poses to Western audiences is the space in which it may be enjoyed. Western music creates an adversarial space: audience versus performer, the stage versus the seats. Judgment is inherently built into the performative space. African music, on the other hand, is communal. Dancers move in between musicians. Voice is interwoven with movement. Nearly every traditional performance I have witnessed in Africa incorporates the audience in the action. Audience members are encouraged to dance, are encouraged to play. They take their place with the performers rather than remaining passive onlookers. They clap. They stomp. They shout and sing. In traditional music, these sounds are not merely noise but are incorporated directly into the performance, shaping and reshaping the performance of an old favorite.

In this way, traditional music is much like the very best jazz. One of my favorite recordings of all time is the pirated version of Clifford Brown’s Night in Tunisia. It was recorded (illegally) the night he died in a car accident. He takes a simple melody, one that everyone knows, and is able to transform it, making it his own while giving it to everyone equally. Every single person is participating in that performance just by being there. The energy is palpable. You can’t listen to that song without imagining yourself in a smoky back room at four in the morning, drink in hand, hoping the dawn never comes.

That’s a tangent, but an important one, as a lot of jazz flows out of the rollicking, free-wheeling nature of traditional music. It’s there for you, you right there in that chair, the person I can reach out and touch. Consequently, African music doesn't lend itself to our modern thinking on sound and amplification. In much of the modern sound tech world, it’s all about levels, hot spots, acoustics, but when you start to mic up drums, marimbas, and guitars the entire concept of ‘level’ flies out the window.

Take voice, for instance. In the West, we place greatest emphasis on voice, on lyrics, on melody and harmony. Voice, where present, typically exists at the forefront of performance. In African music, a vocalist has to fight for her place in the soundscape. She shouts and ululates, clawing for her place above djembes and marimbas. When she’s given a microphone, her voice is suddenly much too prominent. Amplified, she becomes too harsh, too dominant.

This is especially true when recorded. Once you start to combine the difficulty in mixing levels with the kombi driver’s propensity for pumping his music to its highest volume, the voice becomes distorted as it shreds any hope that you’ll stave off a hearing aid until sixty.

I used to wait tables at a little jazz club in London. We had a prominent Malian artist on stage in late summer. Two houses each on a Friday and Saturday night, so it was kind of a big deal. While we set up the club for the diners and guests, the band went through their sound checks and set their levels. All I could think was: why are we even bothering with a sound system? The venue held two hundred-odd people. It’s small, intimate, the exact opposite of the open bars and desert stages of Bamako and Timbuktu. We didn't need microphones. If anything, we needed to line the walls with shock absorbers. This wasn't supposed to be a ‘sit down and enjoy’ sort of night. He wanted everyone up and dancing and he was going to blow them out of their seats with all the force he could muster. They weren't listening to his record at home, where they could quietly lower the volume to share their eclectic musical tastes with their bougey upper-middle class friends over a fairly middling wine.

Until I saw the Hloseni troop perform in person, I couldn't give voice to why I didn't like traditional music. Recent work by psychologist Chia-Jung Tsay at University College London, however, gives some empirical support to my previous disinterest in this art form. In a series of studies, Tsay gave clips of classical music competition finalists to participants. Their task: to determine who won the competition. When presented solely with audio clips, participants weren't very good at judging the quality of performance. Even experts scored no better than novices at determining a winner from sound alone.

However, when presented solely with a visual clip of a performance, novices and experts alike were much better at determining a winner – despite not hearing even one note. Without sound distracting the listener, the participants are able to appreciate the other aspects of a performance, indicating that our place in a performance is more than the sum of its parts.

I suspect that this is why, until recently, I never gave much credit to traditional music as an art form that I could appreciate and enjoy. Most of the recordings that blared away in bush taxis and market stalls were just direct transcriptions of what an artist would do on stage. That is, they were performances stripped of performance. Hloseni changed that. They showed me something that I always knew, at least subconsciously, that music cannot be separated from those who make it, nor can it be separated from the audience that appreciates it. Western amplification may help us to enjoy music on a greater scale, but we lose something as we’re pushed farther and farther from the stage. A dance is as much a dance for the athleticism and artistry of the dancer as it is for the earth shaking under foot and the dust kicked up in the process.

Music as performance. Performance as process. A hell of an idea, one that’s several thousand years old, but still alive and well and living in Africa.