Know your Ngoni
To get everybody in the mood for the Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni ba show this Saturday, I'm here to gather some information for you on the instrument from which the band takes its name.
Seems like it is a large and loose family of instruments, but basically what you need is some goat skin, a gourd or wood frame, some fishing line for strings and a stick of some sort to form the neck. Let's look at some variations.
Because it is basically a drum with a neck - and that only goes a small way into the body - and the strings are plucked, music historians regard the ngoni as the ancestor of the banjo. Here's an interesting short article from coraconnection.com which mentions the man we will be seeing on our stage this weekend, saying "Perhaps the foremost ngoni modernizer in Mali is Basekou Kouyate of Segou." NICE!
A listen to his recent disc I Speak Fula will confirm something I have long maintained, that being any instrument can totally ROCK in the right hands. Trust me here, readers, the ngoni is in the right hands here!
The 47 stop tour has been getting fans excited from L.A. to Charleston to New York. Here's a nice interview with the fine folks at Rock Paper Scissors. ' “The image I like,” he says, “is of the ngoni as the griot’s ID card. Even if there is a war going on and it is difficult to travel, a griot, with his ngoni slung around his back, was always allowed through, because it was known that he was going to play for a leader, and perhaps act as an intermediary for political negotiations.” Bringing the ngoni from the palace to the people, Kouyate represents a new kind of global griot; one who has travelled the world negotiating artistic alliances between the ancient and the contemporary.'
Kouyate plays the smaller Jeli ngoni, and although in the past, musicians such as his grandfather played the biggie donso ngoni, nowadays that size is more often used just for cerimonial purposes. The donso ngoni also looks a lot more like a kora, if you ask me. If you were at the Habib Koite show at the Cedar last week, you saw balafon player Fassery Diabaté pull out a kamale ngoni for several songs. Did anybody catch the comment on my blog post about the concert last week? That was balafon master Kélétigui Diabaté's son rocking the mallets! Yeah!
Ngoni is also the name of an ethnic group now scattered through several countries in Central Africa. They were part of a mid-19th century diaspora, caused by the rise of the Zulu empire or by populations pressure from those escaping slave raiders in coastal areas, depending on which articles you read. The traditional Ngoni language, closely realted to Zulu, is seldom spoken now as the people have assimilated in their new countries. I am not sure what, if any the relationship to the instrument is.
Regular readers will remember my call for music to link with the books my sister is teaching in her World LIt class next year. I had a big discussion on what would be the perfect music to go with Everyhting is Illuminated. (She doesn't call it World Lit, kind of like we don't call it world music, but we all know what we mean, right?) Anyway, here are a few more titles for us to match up with music of threshholds and diasporas.
The play "The Great Celestial Cow" about an Indian family that moves to
the British midlands in the 70s. Obvious culture fusion choice here:
Cornershop. Any music that deals with how we use our cultural myths to
interpret our lives when our surroundings get confusing. [Might I sugest some M.I.A. as well?]
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Achronological anti-war sci-fi. How about
some music for that?
The lovely New Zealand film Whale Rider. Threshold between ancestral
beliefs and modern loss of culture in a Maori community.
James McBride's The Color of Water. Dual autobiography/biography of
MacBride growing up black with 11 siblings in 60s-70s and his mom, who was
a Jewish immigrant from Poland and grew up in the South.
Please, suggest and comment away!
Yes, we're all excited for the Balkan Beat Box show at the Cedar in June, and would love to get a listen at the new disc. Too bad they are being so coy with the song samples! The only place I could find anything others than the offical single "War Again" was on the German version of Amazon.com. So here you go, some 30 second samples from Blue Eyed Black Boy.
Finally, for those who cannot get enough of those desert blues, might I suggest trying to track down the debut album by Tamikrest, a young band from the north of Mali. Adagh came out in Europe last month and definitely veers toward the rockin' side of the genre. I loved the samples I could find, but as the album is on the rather obscure German label Glitterhouse Records, I wonder how tricky it will be to get ahold of. Now, why do I have the urge to buy the physical disc here instead of the download? Especially after I went on and on last week about how I only want downloads now...well, I'll report back on the quest.
