Archive for June 2014
A Musical Interlude
0Monday, 2 June 2014 by Renee
Before I finally wrap this bloggy up, it would be remiss to leave without giving a nod to some of the amazing music that we encountered both from Ghana and surrounding countries. Life in Ghana drips with brilliant music. Even the average cover band at a bar are spectacular musicians - often playing three hours non-stop without dropping a beat, with one song morphing into the next, and the oppressive tropical heat only seeming to spur them on.
It was also really exciting for Adam to live somewhere where musicians are massively respected. No "yeah, but what's your real job?" for a whole year, just mega respect, and it follows, a massive crowd gathering the minute anyone whips out an instrument. One of the things I miss most about Ghana is that fact that there is always music and always someone, but more often, everyone, dancing. The world would be a better place if more of us took the "You are alive, so why aren't you dancing"? approach to life!
It was also really exciting for Adam to live somewhere where musicians are massively respected. No "yeah, but what's your real job?" for a whole year, just mega respect, and it follows, a massive crowd gathering the minute anyone whips out an instrument. One of the things I miss most about Ghana is that fact that there is always music and always someone, but more often, everyone, dancing. The world would be a better place if more of us took the "You are alive, so why aren't you dancing"? approach to life!
Of course, other people are much more qualified to write about the history of Ghanaian and West African music than I - if you're interested I encourage you to get googling! But without further ado, here is a brief history and some of the great genres and artists we stumbled upon...
It's said that modern Ghanaian music harks back to drunk West African sailors in the late 1800s who were introduced to the guitar by Portuguese traders. The Portuguese would “employ” locals on their ships who then took the guitars to shore, developing the distinctive finger-picking and call-and-response vocals while hanging around palm wine bars, giving rise to the genre palm-wine music. Today palm wine music is carried on by the likes of legends like Agya Koo Nimo who we were lucky enough to see with his amazing ensemble at Alliance Francaise (which - at least for most of our time in Accra - was quite the hub for amazing musicians thanks to some awesome curations).
(If that wasn't enough for you, here is a much longer medley of Koo Nimo's classics, and here is Koo explaining the evolution of guitar in palm wine music)
In the early 1900s, palm wine music mixed with the American and French jazz music that was popular in England at the time, thanks to the British colony. The expats would arrange for bands of local traditional musicians and Brits to play at the extravagant parties of expats and upper class Ghanaians, the palm wine traditions melding with the big band style. This became known as "Highlife" music for it's association with wealth, but over time became increasingly diverse, Ghanaian and politicised as the movements for Independence and pan-Africanism ramped up. Unfortunately I was ill the one night Ebo Taylor played in town!
Fairly early on in the piece we headed to +233 Jazz Bar and Grill and caught Della Hayes & the Dzesi Band, aka "the Women of Colour Band". These women are absolute legends - absolutely stellar musos and according to the word on the streets, also fiercely committed feminists (which isn't surprising given that this kind of music is generally seen as men's domain in Ghana).
Not long after, we got to see the amazing Malian Griot guitarist Vieux Farka Toure perform his brilliant desert blues music at the Alliance Francais. Vieux is the son of the legendary Ali Farke Toure, but is a legendary player in his own right.
I've long been partial to a bit of blues, but there is something so engaging about Malian desert tunes and the way it just washes over you. You can so easily imagine you're in a 15-seater bus with 30 of your new best friends tearing along red dirt roads towards the Sahara....
Adam and I have been fans of Tinariwen, another Mailian band for a while now, and had high hopes that this would be our chance to see them live, but sadly this time it wasn't meant to be. I really really hope some day this is rectified (and that Mali soon is stable enough to once more host the amazing Festival in the Desert).
Malian music is a great example of the fascinating feedback loops of musical influences in the African diaspora - if you keep in mind that most African-Americans could trace their roots back to West Africa via the slave trade, you can start to hear the origins of the blues, but at the same time, West African music is equally influenced by trends in the world abroad, Tinariwen for example obviously having heard a bit of Hendrix in their time...
Adam got to play alongside some amazing musicians along the way, including the wonderful Ghanaian-American soul singer Jojo Abot - one can only imagine the great things in store for her young career.
Of course, I can't write all of this this without mentioning Azonto, the dance craze which is pretty much the biggest thing to have ever happened to West Africa. Along the way, those influences kept looping around as hip hop morphed with highlife to become hiplife, with touches of dancehall and reggae to beat...And then a couple of years ago, Azonto took off as both a dance move and genre in it's own right - our friends in Jamestown will tell you it started there, though it's definitely contested! The dance move involves twisting your right foot, swinging your hips and pulling sweet shapes with your arms as you feel. More than any other genre it was the soundtrack to our year, and while I could write a whole other post on all my favourite azonto songs (one of my favs is here!), this one was one of the first and gives you a good schooling in the moves.
The word from the streets of Accra is that Azonto is slowly dying down, being taken over by the madness of Alkayida which admittedly was getting heavy rotation towards the end of our stay. That Ghana can give birth to a wildly popular genre of music named after a terrorist organisation should help to explain what I mean when I say Ghana is one hilariously crazy place!
Category Azonto, Dancing, Ghana, Highlife, Hiplife, Mali, Music, Palm Wine, West Africa
