The post Finding The One – Songlines Review ***** (17/07/2014) appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

We live in a noisy world. Our cities and towns fizz with an almost permanent tinnitus of machine-generated sound. And even if, by some fluke, all that noise is absent for a while, most of us are left with the din of our own mental machinery churning inside. To disengage from that noise requires a drastic amputation from our usual environment; a trip to some distant wilderness perhaps, or an afternoon in a floatation tank. Sometimes we try to approximate the absence of noise by sitting in a garden or a park with the hum of traffic or roaring jet planes swept into the distance for a brief hour or two. Or we listen to ‘relaxation’ tapes of rhythmic sea-surf, dawn choruses and Celtic harp music laced with saccharine.

Clychau Dibon by Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita isn’t one of those tapes. Believe me.

You don’t pair the greatest young harpist in Wales with one of the most innovative kora players from West Africa for the purposes of relaxation. Their music is too deep, full-blooded and fragile for that. It engages with rather than disengages you from life and plays out against a backdrop of history, places, lives and legends that mirror each other in curious, even startling ways. Music with that kind of depth can never be relaxing. Too much old blood runs through it.

The harp and the kora appear to us like old instruments, designed for quieter sparser times. They can seem out of place in this cacophonous world. They’re old, that’s true. If you have a mind to go back to their beginnings, you’ll need to try and imagine that first hunter-gatherer who plucked the string of his bow and made music. Killing, skinning and eating animals were essential to him, but he also had a need to talk to the spirits and only music could do that. The many different harp-like instruments you can find around the world, including the kora, the classical concert harp and the Welsh harp, are the descendants of that hunter’s bow, just as every human descends from Lucy, our common grandmother.

About three hundred years ago, in an old West African kingdom known as Kaabu, simpler harps made from the tough gourd of the calabash, an African cousin of the melon too bitter to eat but good for just about everything else, were fused to create a new instrument with 21 strings, an instrument of majestic complexity and sophistication. Every griot or ‘bard’ in West Africa has his own version of how the kora was born, but they all agree that it was handed to man by the djinns. In other words, it was born in the spirit world before and then passed on to the human one. Which makes sense. All great music comes from the other side.

Like the Welsh harp, the kora’s original purpose was to help the griot sing the praises of great men, especially noble warriors and fighters. Hence its original name; koring bato – the box of the koring, who werethe warriors of the West African Manding. Like the Celts, the Manding are an ancient people bound together by ties of language and culture who populate the modern nations of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea and Mali. The kora is the king of all Manding instruments.

Seckou Keita was born in southern Senegal, in a town called Ziguinchor that sits on an arm of the great Casamance River. His mother was the daughter of a great griot whose bardic lineage stretched back into a distant and foggy past. Seckou’s father was a Keita, in other words, a descendent of the great Manding king Sundiata Keita, who founded the Mali Empire in the 14^th century. The bluest of blood runs in Keita veins.

Seckou learnt the kora under his grandfather’s stern eye. He later rebelled and took up the drums as well. His entire clan, the Cissokhos, are griots and kora players of international renown. Many younger Cissokhos are scattered around Europe, surviving on their wits, their charm, their affability and their music. Seckou has made England his base since 1997.

Catrin Finch was born in Aberystwyth, west Wales, of English and German parents. She grew up in a tiny village near Aberaeron, on the shores of Cardigan Bay, with the sound of the sea in her ears. She fell in love with the harp when she was six years old, after seeing the Spanish harpist Marisa Robles play at the Lampeter Music Club.

By the age of nine, Catrin had dusted all her grades and was soon filling the cupboards of her family home with trophies and stringing gigs with the National Youth Orchestras together with solo concerts and the occasional appearance on Blue Peter. The child prodigy turned into an A-list student at the Royal College of Music in London and, at the age of 19, was invited to become the first harpist by appointment to the Prince of Wales.

Now in her thirties and living in south Wales, Catrin Finch enjoys star status in the classical music world, although her instrument is still the Cinderella of the classical orchestra, considered good enough for the musical expression of sparkling brooks, fluffy clouds and angelic dreams but not much else. That’s something Catrin would like to change. Her collaborations with the Colombian cowboy virtuosos Cimarron and now Seckou Keita provide proof of her desire to leap over cultural barriers and roam in mapless musical territory.

Harp and a kora, woman and a man, Celt and Manding, European and African, written scores and word of mouth; you might expect Seckou Keita and Catrin Finch to be separated by unbridgeable cultural chasms, but you’d be wrong. Go deep and you’ll find strange symmetries and fabulous coincidences that bind West Africa and Wales; bards and griots, djinns and faeries, the Casamance River and the Teifi, Sundiata Keita and the 10^th century Welsh King Hywel Dda, the list goes on.

What’s more, both the harp and the kora make music that flows like water and expresses its essential melancholy. The poet Dylan Thomas once wrote a line about the sea singing in its chains. ‘Ceffylau’ (‘Horses’) is a groove that Seckou dreamed up in a moment of nostalgia and longing. It’s doused in the sadness of leaving, of being thrown out onto the mercy of the waves, never to return.

Both the enticement and the loneliness of an empty horizon is expressed in ‘Llongau Terou-bi’, in which the old Welsh air ‘Llongau Caernafon’ (‘The Ships of Caernarvon’) is played out on a quay or terou near Dakar in Senegal, gulls screeching overhead, fishermen unloading their catches, the eyes of a young boy transfixed by that endless coming and going of shore life. Poverty drove many Welsh men and women to take to the sea. Near Terou-bi beach in Dakar lies the Island of Gorée, from which so many Africans were forcibly embarked on ships bound for the new World. Both were enslaved in their own ways.

But the sea, together with the inlets, creeks, swamps and tributaries that are its limbs, is also an enchanter. The island of Carabane at the mouth of the Casamance River and the wide Bae Aberteifi, or Cardigan Bay, are magical places for Seckou Keita and Catrin Finch. Those Bras de Mer (‘Arms of the Sea’) inspire the currents that flow through their fingers.

When they were working on the song Bras de Mer, Seckou remembered this old Welsh tune that he’d once played with another Welsh harpist by the name of Llio Rhydderch, but he couldn’t remember its name. Producer John Hollis found it on the Internet. It was called ‘Conset Ifan Glen Teifi’, ‘The Concert of Ifan Glen Teifi’. Teifi is the name of the river that runs through Cardigan. It’s a lush and beautiful Welsh waterway and the tune fitted Seckou’s Manding melody ‘Niali Bagna’, named after an old Wolof king, like a hand fits an old glove. Seckou then added an old Manding melody called ‘Bolong’, meaning ‘The Arms of the Sea’. Finally Catrin overlaid ‘Clychau Aberdyfi’ or ‘The Bells of Aberdovey’. Everything found its place in the whole without coercion, like the pieces in a puzzle or the water of many rivers flowing into each other for their final journey to the sea. That’s how most of Clychau Dibon came together. Strange symmetries. Strange coincidences.

Like the imaginary encounter between the Manding king Nialing Sonko, famous for collecting too much tax from his people, and Robert Ap Huw, the 16^th century musician who invented his own baffling form of notation and wrote down many of those old Welsh harp tunes before history could consign them to oblivion. Seckou chose to name his contribution after Nialing Sonko because the tune echoed the pure Casamance kora style of his youth and Sonko was a Casamance king. Catrin rummaged in the Ap Huw canon and pulled out a melody called ‘Caniad Gosteg’. Once again, the fit was seamless, uncanny, the old courtliness of medieval Wales echoing the old-world dignity of the Casamance style. Then, returning to his childhood again, Seckou added an exercise that all aspiring kora players have to master, Kelefa Koungben, the rhythm of Kelefa. Kelefa Sane was another old Manding warrior whose name is intimately tied to the birth of the kora itself.

Seckou dedicated another of his tunes, which he called Bamba, to the great Senegalese holy man and anti-colonial resistance leader, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacké. He was a man who devoted his life to the welfare of those around him. His deeds and miracles have been praised in endless tales and poems. The tune leaves a sense of wisdom, kindness and gentleness – the qualities of true sainthood – in its wake.

Downstream and further out across wide oceans, we come to ‘Genedigaeth Koring-bato’, ‘The Genesis of the Koring-bato’, in other words, the birth of the Kora. The piece is dedicated to Toumani Diabate, probably the greatest kora player in the world, who, in March 2012, pulled off an unforgettable tour of Wales with Catrin Finch, despite illness and the military coup that had just shattered the peace and well being of his native Mali. That tour, the brainchild of producers John Hollis and Dilwyn Davies of Theatr Mwldan in Cardigan, is the genesis of the album Clychau Dibon.

But there’s more. Seckou often had to delve back into the old Manding melodies of his youth, to the genesis of his own style and his own life as a musician, in order to find the necessary symmetry with old Welsh songs such as ‘Beth Yw’r Haf I Mi’, (‘What is the summer to me?’), melodies that cry tears of loss and longing and tell us that Wales is not all about emerald hills and sun-kissed bays, but also boarded-up mines and factories, enforced migration, callousness and poverty, chapel and bible, hopelessness and damnation.

That’s the tone with which Clychau Dibon opens, a Welsh love story gone awry. Out of it, the kora emerges holding down a simple riff taken from a tune called ‘Macki’, named after an old king who was kind to orphans. It’s then overlaid with more longing, this time for a love left behind in Pontypridd, to which the kora answers with a tune called ‘Kelefa Ba’, the ‘Great Kelefa’, the warrior who will not succumb. Not just musical notes, but whole stories and worlds are blended here.

Why? To create something new out of the old. We’re dealing with young hearts whose desire to break new ground is strong. Future Strings is a fine example of the uncharted territory into which Seckou is pushing his kora, a territory in which the theme from ‘Prelude from the Asturias’ by the Spanish composer Albéniz can trip lightly from Catrin Finch’s fingers. The highly structured and complex world of European classical music is fused with the oral traditions of West Africa. Each make compromises, the kora moving into a more structured world that it is perhaps used to, the classical harp jettisoning the strictures of notation and over-bearing reverence for the ancestors to breathe more freely…

Where? To a world where the Bells of the dibon bird – Clychau Dibon – chime their bittersweet chime. The second bass string on the left hand side of the kora is named after the dibon, otherwise known as the West African Ground-Hornbill. During the day, the male and female dibon do everything and go everywhere together. But at night they part to sleep alone, each in their own nest. The next morning they call to each other, a mix of low male tones and higher female ones, so that they can reunite and face the new day.

What are all these old tunes from West Africa and Wales except old pop songs that remain doggedly tenaciously alive. Listen to them carefully. They’ve found each other and created a new sound, another kind of noise to add to the tinnitus of modern life. But listen again and see if you can’t find a different kind of peace in there, not the emptiness relaxation or switching off, but the fullness and peace that only come once you have travelled through life, love and loss, to emerge sadder and wiser on the other side.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2013

Printed in the cd booklet of Clychau Dibon by Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita (Astar / Mwldan 2013)

The post CD SLEEVE NOTES – ‘Clychau Dibon’ by Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

The post PHOTO ESSAY – Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita Live appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

The post PHOTO ESSAY – Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita: ‘Clychau Dibon’ Sessions appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

FINDING THE ONE

The strange and parallel lives of the West African kora and the Welsh harp

(English / Welsh)

 By Andy Morgan

AVAILABLE FROM:  Mwldan Theatr Shop

“…Morgan is a storyteller, whose poetic ear means he has the gift of using words with the same inventive skill that a musician applies to the notes on a scale…The ultimate test of a book about music is whether it leaves you with an unquenchable desire to hear the sounds being described…Morgan’s joyful book passed the test with flying colours…”  Nigel Williamson, Songlines Magazine (5/5 Stars).

The West African kora and the Welsh harp are ancient instruments that have come to symbolise entire peoples and cultures. They come from separate worlds that seem to have very little to do with each other, and yet, their stories are full of strange and striking parallels.

In Finding The One: The strange and parallel lives of the West African Kora and the Welsh Harp, Andy Morgan recounts the respective origins of the kora and the harp in the warrior culture of the old Manding empire of West Africa and the medieval kingdoms of Wales. In a pacey readable style, he examines how both instruments were intimately tied to ancient traditions of bards and powerful warrior lords, how these bards fulfilled the role of today’s journalists and histories, how the kora and the harp represented both temporal and spiritual power and how they fell from grace due to the ravages of history, only to be reborn in a renaissance of cultural pride.

The book was written to accompany the release of Clychau Dibon, the highly praised new album by Welsh harpist Catrin Finch and Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita. It tells the fascinating story of friendship, dreams and coup d’états that lead to their collaboration and delves into their personal histories, which are full of tragedy, comedy and an acute sense of place. It also includes a chapter about how the kora and Welsh harp are made, and the lore and legends that surround each instrument.

Andy Morgan has contributed articles about music and culture to The Guardian, Songlines, fRoots and many other publications. He managed the Touareg rockers Tinariwen before giving up the music business to concentrate on writing full time in 2010. His first book Music, Culture & Conflict in Mali was published by Freemuse earlier this year.

Finding The One: The strange and parallel lives of the West African Kora and the Welsh Harp is on sale at Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita gigs. It is also on sale from the following outlets:

Read some extracts from the book:

If your name is Keita,  you’re still royalty

Meths, gunpowder and the revival of harp making in Wales

How the kora came to mankind

For more information or preview copies please contact:

2 Short Extracts:

“It is said that the kora is so emblematic of the Manding culture of West Africa that it ‘speaks Mandinka’. It’s the king of Mandé instruments. Talk of royalty is apt. Originally, and still to a large extent, the kora is an instrument of power, not just spiritual power, but hard-edged temporal power. The role of the griot and his kora is not just to praise powerful men, but to represent them, to chronicle their adventures and manly exploits, to preserve the memory of their lineages all the way back to their original and most illustrious forefathers.”

“In those fractious and uncertain times, the bard and his harp were a warrior lord’s passport to immortality, his psychological armour going into battle, his jewel at feasts in halls and long-houses and his mouthpiece in times of pomp or political tension. In fact, so essential were the bards to post-Roman Welsh society that it was deemed necessary to regulate their art. That idea might seem strange to us as we try and imagine the government of today issuing laws dictating how an indie band from Manchester should behave; but less strange if we remember that the bard was all at once the news service, commentator and truth-teller of his day; its ‘media’, in other words. He was also the mouthpiece of power and the guardian of a precious oral heritage, which had no written texts or reference books to which it could anchor itself for posterity.”

The post NEW BOOK – FINDING THE ONE: The strange and parallel lives of the West African kora and the Welsh harp appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

After a while, Seckou felt it was time. He was ready to pack his bags and book a flight. Word was that his father was in Bamako, the capital of Mali. But just as he was about to go, he heard that his father had died. “There’s no right or wrong,” says Seckou. “It was just supposed to happen that way.”

Seckou’s father had been a Quranic teacher, a kind of wandering man of the spirit, who would settle in a community, help any way he could and then move on. He was helping out a family in Bamako when he died. The husband had passed away and there were lots of kids to feed. The whole neighbourhood looked on him as their spiritual father.

His name was Elhaji Mohammed Keita. But he had other nicknames: Lamine and Dari. His great grandfather, Malick Keita, was born back in slavery days in Kita, in the west of Mali. His grandfather, Youssouf Soumah Keita, had moved to a place called Kolia in north western Guinea, just south of the border with Senegal. That’s were he, Mohammed, was born and where he grew up.  Of course, in those days, none of those nations – Mali, Senegal, Guinea – existed yet as such. The region was still one large borderless zone of Manding, Bambara, Soninké, Fulani, Sousou, Djola and other peoples, living under French rule.

Mohammed was a Keita and, in the land of the Mandé, Keita is a name to contend with. All Keitas are the descendants of a great Emperor called Sundjata Keita, who ruled the Manding Empire in the 13^th century. You can be as poor as a field mouse, but if your name is Keita, you’re still royalty. Confusingly however, Mohammed’s family were known in Kolia by the name of Soumah, which was a form of ‘royal’ greeting. Another was Mansareng, meaning ‘royal family’. Every time a Keita was addressed, especially by a griot, these honorific titles were liable to come out: Keita…Soumah…Mansareng!  It was like saying “Oh Keita…most royal…most noble lineage etc etc.”  In the case of Seckou’s father’s family, the ‘Soumah’ part became a fixture and eventually took over as the only name by which they were known at home in Kolia. At one point, Mohammed and some of his brothers went back to the ancestral lands in Mali to change their ID cards and ‘reclaim’ their original identity: the Keita name and the pride it carried with it.

Mohammed ‘Soumah’ Keita’s reputation as a holy man and teacher spread far and wide, and in the late 1970s he was invited to Dakar by the sister of the Senegalese president, Leopold Senghor. On his way there he stopped off in an old town on the banks of the Casamance River in southern Senegal called Ziguinchor. He’d had a premonition that if he passed that way, he would meet a woman and she would become his wife. They would have a son. It was like a dream; so that’s where he went.

In Ziguinchor he visited the compound of a famous griot called Jali Kemo Cissokho, and there, in the semi-darkness of late evening, he was introduced to the griot’s young daughter, Fatou Bintou. Even though there were plenty of other young women in the greeting line, and it was so dark that Elhaji could hardly see Fatou’s face, when he came shake her hand, he wouldn’t let it go. He knew that his dream had come true. They married and had one son; Seckou Keita.

Soon afterwards, Mohammed left to continue his roving life. He came back to see Seckou a few times when he was just a baby, but after that, father and son never saw each other again. Nonetheless, Seckou learned later that Mohammed had never stopped asking after him.

Ziguinchor is an old Portuguese trading post that became the capital of the Casamance (from the Portuguese Casa di Mansa or ‘House of the King’), the southernmost region of Senegal, which is cut off from the rest of the country by the ex-British colony and independent state of The Gambia. The town is an out of the way place: green, relaxed and turtle-paced. Not far from the Atlantic and surrounded by forests, mangrove swamps and rice paddies, its bustling marché St Maur and old colonial buildings with their shady colonnades, exude a sense of easy African provincialism. If you stand on the town’s main bridge, it’s possible to see dolphins gambolling in the languid Casamance River.

Seckou grew up in a suburb called Lindiane. Its adobe houses and yards were tightly packed together and burrowed through by a labyrinth of narrow sandy alleyways. All kinds of people lived there: Christians, Muslims, Animists, Manding, Djola, Manjack, Balantes, Peul,Wolof. They all seemed to get along fine. There were shacks on the street corners selling palm or cashew wine. The streets buzzed when someone got married or held a naming ceremony for their child. Without any great self-consciousness of the fact, Lindiane was what you might call the model West African multi-cultural neighbourhood. And it was full of musicians, drummers and dancers.

Seckou was raised in a household where music was everything: livelihood, ancestry, family and community. His grandfather and guardian, Jali Kemo Cissokho, could trace his griot lineage back at least three centuries, to the time when the first kora was given by the djinns to Jali Mady Wuleng in the kingdom of Gabou. Mady ‘The Red’ was a Cissokho himself; and before him, Cissokhos stretched back to a vanishing point beyond history. Seckou’s grandmother, Bintou Konte, also came from a griot family.

Most of Seckou’s uncles and grand uncles – Jali Mory, Jali Messing, Jali Solo, Jali Aliou, Jali Fily, Jali Sadio, Jali Maher – either lived in his compound or just nearby. Music and griot lore enveloped Seckou on all sides. They called him Seckou jali n’ding: ‘Seckou, the little griot.’

The family knew they had something in Seckou: a talent, even in griot terms. When he was toddler, his grand uncle Jali Mory, the man who built the first 28-stringed kora, looked at him one day as he crawled about the yard and noticed that his hands looked strange. They were small but fine and dexterous, like the hands of a skilled adult. “The kid better watch for those fingers,” he declared. But Jali Kemo was especially hard on the little Seckou, to the extent that, even as a boy, he began to wonder why.

“He wasn’t as strict to his own kids,” Seckou remembers, “And as I grew up it became a serious problem. Like – this isn’t right! He’s stopping me doing what I want to do! He’s guarding me everywhere I go! I wanted to discover other things. I was very stubborn and I resented him at times.”

It was only much later, with the onset of wisdom, that Seckou realised his grandfather was trying to protect him from all the traps that were laid out for stubborn young musicians just like him: drugs, alcohol, stuff like that. “The wisdom of those old people,” he says, “they’re really good at seeing what might happen to their kids. I wanted to discover other things and he was frightened of people taking advantage of me.”

The post FINDING THE ONE (extract) – If your name is Keita, you’re still royalty appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Granted, his livelihood had been reduced to a pile of charred wood and ashes, and so had some of the tools his father and grand-father had used on the Terra Nova, the ship that had taken Captain Scott on his fateful journey from Cardiff docks to Antarctica in 1910. Scott died in the snow and ice. The children were all dead too. But he was alive. Keep going. There was nothing else but to do. Just keep going.

Friends and neighbours donated materials and goodwill; John Weston Thomas picked himself up and carried on. He rebuilt his workshop and started taking in orders again. He had a mission, clear and energising: to revive harp making in Wales. He’d arrived at it by a scrappy circuitous route. After training as a carpenter and joiner, he joined the merchant service at the beginning the war, and had gone back to his chosen trade after V-Day. He was a practical joker. On one building site, a worker left his trowel out while he went off for his lunch break. In less than hour John Thomas had fashioned a tiny replica of it. “What’s this?!” gasped the worker when he came back. “Well, you shouldn’t leave your tools out in the rain should you?” answered John, to general guffaws.

John Thomas acquired a taste for making miniatures. His work was dazzling in its accuracy and detail. A full set of tiny tools won him a silver medal at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Then a complete set of orchestral instruments was commissioned by a collector. Of all the instruments he fashioned, he was most taken by the little Grecian harp. He was a Welshman and the harp stirred him somewhere deep.

After a time spent teaching in London, he came back to his native Cardiff and did all kinds of advanced wood work, building sets for the BBC and models for local museums. But the harp kept tapping on his shoulder. “You know,” he said to his wife Joan, “I wouldn’t mind making harps. “Well, look!” she answered, “either do it or shut up!” Behind every great man…

So, in the mid 1960s, he set about it. There were hardly any harp makers left in Wales, and not that many harps either; at least, none other than those grand curlicued affairs that aped the regency splendours of the Érard pedal concert harp. John Thomas had to go to the Welsh Folk Museum and study the old harps there with his keen eye: triple harps, double harps, ancient one-row harps. He rooted about for knackered old instruments that he could take apart, just to see how they were constructed. He dug deep into the archaeology of the instrument.

There had once been many harp ‘luthiers’ in Wales; men like John Richards of Llanrwst in Snowdonia, who was harpist to Queen Charlotte in the mid 18^th century. The little hill-circled village with its old humpbacked bridge was the centre of harp making for at least two hundred years before the industry faded out in the late 19^th century. The few Richards triple harps that survive are objects of refinement and beauty. If you felt expansive, you could even say that John Richards something of a Welsh Stradivarius.

One of Richards’ pupils was Basset Jones of Cardiff, who became a protégé of the fearsome Lady Llanover of Llanover Court near Abergavenny. He made at least three dozen brand new harps in the early to mid 19^th century and had the privilege of presenting one of them to the Prince of Wales. Later, one of Llanover Court’s two ‘in house’ luthiers, a carpenter by the name of Abram Jeremiah, was possibly the last harp maker to work in Wales. That is, before John Thomas decided to revive the art. Lady Llanover herself, a born-again ‘Wales-o-phile’ of the most ardent type, deserves high praise for keeping the Welsh harp out of the morgue, where it seemed inexorably bound in the late 19^th century.

John Thomas, no relation at all to Queen Victoria’s harpist of the same name, was never without a smouldering pipe between his lips. Some glowing ember or an unextinguished match was probably responsible for the fire that ravaged his workshop in the autumn of 1966. Two weeks later disaster struck at Aberfan. For a while, every Welsh men and women lived with the bitter taste of grief and death in their mouths. They mourned as a nation for the coal-black misery of their brow-beaten past; they railed at God and the Coal Board. That terrible memento mori, together with plenty of gruff passion and courage, put John Weston Thomas back to work. The business grew and he took on apprentices.

One of them was Alan Shiers, a young woodworker from a neighbourhood in the Cardiff docks with the enviable name of Splott. Down in the docklands of Alan’s post-war youth, music was a kind of social glue. His whole family sang or played an instrument, without ambition, pretence or stress. It was just something everybody did. “I didn’t realise it then, but there was a sort of social belonging that only music brings,” he remembers. “Everybody would be dancing in the streets at New Year’s Eve. And I just felt – wow! This is it. You’re either playing the music, or making the tools to play it. Culturally, the people who make the instruments are a kind of forgotten band of brothers really.”

After working as an organ-restorer’s apprentice (“Organs were on their way out. They became ‘vestrified’”), then a boat builder (“just cheap labour”), then doing voluntary work in India and youth work in Cardiff, Alan was on the look out for a piece of rosewood one day, to make a bridge for his guitar. One of the teenagers at the youth club where he worked knew John Thomas and offered to take Alan round to his workshop.

“He was a bit of crusty character,” Alan tells me. “At our first meeting, this lad introduced me: ‘He’s looking for a bit of rosewood.’ ‘What?!!’ Mr Thomas replied, ‘I’d save the sawdust of rosewood. It’s very precious timber!’ Anyway, he delved into his store and came up with this piece of wood about so long. And I said, ‘Oh no…I don’t want all that!’ ‘You’re not having it!!!’ he said.” At which point Alan mimics his old master’s look of stern rebuke and cracks up at the memory. “‘I’ll give you six inches and you save the sawdust,’ was what he said and then I must have messed it up. I’m pretty sure of that.”

Alan ended up working as John Weston Thomas’ apprentice for five years. “I realised that I’d landed with somebody I’d been looking for since I was fifteen,” he says, “but I was 23, so mature enough to appreciate it. When you’re at school you just think learning is learning. But then…if you think education is expensive, try ignorance instead…isn’t that right?”

Alan had found a “gem”, the last in line of the old traditional woodworkers. There was a circular saw in the workshop, but that was about it. Everything else was done by hand. “I’ve had to unlearn some of that stuff,” he admits. But above all, despite the low wages, the stress of deadlines and all the rest, it was the camaraderie of the place that made those years so rewarding: John Thomas dressing up as Long John Silver in the oily old rags they used for polishing; or swigging water from a bottle clearly marked ‘METHS’ whilst smoking his pipe and talking to some trembling visitor; or leaving little piles of gunpowder around the shop and casually tossing his lit match on one, just to see it go bang and scare the living blazes out of Alan or anybody else who happened to be about him at the time.

“We could never make enough harps, because we were making them by hand,” Alan says.  “And sometimes he refused. I remember some bloke going on and on at him, and I thought ‘Mmm, he’s very quiet. Normally he’s chirping.’ So this bloke says ‘When’s it going to be ready then John?’ You had to call him Mr Thomas. Mr T, was as I close as I ever got to familiarity. ‘Well…it’s never going to be ready for you,’ he says. ‘I don’t like your face!’ Ha ha ha! You know, the Sales department would have shot themselves!” Alan laughs again at the memory but then, still wearing his smile, he quietens down before adding, “it was such a lovely place. You smelt the wood and you smelt the shavings and John would come over with some Welsh cakes. If you were in, boy, you were in.”

The post FINDING THE ONE (extract) – Meths, gunpowder and the revival of harp making in Wales appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

“I have now to add a list of their music instruments,” Park wrote, “the principal of which are – the koonting, a sort of guitar with three strings; the korro, a large harp with eighteen strings; the simbing, a small harp with seven strings; the balafou, an instrument composed of twenty pieces of hard wood of different lengths, with the shells of gourds hung underneath to increase the sound;…” The list goes on.

The uniqueness and value of Park’s account derives partly from the fact that he was the first white European to cast his eyes on whole swathes of land that are deep in the West African interior (and the first be able to confirm that the Niger River flowed west to east, thus resolving a geographical dispute that had lasted a century or more); and also partly to the fact that his was the first written portrayal of those lands. Africa, of course, has its own historians; but until recently, they carried their histories around in their heads, never on paper, transmitting them only in long spoken or sung epics that travelled no further than the ears of the audience seated in front of them. Their accounts are equal, if not, greater in value than Park’s. Their concept of history is also quite different. To them, history is not a fixed and rigid thing, an ultimate truth to be revealed slowly with painstaking research, but rather a story, a tale, that is constantly fed by family and clan imperatives, by the need to praise great men, by the vagaries of collective memory and the slow maturing of myths and legends.

In the collective mental archive of all these oral historians, the circumstances of the kora’s birth are richly varied. Some say that the instrument dates back to the 13^th century and was invented by the great and powerful king Sumaoro Kante, the man who was beaten at the battle of Krinia in 1235 by the greatest warrior and ruler West Africa has ever known: Sundjata Keita. Others say that it was Koriyang Musa, Sundjata Keita’s personal griot or bard who invented the instrument.

Others, like the modern Gambian griot Bamba Suso, whose version of the great Sundjata epic was transcribed and subsequently published by Penguin Classics in the 1970s, thereby becoming a kind of ‘fixed’ standard version of the story, also attributes the advent of the kora to Koriyang Musa, but with an important twist.

Here are some of the opening lines of Bamba Suso’s oration:

This tune that I am now playing

I learned it from my father,

And he learned it from my grandfather.

Our grandfather’s name – Koriyang Musa.

That Koriyang Musa

Went to Sanimentereng and spent a week there;

He met the jinns, and brought back a kora.

The very first kora.

Let’s set aside the conundrum that if Koriyang Musa was really Bamba Suso’s grandfather, then he must have lived in the 20^th rather than the 13^th century! What’s important here is Bamba Suso’s conviction that the kora was given to mankind by the djinns; in other words, the spirits.  On that ‘fact’, almost all of west Africa’s oral historians agree.

It makes sense. The best music always comes from the other side. The kora may be a manmade tool but it’s more than a spade, a hoe or an axe. Humans can channel their soul, all their feeling and their awareness of every immaterial force that governs their lives through the strings of a kora. In other words, to put it more poetically, with a kora they can commune with both their own and other spirits, especially those of nature. All music is a gift of the spirit for the spirit by the spirit. Depending on your degree of monotheism, the same could be said of the spirits plural. Yes, the spirits gave the kora to men and women and you only need allow a little poetry and metaphor into your world to understand that and accept it as fact.

The most common kora-birth story goes like something like this: A man called Jali Mady Wuleng – Jali Mady ‘The Red’ – was walking through the bush one day. Griots tended to travel a great deal, because part of their job was to fulfil ‘missions’ for their patrons or masters, often involving longs journeys to other cities and lands to solve all manner of contentious issues and disputes. Whilst walking on his own, Jali Mady heard this wonderful motion-stopping music and, looking round about him, found a spirit sitting in a hollowed out tree playing an instrument he’d never seen before. It looked a bit like the various harps that already existed in Manding society – the three-stringed bolon, or the seven-stringed simbin – but it was much larger, grander and more sophisticated than any of those, and it had twenty-two strings in all. Jali Mady used his considerable bardic skills to persuade the djinn to part with his kora, which it eventually did. And so the kora came to mankind.

(c) Andy Morgan 2013.

Extract taken from ‘Finding The One: The strange and Parallel Lives of the West African Kora and the Welsh Harp’ (Theatr Mwldan / Astar Artes 2013)

Available from:

Astar Artes Shop

Mwldan Theatr Shop

The post FINDING THE ONE (extract) – How the kora came to mankind appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita soundchecking at The Royal Welsh College of Music  Photo by Andy Morgan (c)

This wasn’t so much of a grand opening as a work in progress preview before an audience of warmth-seeking guinea pigs. The coldest March in fifty years brought them to The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff for a night of a thousand and one strings. After the last had been plucked, they disappeared into the slate grey gloom halo’d by what connoisseurs of the British breakfast might call a “Ready Brek” glow.

Apart from a brief first attempt a few years ago involving the great Toumani Diabate, Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita had only been working on their mission to marry the classical harp and the West African kora in total, on an off, for less than a week. This was hard to tell at times given the instinctive intertwining of notes that cascaded up the aisles, eddied round the rafters and poured into the ears of the magnetized audience. Discerning precisely whose flurried fingers were responsible for which cascade often proved fruitless.

Dressed in what he called his “Chelsea Blue” robes, brick brown babouches and tight black skull cap, Seckou Keita wore an absorbed smile in which both the delight in being there and the relief that a marriage of such distant relatives actually seemed to be working were present. Catrin Finch meanwhile, in floating black cape, black tights and spangled gold pumps, was focussed on throwing away her compass, log book and the other paraphernalia of precision that 25 years of classical music training had afforded her to go beyond calculation and lose herself in the flow.

Old Welsh harp songs, Manding kora staples, Latin dashes, Celtic arias and more were woven together to create something new that also possessed enough depth to sound sage, even timeless. If you closed your eyes you might just have glimpsed the late medieval Welsh harpist Robert ap Huw landing on a West African shore, trading his slate-grey skies for the shimmering light of Africa and the busy dark flow of the Taff for the lazy effortless meander of the Gambia river.

Cross-cultural musical collaborations are strange beasts, sometimes beautiful and coherent, sometimes daft and flat. A marriage of kora and harp, distant members of the same family, makes sense on paper. But whether it would work in flesh and bone was uncertain.  Catrin Finch and Seckou Keita each have the requisite courage, open-mindedness, patience and affability for the task. They’re also undeniable masters of their own instruments and determined to devote the necessary time for the alchemy to work.

This was only a first taste but it was already golden, despite occasional rawness and hesitation, easily forgiven. With albums to be made, tours to be done and an inevitable maturing yet to come, the marriage of harp and kora seems blessed to be long, warm and fruitful.

Andy Morgan (c) 2013

PHOTO ESSAY – Catrin Finch & Seckou Keita ‘Clychau Dibon’

The post CATRIN FINCH & SECKOU KEITA – The Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff, 20/03/2013 appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.