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)

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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.”

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Lojo in Georgia (c) 2012 Andy Morgan

The best thing about drinking wine from a hollowed out ram’s horn is that you can’t put the thing down. You have to keep holding onto to it otherwise it’ll topple over, and if you’re holding it, you might as well carry on drinking. Inevitably, with a ram’s horn goblet in hand, the wine keeps flowing and the party keeps going into the small hours. It’s a very Georgian kind of drinking vessel.

In a largely deserted museum gallery, Lo’Jo’s lead singer and songwriter Denis Péan stares placidly at a portrait of a man pouring wine into a ram’s horn. It’s by the great Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani, the son of peasant farmers who lived a marginal life over a century ago, painting shop signs to earn a bowl of soup and a hunk of bread. Now his work has pride of place in Georgia’s National Museum of Art. There’s something about his paintings of carousing men and sad-eyed Georgian beauties that’s beyond calculation, as if they were painted by a child who also happened to possess the gentle curiosity and bitter-sweet experience of an old man. They remind me obliquely of Lo’Jo’s music.

As we coax our hearts open to the power of Pirosmani, I ask Denis what he finds so seductive about Georgia. He’s visiting the country for the fifth time and has quite obviously fallen in love with the place. “It’s a humour, a taste, a smell,” he replies, “a charm that goes beyond discussion or argument. Take their love of a good feast for example. I mean, you can be anywhere, lost in the depths of the countryside, and people will bring out a large table, a white table-cloth from their chest, a large pitcher of wine and suddenly, from nothing, there’s the wherewithal to put on a feast for one hundred people. It’s splendid.”

Denis’ words evoke another table that is equally ready to feed friends and strangers alike at any moment, one covered in a tatty old oilskin cloth and laden with succulent grilled meats and bottles of red Anjou wine. It dominates the kitchen of Lo’Jo’s large, ramshackle headquarters near Angers in the west of France. Most members of the band once lived together in this solid old farmhouse, but communal life has its limits and Denis is the only Lo’Jo who lives in the place now. The others have all gone off to raise families in houses and apartments scattered around the gentle hills of the Loire.

Nonetheless, the house is still the hub of the band’s roving existence. The place was renovated over a decade ago by the music-loving mayor of a nearby town and fitted out as an residential music laboratory, an ideal communal creative space, all at the tax payer’s expense.  “It’s a cosmopolitan place,” Denis says, “modelled on a dream, or a utopia that’s almost within reach. The traveller finds shelter there, the table is always open. It’s a pivot for chance encounters, an open book for children.” Lo’Jo’s latest album, Cinema El Mundo, was written, rehearsed and recorded in a barn that adjoins the house.

‘Two Georgians at Marani’ by Nikos Pirosmani

Like Georgia, stuck out on the frontiers of what was once called ‘the Christian world’, Angers, in French terms at least, is a marginal place. But then Lo’Jo are also an defiantly marginal band. Not for them the ratatouille of Parisian showbiz. “To be marginal simply allows you to be free,” Denis confirms with a matter-of-fact shrug of the shoulders. “The music business tends to sell itself for a kowtow and forget about the cosmos. Once it seemed hard to exist as a band so far from Paris. Nowadays it only feels like like an immense advantage.”

In 1982, Denis Péan and violinist Richard Bourreau decided to create a little side-project to alleviate the tedium of their classical music courses at the Angers conservatoire. They called it Lo’Jo because the name meant nothing much in particular whilst sounding naive and playful.  They pooled their instruments – bassoon, violin, cello – and their passions – Debussy, Robert Wyatt, Led Zeppelin, Leo Ferré, Coltrane, punk rock – and came up with a sound whose originality deepened as the band began to integrate musical flavours from the four points of the compass.

Then in 1988, Lo’Jo were invited by the local street-theatre company Jo Bithume to provide the music for a touring show called Décrocher La Lune (Unhook The Moon). It was a carnival on wheels, a caravan of late twentieth century Pierrots and Bozos, musicians and acrobats, revellers and pilgrims. The show toured Europe for three years and Lo’Jo discovered their essential love of travel. Like 19^th century botanists, Lo’Jo were propelled to new horizons by a powerful curiosity, an avid appetite for new shapes and colours, a lust for a fresh view of the human circus. And when they returned home to Angers – from Mali, The Sahara, Reunion Island, Algeria, Turkey, Egypt, Cambodia – it wasn’t rare butterflies and orchids they brought back but new sounds and new instruments. These were then integrated into a style that grew ever more unclassifiable.

“It’s exciting to travel to unlikely places and play,” Denis tells me, “and travel nourishes the songs that come afterwards, because it nourishes our knowledge of the world. Our music talks about those journeys, those migrations.”

But can travel also become a form of escape? “I don’t know if we really chose to travel. It just happened.We found ourselves taking to the road, and it suited us. It’s become totally natural in fact. But it’s true that I have this great interest in the elsewhere, for what is different, in compensation for my rural origins, which were very sedentary.”

So was travel a kind of revolt? “No, not a revolt. Just to a reaction to my reality. My ancestors stayed at home, because they weren’t interested in the rest of the world, but also because they didn’t have the possibility to travel. They were peasants after all, and when you’re on the farm, you have animals and you’re bound to stay put.”

I ask Denis how he reacts to the word ‘exotic’? “Well it has that negative appearance, linked to tourism, which finds something interesting simply because it’s far away. But Lo’Jo isn’t searching for the exotic, not at all.  In any case, I don’t see anything particularly extraordinary in the idea of mixing different sounds, because in one hundred years, two hundred years, all music will be like that. It can’t be otherwise.”

In other words, embrace the Babel that is human existence, the “knowing bazaar, heterodox boutique, made of outlandish flavours and treasures, the great big market of the apocalypse” that is life, according to the lyrics of ‘C’est La Vie’, one of Péan’s greatest songs. But let it serve your own voice, not the other way round.

Searching for the exotic tends to produce fusionistic gewgaws, in which the parts militate against the whole. Lo’Jo do something quite else. Their polyglot clutter of instruments and sounds, the sawing imzad of the Sahara, the fizzing kamelgoni and sprinkling kora from southern Mali, the wheezing south Asian harmonium, the melodica, clarinet, sax, violin, bass, all of them serve a coherent style. All the rhythms and flavours that echo through their songs – funk, rock, jazz, chanson, créole, maloya, ragga, tindé, oriental pop – are brushstrokes in a picture that sits comfortably in its frame and makes sense. Everything serves a whole that has been carefully constructed through years of experimentation and changing line-ups.

With the relatively recent addition of drummer Baptiste Brondy, a 26-year-old toddler compared to the venerable founder members, the group now has a settled and permanent feel about it. Péan’s Gallic growl sits atop the alien yet sweetly familiar harmonies of Nadia Nid El Mourid and her sister Yamina, the daughters of North African migrants who settled near Angers in the 1970s. The agile gracenotes of Richard Bourreau’s violin flirt with the earthy bass of Nicolas ‘Kham’ Meslien, both upright and electric. Brondy’s drums inject youth and energy.

Central to the band’s appeal are the lyrics of Denis Péan, a fine poet who has published several books of poems. He travels without a laptop, camera or smartphone, relying simply on his mind to store pictures and sound. “I’m surrounded by people who take pictures,” he tells me. “Writing is a different approach to reality. Memory just preserves what is essential, which is the feeling of a place. A song depends on the décor. It’s a film in words, with the impressions, the moments, and without judgement, because it’s reality and nothing more.”

Denis Péan in the old town of Tbilisi. (c) 2012 Andy Morgan

Every Lo’Jo album, and there have been thirteen so far, lays out a table and invites other musicians to come and join in the feast. The opening words of Cinema El Mundo are intoned by Robert Wyatt. Other guests include Ibrahim Ag Alhabib from Tinariwen, The Mauritian Sega soul rebel Menwar, René Lacaille from Réunion Island, Malian ngoni player Andra Kouyate and many more. Lo’Jo invites the world to its banquet, in music, in word, in person, and then serves their world up for our ears to feast on.

Niaz Diasamidze is another guest on Cinema El Mundo. He’s a big rocky boulder of a man who plays genial host during our stay in Tbilisi. Diasamidze isn’t only a master of the Georgian panduri, a three-stringed lute through which, according to Péan, “the whole country breathes”, he also makes the instrument and is soon to open a panduri shop in the old ‘silk road’ quarter of Tbilisi. Diasamidze speaks perfect French, is the founder and director of the annual Art Gene festival of traditional music and dance, owns Club 33A where Lo’Jo are performing this time round, and runs an music equipment shop and hire company. Oh, and he has his own band called 33a who play the best contemporary Georgian music I’ve heard so far and can eat and drink the hind legs off a Caucasian mountain goat. Quite a dude is Niaz.

In the early 1990s, during the turbulent heat of the post-perestroika years, Niaz was studying graphic design at the École Des Beaux Arts in Tbilisi. The place was breeding radical young musicians with plenty to say. “During those years, everything was the opposite to what it should be,” he tells me in his nicotine stained voice. “There was the civil war between us Georgians, which should never have happened. There was the war in Abkhazia with the Russians. In fact, everyone around me had a weapon. A machine-gun then was like a cigarette is now. Not even worth mentioning.”

Niaz picked up and started playing the electric guitar, “because I liked the sound of the fuzz pedal!” But then, the rebellious rocker turned into an hungry pilgrim in search of Georgia’s authentic musical voice. With groups of friends, Niaz would drive up into tiny villages up in the hills and mountains of Gouria, Kakheti or Abkhazia to listen to old people singing old songs. He wasn’t the only one. Many contemporaries seemed to share his quest. “There was patriotism in there too, because they [the Soviets] tried to oppress our identity so much, that a feeling arose during those years, to go out and rediscover our music and our poetry. Identity still motivates me. Without that I wouldn’t play music. It wouldn’t interest me.”

Niaz tells me that life is improving, and that Georgians are learning how to be free again. Cranes, scaffolding hard hats and dust are all over Tbilisi. There are two cities in one here: the old one, wrinkled, arthritic, palsied and the new one, peachy, proud and hopeful. When Lo’Jo first visited the place in 2005, as part of Babel Caucase, a inspirational caravan of painters, clowns and musicians that crossed the whole of Europe en route to Grozny to raise awareness of the suffering of the Chechen people, only the old Georgia was in evidence. 

“It made me think of something which I never knew,” Péan remembers, “which is the French countryside of perhaps one century ago, with its women in their large scarves, pushing their clogs through the earth. And those small holdings, those little parcels of land.” Yamina Nid El Mourid likened the Georgian countryside to Africa, only white not black.

Babel Caucase never reached Grozny. Instead, Lo’Jo played a concert in a Chenchen refugee camp high up in the Pankisi Gorge, near the Chechen border. It was a wild, emotional, drunken night, that teetered on the edge of disaster for a while but pulled itself up high and smiling by the end. In its spirit of crazed adventure, without a safety net or rider, it was a bit like the first Festival in the Desert in the far north east of Mali, which Lo’Jo helped to organise in 2001.

I ask Denis whether he was frustrated not to reach Grozny. “No, because I’m satisfied with what the moment brings me,” he answers with a sage shrug. “And I’ve always, during my life, liked journeys that happen thanks to the cancellation of some other project. I find myself an innocent, like a virgin in the situation, in that cosmic flaw which you never imagined would happen, which was unintended.”

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2012
First published in Songlines Magazine – Oct 2012

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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.”

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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.

But much as my imagination was stirred by the brittle winter forest, the rotting sludge of leaves of the ground, the towering limestone precipices of the gorge, and the incredible views over the Somerset levels and Glastonbury Tor, I didn’t fly quite as high as our great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge managed to do when he visited this place two hundred years ago whilst off his head on opium. Or was he high as a kite when he actually wrote the poem.  Maybe both.  My wandering mind managed to concoct imaginings that were perhaps far-fetched but still anchored firmly to the crazy rock formations and quiet woods that lay all around me. Coleridge built something a thousands times more fantastic from his wanderings:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

a stately pleasure-dome decree,

where Alph, the sacred river, ran

through caverns measureless to man

down to a sunless sea,

so twice five miles of fertile ground

with walls and towers were girdled round.

and there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

where blossom’d many an incense-bearing tree.

And here were forests as ancient as the hills,

enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But O! That deep romantic chasm which slanted,

down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover.

A savage place! As holy and enchanted

as e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

by woman wailing for her demon lover.

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

as if this Earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

a mighty fountain momently was forced,

amid whose swift half-intermitted burst,

huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail,

and ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever,

it flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion,

through wood and dale the sacred river ran.

Then reach’d the caverns measureless to man,

and sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.

And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from afar

ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

floated midway on the waves

Where was heard the mingled measure

from the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device

a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.

A damsel with a dulcimer

in a vision once I saw.

It was an Abyssinian maid,

and on her dulcimer she played,

singing of mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

her symphony and song.

To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,

that with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air!

That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!

and all who heard should see them there!

and all should cry, Beware! Beware!

his flashing eyes! his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

and close your eyes with holy dread!

for he on honey-dew hath fed,

and drunk the milk of Paradise.

The poet was on a roll when he was disturbed by “a man from Porlock”, maybe the gas meter reader. When he got back to his desk, the drugs, or the inspiration, or maybe both had worn off and his head was empty. If he’d lived in 21st century Hackney, with easy access to his supplier, we might have been bequeathed a lengthy epic. As it is, all we have are these few lines. But what imagination! With a little effort I can related almost all the poem to my experience of walking in the gorge yesterday. It was most definitely “holy and enchanted.” To build a pleasure dome, however, with a sacred river that flows through unfathomable caves to a sea on which the sun never shines…that was quite something.

It was only this morning that a chill and cynical question entered my mind. How much of it was Coleridge, and how much was it the opium? I mean, I’ve often composed epics in my mind whilst off my tree, usually on weed or hash of somekind. And of course, they’ve always disappeared into thin air come the next morning. Many my mistake has been not to say “Laters” and just rudely squirrel myself off into some corner to write my psychedelic opus there and then. Or maybe I’m not Coleridge. Well, definitely. But the question remains: do drugs help the creative process? I’ve always believed the answer is ‘No’. Ebbor Gorge made me think again.

Andy Morgan, (c) 2010

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