Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako

Some bands score a few hits, some change the face of music and some end up defining a whole era. Les Ambassadeurs did all three. During their decade and half of existence, from 1970 to 1985, this West African supergroup wrote and rewrote the rule book for the Manding pop that was to achieve global success during the ‘world music’ boom of the 1980s and 1990s. They forged a new sound out of the dreams and tensions of post-Independence West Africa: socialism, pan-Africanism, black pride, authenticité, salsa, jazz, soul, rock’n’roll and the ancient art of the griots. They gave the Malian everyman and everywomen a chance to reconcile their instinctive pride in West Africa’s illustrious past with their equally instinctive desire to be fully engaged in the modern world. “Above all”, says Salif Keita, Les Ambassadeurs’ most famous ‘son’, “they taught Malians to love their own music.”

The reunion of Les Ambassadeurs is a banner headline long dreamt of by Malians, West Africans and lovers of African music the world over. What the band’s surviving singers and instrumentalists are preparing to deliver when they stroll on stage this summer is more than just nostalgia for a time when Mali was young and drunk on the hooch of hope and possibility, more than an excuse to rekindle past friendships and relive old glories and more than an hour or two of unforgettable Malian orchestral pop. What Les Ambassadeurs will deliver is proof that Malian musicians, given the right conditions and support, can create truly revolutionary music. That’s exactly what happened back in those salad days in the 1970s when Les Ambassadeurs were the pride of Mali and West Africa, and that’s what will happen again if the country can face its demons, heal its fractured soul and get back to the business of creating conditions in which music and culture can flourish.

Every successful Malian musician is an ambassador for their nation, because as the great griot Toumani Diabate famously said, “music is our cotton, our gold and our diamonds.” But les Ambassadeurs weren’t only true ambassadors, they were a pioneering institution, a school through which the greatest Malian musical talent of the late 20^th century passed before going on to conquer the world, a symbol of Mali’s enduring potential as a musical powerhouse.

Les Ambassadeurs is also a story of friendship, danger and music. It’s a story that needs to be told!

Dateline: Bamako, Mali. 1970. The honeymoon of independence is most definitely over. Mali’s first president Modibo Keita festers in a military prison up in Kidal, a desert outpost in the far north east of the country. The socialist dream that bought him to power in 1960 has turned into a nightmare, with enforced collectivisation and currency devaluation leading to financial meltdown and widespread dissent. President Keita’s response is to suppress political opposition and personal freedoms, often with extreme brutality. Then, on the 19^th November 1968, the President is arrested by a group of soldiers as he’s driving back to Bamako with his cortège. They bundle him into a tank and take him back to the Presidential palace in the capital. That night, a cabal of army officers lead by Lieutenant Moussa Traore and his Military Committee for National Liberation (CMLN) seizes power. The next morning there’s jubilation in the streets and the nation breathes a collective sigh of relief.

The man who arrests President Keita is a steely-eyed lieutenant by the name of Tiékoro Bagayoko. He fought for the French in the Algerian war of Independence and received military training in the Soviet Union and the US. His swashbuckling hardman attitude and all round ruthlessness earns him the rank of no. 2 in Mali’s new military government. He’s also named head of Mali’s security services. Not a man you’re likely to argue with if you value your life, let alone your peace and prosperity.

Bagayoko happens to be a big fan of music and football. He runs Djoliba AC, one of Mali’s leading soccer clubs, treating it like an executive toy. But to be a real big shot in Mali’s 2^nd Republic, you also need your own orchestra. In 1970, Bagayoko persuades the owner of the Motel de Bamako, one of his favourite nightspots in the capital, with its mango trees and wide views of the Niger River, to form a new resident band. A group of musicians are duly poached from two highly reputed orchestras based in Bouaké in the Ivory Coast – L’Orchestre de la Fraternité Ivoirienne (OFI) and Les Elephants Noirs. Their leader is a saxophonist by the name of Moussa ‘Vieux’ Cissokho. A lead vocalist called Ousmane Dia is lured from the legendary Star Band of Dakar in Senegal and more musicians are hired locally. Given the multi-national nature of its membership and Bagayoko’s penchant for exclusivity and style, the band is baptised Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako.

Initially, Les Ambassadeurs have only one mission: to be the best human jukebox that money and patronage can buy. Their clientele is a mix of military goodfellas allied to the junta, their wives and mistresses, other well-heeled government employees, expat businessmen, diplomats, visiting dignitaries and high class ladies of pleasure, all of whom converge on dance floor of the Motel nightly from Wednesday through to Saturday. The entry fee is sky high and the bar bills prohibitive. It’s a place to see and be seen, its atmosphere perfumed with an intoxicating scent of power thanks to the presence of Tiékoro Bagayoko himself, who often holds exclusive private parties at the Motel and clears the dance floor with a couple of shots from his pistol when the fancy takes him. The band play…well…almost everything: salsa, son, calypso, French variété, musette, funk, soul, rock’n’roll, twist, country and western, Russian songs, Arabic songs, Chinese songs. The list goes on. Clients often slip the band a tune in the morning requesting it to be played that same night. Rehearsals are from 2pm to 3pm every afternoon. Showtime is at 9pm sharp and the party goes on until the last man standing.

With the arrival of the renowned guitarist and composer Manfila Kanté and the keyboardist Idrissa Soumaoro in 1972, Les Ambassadeurs begin their slow mutation from a covers act to a real creative force. Manfila Kanté was born a nyamakala, a member of a hereditary clan of blacksmiths and griots in Guinea. He cut his teeth in various jazz bands in Ivory Coast before joining up with Les Ambassadeurs. His talents as a composer and arranger are widely recognised. Not only is the Motel the place to be, but Les Ambassadeurs are becoming a magnet for musical ambition and talent.

For a while now, a young singer called Salif Keita has been making waves in Bamako with the goose-bump intensity of his voice. He’s the frontman of The Rail Band du Buffet Hotel de la Gare, the great rivals of Les Ambassadeurs on the Bamako music scene. Like a covetous football club manager, Manfila Kanté sets his sights on persuading Salif Keita to switch sides. Salif is already at odds with Ally Diallo, the manager of Bamako’s main railway station hotel, in whose buffet restaurant the Rail Band is the resident attraction. When Salif questions Diallo about royalties and copyrights due on various Rail Band album releases, he’s told that he’s an employee of the Malian railways, in other words, of the state, and as such royalties and copyrights are of no concern to him. He should content himself with his generous monthly salary and free moped.

But Salif is beginning to think otherwise. After finishing his set with the Rail Band he gets into the habit of scooting over to the Motel to join his best friend Ousmane Dia and Les Ambassadeurs for a late night jam. He digs the creative genius of Manfila Kanté. He loves the intense camaraderie at the Motel. “It was those people who really taught me how to compose,” he tells me, “They were people who had been in the biggest bands in the Ivory Coast. They really weren’t just any old musicians. They were really strong intellects, people from whom I could learn loads. So it’s there I really wanted to go.”

The Rail Band are a force to be reckoned with. Under the inspired leadership of saxophonist Tidjani Koné, the group has been blending traditional epic poetry, for centuries the exclusive preserve of the griots or hereditary ‘bards’ of the Manding People, with a 20^th century brew of salsa and jazz. But despite the presence of musicians who would later become globally famous, like the guitarist Djelimady Tounkara or the singer Mory Kanté, Salif still sees the Rail Band as a glorified cabaret act, albeit a glorified MALIAN cabaret act. Les Ambassadeurs are something else: modern, international, outgoing, creative and the home of Salif’s best friend, Ousmane Dia. In 1973, he decides to jump ship, a move equivalent in Malian terms to Mick Jagger joining The Beatles in ’64, or Damon Albarn defecting to Oasis in ’96.

And not without political consequences either. Salif has to face the displeasure of Tiékoro Bagayoko’s friend and fellow-putchista Lt Col Karim Dembélé, who is the Minister of Public Works and the man responsible for Mali’s one-track rail network and ultimately, the Rail Band itself. The presence of Salif Keita in ‘his’ band is an adornment that Lt Col Dembélé is loath to loose. But eventually, Bagayoko gets his way, as he usually does, and Salif moves from the Buffet de la Gare to the Motel de Bamako. The reception he receives is warm but conditional: “The musicians came up to me and said, ‘you won’t find the Manding griots here. You haven’t come to transform Les Ambassadeurs into a folkloric instrumental ensemble. Either you’re willing to learn or you can get lost!” The memory brings out a chuckle in his voice.

Those welcoming words hint at the ideological winds that have been shaping Malian music since independence. Mali’s first President Modibo Keita was a doctrinaire socialist, who viewed his country’s moral and cultural health as his paternalistic responsibility. His goal was to decouple the Malian mind from colonial feelings of inferiority and disdain, and forge a new sense of pride and national cohesion using local West African traditions of music, poetry and dance as both hammer and anvil. In doing this, he was following the lead of President Sekou Touré of Guinea, to whom authenticité and Africanité were inviolable creeds. Guinean bands like Bembeya Jazz, Les Amazones de Guinée, Balla et ses Balladins and Keletigi et ses Tambourinis were already way ahead of their Malian counterparts by the late 1960s.

As soon as he came to power, President Keita set up the annual Semaines de Jeunesse (Youth Weeks) during which musicians, actors, dancers and sports men and women from all over the nation would come together to celebrate Malian culture and tradition in all its pied beauty and ethnic variety. He also created two National Orchestras, Orchestre Nationale A and Orchestra Nationale B, and a National Instrumental Ensemble, and stuffed them with Malians most talented musicians who became, in effect, state employees. Every region was also urged to create its own orchestra; Mopti, Kayes, Ségou, Sikasso and eventually Gao rose to the challenge. The musicians in these state-run orchestras started by playing what they knew and loved, which was salsa and jazz. But they were constantly urged to “be more African!” and so lyrics glorifying the new nation in local languages started to be superimposed over the Latin rhythms and eventually, epic poetry and praise songs were ‘borrowed’ from the griots and adapted to the new purpose of nation-building.

The most important of those epics recounted the exploits of Sunjata Keita, the warrior-king who founded the Empire of Mali in the 13^th century. It was no idle fancy that drove the founding fathers of the nation to choose the name Mali for their new country. Under the French, it had simply been known as Le Soudan Français or French Sudan. The story of Sunjata Keita and magnificence of the Empire that he created was a unifying legend every bit as powerful to Mali’s sense of its own being and worth as King Arthur is to the British, or Moses is to the state of Israel. President Modibo Keita was determined that every citizen should learn and draw strength from those epics, and there was no better way of transmitting them than through music. He also sent out his hated milices populaires to keep a watchful eye on the youth of Mali and ensure that their behaviour, their dress and their musical tastes conformed to his vision of anti-colonial socialist morality and Islamic propriety.

But the youth had other ideas. They revered Sunjata Keita but in their own way. Salif Keita, who was nineteen years old when Modibo Keita was overthrown, was especially familiar with the legacy of the great king because he was one of his direct descendants. As such he was a horon, a man of ‘noble’ birth, even though his father was a simple crofter who tilled his fields of manioc in Djoliba, a small town on the Niger not far from Bamako. A Keita wasn’t supposed to sing or play music. A Keita was supposed to be sung to by a griot, who knew a thousand beautiful words and phrases with which to praise him and his illustrious ancestor. Such are the strange workings of birth, caste and tradition in Malian society.

What’s more, Salif Keita was born an albino, his skin as pale as that of the coloniser who had just been sent packing from the country. He was a freakish aberration that inspired an uneasy mix of curiosity and fear in the strangers he met. In West Africa, albinos are derided, spat upon or sometimes fetishised as mascots with mysterious powers. In rare and extreme cases, they can even be murdered young by the paranoid and superstitious, their head and genitals removed and their hair harvested as a lucky charm.

Salif’s father chased him from the family home whenever he sang or played the guitar. He grew up lonely and isolated, often shunned by classmates, singing griot songs in the fields as he watched over the crops. By his own admission, music saved him from insanity, and at the earliest opportunity he left for Bamako where he busked in bars or out on the street, living off the few coins and notes that were stuffed into his guitar soundbox by appreciative folk in the audience. That’s how he was ‘discovered’ in 1969 by Tidjani Koné, the leader of the Rail Band. His very being was a revolution in itself: A noble Keita turned ‘troubadour’ in flowery shirt and bell-bottoms, who sang the old epics just like a griot. An albino who didn’t hide his pale skin away in shame like the others, but actually did everything he could to display it in public, along with his heavenly voice.

In the latter years of the 1960s, the patronising speeches about socialism and authenticity that kept being blasted out by the government propaganda machine had limited appeal to a Malian youth fascinated by the culture of the West and other emerging nations. Their heroes were James Brown, Mohammed Ali, Malcolm X, Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba. Their soundtrack was James Brown, Otis Redding, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Santana, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Bad Company, Ten Years After, Woodstock and Latin stars like Orchestra Aragon, Celia Cruz and Johnny Pacheco. Their fashion sense was moulded more by Haight Ashbury and Carnaby St than it was by African traditions. Black and proud but brash and loud and sexy and funky to boot – that’s what Malian teen spirit smelt like. The forces of socialism and Islam bore down on that spirit with their weighty moralising pedantry. Culture was an ideological battleground and nobody could tell which direction it was heading in.^[1]

When Modibo Keita was deposed, music stopped being a tool of the socialist state and became the flower in the buttonhole of powerful individuals in government. The military dictator Lieutenant Moussa Troare abolished the Semaines de la Jeunesse and most of the national orchestras. However, after the remnants of the National Instrumental Ensemble won gold prize at the Pan African festival in Algiers in 1969, Traore was persuaded to revive the concept of regular nationwide cultural gatherings. In 1970s he set up the Artistic, Cultural and Sportive Biennales, which became a sort of bi-annual cultural summit for musicians and dancers form every corner of the land.

People often ask why Mali is such a prolific musical nation. Part of the answer has to be the Biennales. They were a wonderful mix of melting pot, talent contest and music school. From the Biennales and the multitude of local, district and regional contests that were associated with them emerged a new generation of musicians who began to create a myriad of private bands sponsored by organisations, companies or individuals. This wasn’t the musical socialism of Modibo Keita. It was a new form of cultural free enterprise or, as Salif Keita puts it, “Every man for himself and God for all.”

At the top of the pile are The Rail Band and Les Ambassadeurs. Taking a lead from Guinea’s Bembeya Jazz and a band called Las Maravillas de Mali, which comprised musicians from Mali who had been hand picked by the government to go on a course in music in Havana, Cuba, Salif Keita and Tidjani Koné have already started experimenting in the Rail Band by mixing old griot epics together with improvised Latin jazz backing tracks. This isn’t the only style that the Rail Band were capable of, far from it, but it’s the one most popular with their audience at the Buffet de la Gare. But when Salif Keita leaves to joint Les Ambassadeurs, he’s told by his new musical family that he has to change. That’s what lies behind their welcome: “Learn or get lost!”

So Salif Keita goes to school. The steady rigour of absorbing almost every style in modern pop, and playing them night after night creates a fluidity and group cohesion in Les Ambassadeurs that is second to none. Salif’s intense vocals blend elegantly with the tight Afro-latin grooves of bassist Ichiaka Dama and drummer Djossé, the eloquent freeform guitars of Manfila Kanté, Ousmane Kouyaté and Issa Gnaré and the floating horns of Moussa ‘Vieux’ Cissoko and Kabine ‘Tagus’ Traore. Salif sings the Manding songs, whilst Ousmane Dia sings Wolof numbers from Senegal and Moussa ‘James Brown’ Doumbia sings all the funky soulful tunes from across the Atlantic. By 1974 the band have reached cruising altitude.

Manfila Kanté, Salif Keita and Idrissa Soumaoro work on new material, some of it based on old Manding melodies and griot praise songs. They also want to show their love of Mali’s past, but in their own way, and better than the Rail Band. When they’re invited to record radio sessions by the Malian state broadcaster ORTM, it’s that Malian material that comes to the fore. Sound Engineer Boubacar Traore does wonders with the new German microphones and recording equipment that the junta have bought to help create a Malian recording industry. Classics like ‘Mana Mana’, ‘Super Pitié’, ’Saranfing’ and ’Tiécolom-Ba’ are cut during those sessions, and released on the Sonafric and Mali Music labels. The assistant on many of those sessions is a young guitarist from Niafunké in the north of the country called Ali Farka Toure.

The reputation of Les Ambassadeurs begins to cross frontiers and go places. In 1974 the group fly to Paris to play for ex-pat Malian migrant labourers living in their all-male worker’s hostels, who toil in French factories and pine for the warm touch of home . “It was the first time I saw France,” Salif says. “We discovered the true face of immigration there, but we weren’t that far out of our comfort zone, because we were among Malians.” The group stay in the mainly immigrant Barbès district of the French capital, watched over by a government minder. Several members are sacked for various misdemeanours when they return home.

Balaphon player Keletigui Diabate and guitarist Amadou Bagayoko, later to become world famous as one half of the duet Amadou & Miriam, join the ever spinning merry-go-round that is the Les Ambassadeurs line-up in 1975. Keletigui Diabate, who also plays a masterful violin and sax, soon becomes a crucial part of the composing and arranging team. “I think Keletigui was the foundation,” says Cheick Tidiane Seck, the producer and keyboard player often dubbed the ‘Quincey Jones’ of Malian music.

Cheick Tidiane, who’s studying at the National Institute for the Arts, joins the Rail Band around this time but also becomes a regular presence at late night jam sessions with Les Ambassadeurs at the Motel de Bamako. “I was in my Guevarist period, always in revolt,” he says. “The government offered me a teaching job in Gao but I declined to go. I persuaded the Rail Band to let me join them on their return from Nigeria. I already knew how to play Jimmy Smith, James Brown and all that stuff. That was my secret weapon.”

The rivalry between Les Ambassadeurs and the Rail Band remains intense, but devoid of malice or bitterness. “I think it was a bit political,” Salif says, “because Tiékoro Bagayoko supported us and his best friend [Lt Col Dembélé] supported the Rail Band. But there wasn’t any nasty competitiveness. It really just pushed the musicians to work harder.” There’s a famous ‘clash’ in 1974 when both groups share the largest stage of Bamako’s Modibo Keita stadium. Each has been asked to arrange a version of ‘Kibaru’, an old tune with lyrics that rail against the evils of illiteracy. “There was no competition really,” Salif declares with categorical certainty, “because we were composers and they weren’t.”

Tiékoro Bagayoko uses his influence to muscle Les Ambassadeurs onto the bill of the Quinzaine Artistique in the Guinean capital Conakry. It’s one of President Sekou Touré’s regular statements of African authenticity and personal grandeur. Normally, only state-sponsored orchestras are allowed to appear at such events, but no one says no to Lieutenant Tiékoro. Come showtime, Les Ambassadeurs torch the rest of the bill. In the middle of their set at the Palace of the People, Salif Keita starts to improvise lyrics of griotic praise song to President Touré who is seated in front of him, over a popular tune called ‘Wajan’. He addresses President Touré as “Mandjou” which is a kind of panegyric nickname reserved for members of the illustrious Touré family, renowned throughout West Africa for their marabouts and learned men. To the astonishment of the audience, Salif Keita goes right up the Guinean ruler and kneels before him as he sings these words:

“Mandjou, don’t cry

Son of Alifa Touré, don’t cry

Son of Aminata, Fadiga, don’t cry

Mandjou, don’t cry

Father of André Madu, don’t cry

My hope lies in you

The time for crying has not yet come, Mandjou

May Allah reward you with gold

Mandjou, don’t cry

The whole world believes in you…”

(Lyrics taken from the website http://lhistgeobox.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/199-les-ambassadeurs-internationaux.html. Translated from the French by Andy Morgan).

Overcome with gratitude, President Toure stands up and places his hand on Salif Keita’s head. Salif the albino is touched and ‘blessed’ by one of the most famous rulers in post-Independence Africa. It’s a moment of immense significance. “I think we’re really feeling the absence of Seckou Toure right now,” Salif Keita says, almost forty years later, “because he was one of the pioneers who had some good ideas for this continent. Unfortunately, we need him now but he’s not there.”

These sentiments aren’t universally shared, to say the least. By 1975, the early adulation that Sekou Touré received for his defiance of the colonial order has turned into bitterness and disappointment. Thousands of political opponents, even entirely innocent citizens, have been imprisoned without trial, tortured and executed during his paranoid reign, especially after the failed coup of 1970, one of seventeen that take place during his reign. And thousands more will go on to suffer a similar fate before he dies in 1984. But that’s the griot pact: You sing the praises of the great and the powerful – tyrants or saints – and in return you receive gifts and protection.

As the seventies progress, Les Ambassadeurs become less and less of a juke box in flares and hippie shirts, and more and more of a creative force. The composers and arrangers lead by Manfila Kanté propel them forward. “Kanté knew how to be the boss,” Salif says, “And he was a good teacher, very open, with lots of talent.” The group’s reputation grows and the Motel buzzes with comings and goings. Even the great masters of Cuban son, Orquesta Aragón, pay several visits just to see them play. “It was top!,” Salif Keita recalls, “after we played they asked us what school of music we’d been to, and we said that we’d never been to any school. They were floored! They couldn’t understand how we had come to learn their songs so faithfully.”

In 1977 Les Ambassadeurs travel to Lagos for the Black and African World Festival of Art and Culture (FESTPAC). “Quite honestly, the violence scared me,” Salif recalls. “Guns were being fired off continually next to the camp where we were staying. It wasn’t at all pleasant.” A few years later, the band return to the Nigerian capital and spend time with Fela Kuti at the Kalakuta Republic, hanging out and smoking stupendously large spliffs. “He was treated like a king out there,” Salif says, “he was a king, really! Holding court at Kalakuta. It’s something that had to be seen. Then, years later, I saw him for the last time at the Zenith in Paris. Before going on stage, he made me sit down next to him and he said ‘Salif, we did what we could. We resisted. Now it’s time for you to take up the baton and continue the struggle. But above all, do it with your heart, and never be frightened.’ It bought tears to my eyes.”

Back in Mali, the struggle intensifies. The military junta are cracking down on dissent, arresting student leaders, trade unionists and opposition politicians and often packing them off to the barracks of the Paratroop Regiment at Djicoroni for a little softening up. Some don’t return. Modibo Keita dies from poisoning in 1977 and his funeral becomes a mass demonstration of discontent. There are whispers that Tiékoro Bagayoko himself gave the order to liquidate the former president. He’s kept busy rounding up the ‘trouble-makers’, and pays many unannounced visits to Bamako’s educational establishments with a bunch of scary looking paras in tow. But then, as often happens in the annals of despotism, Tiékoro suddenly finds his own head on the block. He’s called to a meeting with President Traore at the Koulouba Palace in February 1978, along with his good friend and fellow music fan Karim Dembélé, and both are arrested on charges of corruption and disloyalty. They’re sent up north to the salt mines in Taodenni, a truly terrifying place, where Tiékoro Bagayoko dies soon afterwards.

Without their protector, Les Ambassadeurs feel vulnerable. Several of the surviving cronies in Moussa Traore’s regime demand to take his place and become the group’s new patron. But the group spurns their advances. Finally, in August 1978, Manfila Kanté decides that Les Ambassadeurs should relocate to Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast. They leave in the nick of time. “Some politicians wanted to arrest us,” Salif explains. “So we had to flee at 6am. We met up and got the hell out of there.” At the frontier, the group are received by a gendarme in the frontier police who’s a close friend. A goat is slaughtered and a delicious méchoui roast is prepared. As the musicians eat their fill, a call comes from Bamako with an order to arrest them all. But the group’s host informs the caller that Les Ambassadeurs have already crossed the frontier and are in the Ivory Coast. They’ve escaped by the hairs on their ears.

Mali’s loss is the Ivory Coast’s gain. For some years, Abidjan has been the city of choice for many West African musicians fleeing oppression and moral constraint in their own countries. Its buoyant coffee and cocoa economy has created a wealthy middle class eager to consume good music and support musicians. The country has a formative but dynamic recording industry and there’s also large Manding community in the capital Abidjan, comprising mostly of merchants and traders, who are happy to welcome Mali’s leading group into their midst. The move to Abidjan is made necessary by the disintegrating political situation in Mali, but also in part by a desire to work in a place where musicians were respected and can earn a decent wage without having to kowtow to a powerful patron or the state. This is all quite new for Les Ambassadeurs.

Nonetheless, life is hard initially. Having been used to being given quality instruments by their employers or patrons, Les Ambassadeurs are now forced to hire their own before every show. They find work playing at various clubs, especially one called Les Trois Cocotiers near the sea in Grand Bassam. There are also weddings, baptisms and circumcision feasts to serenade, but it all seems far from the cocooned life of salaried stardom that the group have known in Bamako. They rebaptize themselves Les Ambassadeurs International. A few members including Idrissa Soumaoro have stayed behind in Bamako. He’s replaced by Cheick Tidiane Seck, who receives a telegram from Salif Keita and Manfila Kanté which reads “What the hell are you still doing in Bamako. Get yourself over here quick!” This is a new Les Ambassadeurs, an international band in exile.

A way forward comes in the shape of Moussa Kamara, a friend who works as a sound engineer at the studios of Radio Télévision Ivoirienne (RTI) in downtown Abidjan. One night, Kamara smuggles Les Ambassadeurs past the studio guards and records a two-hour session that features five songs. One of them is a version of ‘Mandjou’, Salif Keita’s paean to President Ahmed Sekou Touré. Along with four others, the song is released in 1978 on a small local label called Amons Productions, and then re-released a year later by Badmos. It becomes a massive hit throughout West Africa.

A smudgy black and white video of Les Ambassadeurs performing ‘Mandjou’ on Malian TV in the early 1980s can be seen on You Tube. Salif Keita and two other singers cut some moves out front, surprisingly shy and restrained. A dour looking Keletigui Diabate glows incandescent on the violin. Manfila Kanté’s guitar stabs and glides over the melancholy lilt of the Latin beat. The dress code is matching short sleeve shirts with geometric patterns on shoulder and chest, and stay-press bell-bottoms. The effect is disciplined, confident, and masterful. The Manding words of praise are wrenched from deep by Salif Keita who looks down, sideways, inwards, but never to camera. It’s so much more than mere entertainment. It’s a way marker in a road that started long before independence, a glorious peak for Malian and West African music.

The success of ‘Mandjou’ endears Les Ambassadeurs and Salif Keita to President Sekou Touré even further. The song becomes his personal anthem. Salif is rewarded with a medal of Officer of the National Order of Guinea, a diplomatic passport and an extended stay in Guinea after a tour, as a personal guest of the President. Les Ambassadeurs are on a roll. One classic recording follows another: the love song ’N’Toman’, a wrenching Manding praise song called ‘Seydou Bathily’, and song called ‘Kandja’ by ‘Vieux’ Cissokho that’s dedicated to the Guinean griot Sory Kandia Kouyate who died in 1977. If Salif Keita ever followed a role model, it was Sory Kandia Kouyaté. Two albums of acoustic “back to the roots” duets entitled Dans L’Authenticité Vols 1 & 2, featuring Manfila Kanté on guitar and Salif on vocals is released. They propound “a return to the positive values of the past for the building of a modern society.” Salif is nicknamed the ‘Domingo’ of Malian music, in reference to his football-playing homonym, who is blazing bright with Olympique de Marseilles at that time.

At the end of 1979, Les Ambassadeurs receive a Rockefeller scholarship to go and record a new album in the United States with producer Ray Lema. Their semi-official patron and friend, Ivorian businessman Sidi Mohammed Sacko, also helps with the cost of travel and accommodation. Salif Keita, Manfila Kanté, Ousmane Kouyate, Moussa Cissokho and a few others arrive in the alien decay and musical effervescence that is late 70s New York, in the depths of winter with hardly more than a few words of English between them. “It was very cold,” Salif Keita remembers, “I didn’t really try to understand American culture but it was clear that it was too much a case of every man for himself and God for all out there. We were used to more solidarity in our society. It wasn’t the same.”

The group need to prepare musical score sheets of their arrangements, but none of them can read or write music, so they entrust the job to a Puerto Rican musician and pay him $400. He promptly disappears with the money. Feeling demoralised and abandoned, Salif Keita calls his old friend President Sekou Touré who offers the group the hospitality of the Guinean embassy in Washington. They stay in America for a total of three months, recording several songs with Ray Lema. The most noticeable thing about those cuts is the overriding attempt to ‘modernise’ of the Ambassadeurs sound, with liberal use of synths, drum machines and other emerging technologies. This trend heralds the start of major artistic differences within the group. Even though Salif later claims that nobody wanted to “spoil” their music with technology, it’s clear that his ears are more receptive to what’s happening at the frontiers of modern pop than those of Manfila Kanté. “I listened to a lot of pop music,” he says, “that’s all I listened to. Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company, Bob Marley. There were always with me. Whereas Manfila, he just listened to salsa in fact. And jazz and Guinean music a lot. But I listened to pop.”

Salif Keita is almost arrested when he spots a fire at the top of a building next to the Embassy in Washington and attempting to raise the alarm with his two-word English becomes an arson suspect. “I understood that over there, when you see things like that, you stay out of it,” he says laughing. The band return safe to Abidjan and to a steady flow of new releases. First comes the album Seydou Bathily on the Badmos label, its title song a classic Manding jazz salsa blend in the mould of ‘Mandjou’. Then, in 1981, it’s followed by the albums Tounkan and Mani Mani on Sako Productions. Tounkan features songs recorded in the USA, including ‘Primprin’ which becomes a big hit. The sound is driven by a different energy, a big pop thrust varnished by the professionalism of the American studio that marks a change of register in the group’s career.

With the wide distribution of these releases in Africa and the African diaspora in France and other European countries, Les Ambassadeurs are becoming truly internationaux. Salif Keita is turning a star with global reach, a beacon of adulation for a West African youth hungry to see one of their own go beyond the stultifying strictures of home life with its moral straight jackets, its political corruption and cronyism, its poverty and hopelessness. There’s Salif, a Malian kid from the wrong side of the tracks, striding off down the Main St of modernity, in love with the world beyond African shores, in tune with its pleasures and benefits, aware of its pitfalls, but still African down to his very marrow. It’s a vision to make any young Malian dream.

But cracks are appearing. Despite the success, royalties are almost nonexistent and money is scarce. Success without the accompanying financial rewards creates strain in any group. Eventually, Les Ambassadeurs split in two, with Manfila Kanté taking a few loyal followers including Moussa ‘Vieux’ Cissokho and the singer Sandaly Kanté along with him and Salif Keita gathering some of the younger members to his side, including singer and old friend Ousmane Dia, guitarist Ousmane Kouyate, keyboardist Cheick Tidiane Seck, Djossé the drummer, Sekou Diabaté the bassist, Tagus the trumpeter and singer Solo Doumbia. Manfila Kanté and his followers continue to play a regular residency at Les Trois Cocotiers, and Salif’s crew find a new home at the Agnebi bar. It’s a painful divorce that offers the music fans of Abidjan the unique delight of seeing two versions of Les Ambassadeurs in two different places on the same night.

The world is changing too. The old gentility of Manding orchestral grooves built mainly on salsa and jazz is beginning to sound dated, as is the safe metaphorical approach of the lyrics that go with it. The Ivorian reggae singer Alpha Blondy is achieving mass success with music that rides booming bass and drum grooves and speaks plain words about uncomfortable truths such as corruption, lack of democracy, abuse of power and the death of opportunity for young Africans. In addition, audiocassettes and the ease with which they can be pirated is destroying the African recorded music industry. Its economic engine is beginning to shift elsewhere, mainly Paris where the big bang of sono mondiale is in full motion. Radio Nova, SOS Racisme, Actuel Magazine, labels like Celluloid and Sonodisc, producers like Martin Meissonnier and festivals like Musique Métisses in Angouleme or WOMAD in the UK – these are the new gateways to international recognition and success for African musicians.

The last Ambassadeurs album is recorded at the famous JBZ Studios in Abidjan in 1982. The title song is a classic piece of Afro-Manding pop called ‘Djougouya’. All the primary ingredients of the Ambassadeurs sound are there: Cuba, Afro-Beat, jazz, Manding. Concerts in Gabon, Sierra Leone, Liberia follow and in 1983, an invitation arrives perform at the Chapiteau de Pantin in the suburbs of Paris. Les Supers Ambassadeurs, as the Salif Keita-lead branch of the group is now called, return to France in 1984 to play at the prestigious Printemps de Bourges and Jazz en France festivals. At the latter, they share a bill with Super Biton de Ségou, one of Mali’s most prolific and successful regional orchestras, as well as Super Djata Band and the griotte Kandia Kouyaté. It’s a night to remember. 1984 also brings a mass relocation to Paris. Salif Keita finds himself a little apartment in the suburb of Montreuil, with its huge community of expat Malians. Manfila Kanté and the renowned leader of Mali’s Orchestre National, Kasse Mady Diabate, also find permanent homes in the French capital. The great displacement of musical energy away from Africa and towards Europe has begun.

Youssou N’dour lends Les Ambassadeurs a small PA and a sound engineer to do a tour of Senegambia at the end of 1984, beginning of 1985. A major argument takes place in the small town of Kaolack . This is merely the full stop at the end of a long decline in group morale. Les Ambassadeurs are no more. Salif Keita, Ousmane Kouyate and others return to France. Cheick Tidiane Seck goes back to Bamako before eventually also moving to France. What’s left to keep all these musicians in Mali? The military dictatorship of Moussa Traore is entering its most paranoid and repressive phase. The music industry is being shot to pieces by piracy. The whole system of artistic and cultural patronage, by the state or by rich and powerful individuals, is on its last legs. If you have the talent, the energy, the ambition, then exile seemed to be your only option.

Of course, as one star fades, another begins its ascent. With finance provided by the great Senegalese record producer Ibrahima Sylla, Salif Keita goes into a Paris studio in 1986 with Manfila Kanté and many of the musicians he’d known in Les Ambassadeurs and The Rail Band, including Cheick Tidiane Seck, and records the album Soro. The production work of Frenchmen Jean-Philippe Rykiel and François Bréant helps to ensure that the balance between the African and the rock and pop elements feels natural, even inevitable, whilst also sounding utterly revolutionary. The album is released in 1987 and almost from day one, it feels like the beginning of a brand new chapter in the long story of West African music. The spawn of Les Ambassadeurs du Motel de Bamako are set to conquer the world.

Now, forty years after that golden age of home-produced Malian pop, memories are warm, but a little spiked too. The reappearance of Les Ambassadeurs begs painful questions about Mali, the country that gave them birth. Where’s all the hope that existed back then? Where are all the social opportunities that were later squandered, the political initiatives that came to nothing? In the grand tradition of most modern Malian music, many of the songs recorded by Les Ambassadeurs were vehicles for social advice on a wide range of topics: literacy, education, honesty in public life, cleanliness, health, development and so on. Forty years later, the situation in some of these domains has barely moved forward and, in the worse cases, has even been reversed.

“I think that those people whose job it was to make those messages come true haven’t been doing their job properly,” Salif Keita offers in explanation. “That’s nothing to do with the musicians. But…well…that’s how it is. But what Les Ambassadeurs did was to allow Malian culture to become known beyond the frontiers of Mali. Those musicians became the real ambassadors of Malian and West African culture, thanks to what they did. And after all, that’s very important for Mali itself.”

The compounded mistakes and weaknesses of successive Malian leaders and their administrations, from Modibo Keita through Moussa Traore to Alpha Oumar Konaré and Amadou Toumani Toure together with a complex web of external pressures lead to the bitter crisis that enveloped the country in 2012. Mali’s 20-year-old democracy was ripped to shreds by a military coup and the nation was split in two by a secessionist Touareg uprising and a jihadist takeover in the north. Once again the founding legend of Sunjata Keita came to the fore in public discourse to help buttress Mali’s sense of self worth as a peaceful, open and potentially courageous nation. Above all, the fact that Sunjata had united the Mandé people under his rule, from the Atlantic to the place where the great Niger River turns south, thousands of miles to the east, offered a vision of hope and unity for the Sahel beyond the divisions of tribe and nation. That vision finds its echo in Les Ambassadeurs, a band that was always transnational in its membership and outlook, reflecting the polyglot nature of the region.

“The great orchestras of Mali must be a symbol of a sacred union around a nation which was peaceful with a moderate form of Islam,” says Cheick Tidiane Seck, the man who, along with others, has spearheaded efforts to reunite Les Ambassadeurs and put them on the road once again. “Mali has never been an incoherent nation,” says Salif Keita. “Mali has been a family which from the beginning to the end, from the north to the south, to the very last village, is one family. What we want is reconciliation. Society must come together as it has always done. It must unite.”

What is the true legacy of Les Ambassadeurs? “It’s us,” answers Cheick Tidiane Seck, “and the careers we’ve been able to have since then: Salif, Amadou, Idrissa Soumaoro, Manfila Kanté. That’s the legacy. It’s also the younger bands who emerged after us, and who acknowledge the debt to their elders. It’s also what we’re going to build tomorrow, to prove that we’re still here and can still touch people’s emotions.”

Us: A group of friends, partners, musicians, and adventurers. Les Ambassadeurs changed the face of West African music, but theirs was also a story of friendship, one that this summer’s reunion will warm back to a fine simmer.

“It’s Manfila Kanté who I’ll miss most,” says Salif Keita with affection. His musical co-conspirator died in 2011 after a varied but ultimately impressive solo career. “He was a like a big brother to me, and friends with everyone. He was the jack of all trades in Les Ambassadeurs: composer, arranger, guitarist…the boss of everything that went on at the Motel, along with his teacher, Moussa Cissokho, whom we called ‘Vieux’. But in fact, I’ll miss them all, because it really was a great band. There was a great solidarity between us. And there’ll be a few tears shed when we get together this summer, even if those tears may not be seen. The reunion will remind us of many things, and touch us deep down, because many of our friends have left us now.”

Andy Morgan. (c) 2014

Bristol UK, June 2014.

Commissioned by 3D Family to accompany the reunion tour of Les Ambassadeurs, July 2014.

^[1] Anyone wanting to delve deeper into the fascinating stew of influences cooking up on the streets of Bamako in the late 1960s should take a look at the work of the Malian photographer Malick Sidibe, or read an essay by the Malian writer Manthia Diawara called The Sixties in Bamako: Malick Sidibé and James Brown.

The post LES AMBASSADEURS – Mali’s musical revolutionaries appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

“At the first Festival of the Desert in 2000/2001 there were many musical revelations – Tinariwen’s trajectory has been well documented – but another very different group had a huge impact on me: Super Onze de Gao just played one rhythm, but what a rhythm! Devastating and unlike anything I’ve heard, the relentless beat from the two calabashes had the impact of the first time I heard the Burundi Beat, or the Musicians of Jajouka. Two distorted desert lutes circled around each other calling to mind Hendrix’s most trancey moments or Howlin’ Wolf’s band when their sound turns into a web of abstract groove. I love the way the Super 11 Album sounds, I love the rawness and distortion and the heavy calabash sound. This CD brings to the West for the first time the undiluted sound of the Takamba – Not for the faint hearted – it deserves to be heard by everyone who loves wild groove music with no limits.” – JUSTIN ADAMS.

Gao and takamba: the background

The Niger sparkles like a giant sapphire luxuriating on a bed of green velvet as it flows past the city of Gao. All around the far horizons are dry, earthy-brown and immense. Travelers coming down from the arid Sahara drink their first sight of the great river from higher ground just to the north of the city. Vivid, intense colour floods back into their monochrome world. The promise of all that endless rolling blue water revives their parched senses. Thanks and praises are intoned by cracked lips. The desert crossing is over and the ‘shore’ of black Africa, or the Sahel as the Arabs called it, has been reached.

Until a few years ago, you had to navigate the Niger on a rickety old car ferry if you wanted to reach Gao on the main road from the west. Nowadays, a gleaming new Chinese-built bridge spans the sedate waters.  The local people – mainly Songhai (pronounced ‘son-rai’ or ‘son-goy’), but also Tamashek, Bozo and Fulani – hope that this incongruously flashy piece of infrastructure is a sign of things to come. For far too long, their once proud homeland has been reduced to a quiet backwater, starved of attention, deprived of investment and stuck out on the eastern perimeter of Mali, far from the seat of power and influence in the capital Bamako.

Gao’s illustrious past owes everything to its prime location at the junction of the Niger and the Tilemsi valley, a huge superhighway of sand and rock that runs from north to south across the southern desert. Before Timbuktu stole its crown in the 16^th century, the city was the biggest caravan ‘port’ in this part of the Sahara, a proud and preeminent trading hub where gold, salt, slaves, ostrich feathers, ivory, millet and all the produce of Africa set out on its journey north to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Coming in the opposite direction, traders and students brought Islam and the cultural wealth of the Maghreb, Egypt and beyond, turning Gao into a Mecca of culture as well as trade.

In the fifteenth century, the great Songhai ruler Sunni Ali founded an Empire that stretched from the Aïr desert in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. Ali’s successor Askia Mohammed built and endowed universities and koranic schools, unifying his vast Imperium under Islam and establishing a sophisticated bureaucracy and legal system. Before the Moroccans invaded in 1591 and brought Gao’s dominance to an end, the Songhai Empire was one the largest and most sophisticated political entities that Africa had ever known.  Two and a half centuries later, the German explorer Heinrich Barth found all that glory reduced to nothing more than a sleepy town of 300 adobe dwellings, sweltering by the cool evergreen shores of the great river.

Despite its waxing waning economic fortunes, Gao has always been certain, and proud, of its musical wealth. Songhai culture has given us Ali Farka Touré, Afel Bocoum, Baba Salah, Khaira Arby and Ibrahim Hamma Dicko, as well as a rich catalogue of different rhythms, instruments and musical styles.  Among the most popular is takamba.

Takamba is music made for celebration; weddings mainly, but also birth and circumcision parties, harvest thanksgivings, festivities to mark the end of Ramadan, The Prophet’s birthday or the feast of Tabeski – as Eid is known in Mali – and many other occasions of communal joy. They say that takamba has its origins in a neighbourhood of the same name situated on the edge of the small town of Témera, up-river north of Gao, on the road to Bourem. Its driving force is the unmistakable takamba rhythm which pulses on the boom and bip before lurching at the end of every phrase, catching the uninitiated in mid-step. Try and imagine the lope of a camel combined with the flow of a vast sedate river and you’ll be getting close. This beat is locked down by one or more players of the calabash, a species of over-sized died out pumpkin gourd that sounds like an entire drum kit in the hands of skilled player, with its deep booming bass thump and rattling ‘hi-hat’ click.

Atop this sedate beat come the ngoni players. The ngoni is a three or four stringed lute.  The Songhai call it the kurbu, and the Touareg the teherdent. With generous historical license you could call it the great granddaddy of the blues guitar and you wouldn’t be too far wrong. The takamba musicians play the ngoni sitting down, with the instrument lying on the floor and one knee pressing down on its body, as if they’re taming a wayward animal. With their flowing bouboul robes and heads enveloped in a cheche or turban, the ngoni players cut a cool debonair figure as the notes flutter and fizzle out of their fingers in a bewildering bluesy stream. In the last three or four decades, the ngoni has usually been stuck through an amp and a pair of deliciously distorted speakers. Super Onze employ the vintage bullhorn variety. This gives the music a modern punch and grimy edge that could easily rival The Velvet Underground or The Jesus and Mary Chain. Sometimes the ngoni is substituted with an electric guitar thus sealing its contemporary transformation.

The final layer in the takamba sound is the praise singer, the lead vocalist who directs proceedings. Takamba is a generous music. Its role is to make people feel important and happy. The lead vocalist will praise the bride’s beauty, the bridegroom’s strength, the illustrious lineage of the bride’s mother, and the great deeds of the bridegroom’s father. He’ll tell stories about the guests or recite ancient tales of love and bravery, compliment dignitaries for their honour, their astuteness and their generosity, making sure that the power structures that underpin society are recognised and reaffirmed in joyful music. In that sense, takamba, like all praise-music, has a very political and social purpose, which it fulfills in an understated non-confrontational manner.

And then there are the dancers. Not for takamba the wild gyrations and flailing limbs of many other Malian dance styles. Takamba moves are all about dignity, restraint, undulating limbs, covert smiles and trysting eyes. The dancers generally form two orderly lines which face each other, one for the women and one for the men. Sometimes they stand, sometimes they’re seated.  The more traditional mode is the seated one, which places further restrictions on unseemly bodily movement but intensifies the subtle beauty of the dance.  Takamba dancing is a metaphor for flowing water. It’s the body’s hymn to the river, the source of all life. All passion, all excitement is subsumed in its gentle undulations. But those passions still lurk beneath, just like the currents of the great river.  That’s why some swear that takamba is the most erotic dance form in the whole of west Africa, albeit eroticism of the subtlest kind.

Both the city of Gao and the takamba style itself sit neatly and squarely on the frontier between two cultural spheres: the ‘white’ Arab / Berber culture of North Africa, and the black African culture of the Sahel and beyond. Although the Berber Kel Tamashek, or Touareg, and the black Songhai peoples have long been adversaries and have even known periods of open conflict in the past three decades, it’s common for takamba groups to feature both Songhai and Touareg musicians.  For that reason, takamba is a potent and valuable bridging style, which stretches hands out across a fundamental cultural divide, and invites them to shake and make peace.  Some even say that “take the hand” is one of the meanings of the word ’takamba’.

Super Onze de Gao

Super Onze de Gao was founded in the early 1980s by Haziz Toure, Asaalya Samake and Agita Moussa Maiga, who became the group’s first president.  All three were Songhai men from Gao.  In the venerable tradition of so many west African music ensembles, Super Onze was created in order to entertain at community celebrations, preserve traditions, propagate culture and create a kind of ‘club’ or community organization which could support the needs and nurture the talents of its members. In other words, it was more than just a ‘band’ in the European sense of the word. The founding members are still alive, but now it’s the next generation that fills the active roles in the group. That’s another advantage of their typically African orchestral structure. It doesn’t depend on any one individual or person for its survival, and can thus better cope with the passing of time.

Initially Super Onze de Gao played in their own homes, three or more times a month and especially on Fridays, the day of prayer and rest in the Muslim week. From the beginning they concentrated strictly on the takamba style, and were soon a popular feature of local weddings and festivities. In 1985 they gave their first ‘official’ non-festive concert, at an election gathering in Gao. The ex-military dictator of Mali, Moussa Traore, was returned to the presidency with an absurd 99.94% of the vote that year.

In 1986, Super Onze de Gao were invited to perform for the Songhai community at the French Cultural Centre in Niamey, the capital of neighbouring Niger, which is about a day’s journey from Gao by road. Throughout the ensuing years, the group gradually consolidated their position as the number one takamba outfit in eastern Mali. They participated three times in Mali’s famous Biennales – a government sponsored national competition to find the best music ensemble, best theatre group and best dance troupe in the nation – representing Gao in regional and national finals.

The Biennales were instigated by Moussa Traore in 1970 to instil cultural pride and community cohesion in the various regions of Mali, especially among the youth.  Traore also hoped to strengthen the patriotic glue that bound Mali’s huge variety of cultures and ethnic groups together.  Like many African leaders at the time, he was trying to build a nation from elements that hadn’t historically had very much in common. Moussa Traore has been branded a brutal dictator by history, justifiably so, but his Biennale system is one of the reasons that Mali is one of Africa’s musical powerhouses today.

Sometime during the 1990s, Issa Toure took over from his father Haziz as the main singer of Super Onze de Gao.  He is now their president.  He comes from a family of Songhai farmers, rooted in the rich alluvial mud of the Niger valley.  His son is also preparing to become a singer, and will hopefully take over the leading role in the group in due course.

Super Onze’s leading ngoni player is Yehia Mbala Samake, son of Asaalya Samake. Yehia comes from a caste of Songhai blacksmiths. The role of blacksmiths in Songhai and Touareg society is very complex and very important. They belong to an endogamous group, which means you can only be born a blacksmith, you cannot become one. Until recently they were responsible for making almost everything necessary for nomadic or sedentary existence: tents, swords, spears, camel saddles, leather bags and cushions, padlocks, cooking utensils and, most importantly, jewellery. They still make jewellery and many other artefacts. But the role of the blacksmith has never been confined to artisanal manual labour. They’re also storytellers and guardians of family histories and lineages. They’re often called upon to negotiate between two rival clans, and to arrange marriages. And it’s their duty to play music at feasts and festivities. As such, their role has many affinities with that of the Manding or Bamana griot.

Ahmed Ag Assalat, the second ngoni player, also comes from a family of blacksmiths, but in his case it’s a Touareg family. The other Touareg in the group are Aliou Saloum and Ousmane Yattara, who come from a family of wood sellers. The remaining two members of the group are dancer Fatoumata Sarre, daughter of a blacksmith and ‘Cola’ Toure, second calabash player and the son of a farmer.

In 2003, Super Onze de Gao were invited to the third edition of the now world famous Festival in the Desert, which takes place annually near the village of Essakane, by Lake Faguibine, 60 kilometres due west of Timbuktu. They were the unheralded hit of the Festival. Robert Plant became a fan overnight, as did his guitarist Justin Adams. Both harbour a life-long mission to seek out the distant African and North African ancestry of the American blues. When they heard Super Onze de Gao in the silky white dunes of Essakane, it was nothing short of a ‘Eureka’ moment. Ali Farka Toure asked Super Onze to warm up the crowd before his performance; a very wise choice.

Although Super Onze de Gao – who are also known by the alternative name Takamba Super Onze – became fêted regulars at the Festival in the Desert and were famous all over Mali, they failed to find a partner to help them launch an international career.  They did make one off trips to Washington DC for the Smithsonian institute’s lavish festival of Malian culture in 2004 and the Sfinks Festival in Belgium in 2008.  But it wasn’t until the arrival of the Dutch DJ and producer Horst Timmers, aka MPS Pilot that their dream of international recognition began to be realised.

Timmers saw Super Onze at the Festival in the Desert in 2003 and, along with so many others, was blown away. He returned to the Festival the following year, and found that the band’s impact even more powerful. In 2008 he travelled to meet Super Onze and put together a plan to launch their career outside Europe. He enrolled them into an ambitious project that melded takamba with electronica, or ‘la machine’, as the group members themselves refer to new computer-based music technology. The project is called Future Takamba and it toured around Holland and Belgium in October of that year.

Timmers also did a recording session with Super Onze de Gao ‘sans la machine’, in other words, pure and simple, live and direct, in August 2010 and the resulting CD, released by Two Speakers Records, is the best record of raw and rootsy takamba ever released. If Justin Adams is to be believed, you might just find it “devastating” and unlike anything you’ve ever heard.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2011

Artist biography for Future Takamba Project

Super Onze de Gao / Future Takamba Links:

Two Speakers – Super Onze de Gao CD

Super Onze on Facebook

Super Onze on Bandcamp

Super Onze on Soundcloud

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SMOD: (L-R) Ousco, Sam, Donsky

“Africa needs to speak out right now,” says Ousco calmly over a crackling phone line from Bamako. “Africa must stop crying.” It’s a neat little summary of what African rap is all about: No mincing words or metaphors. No ancient musical traditions that cosy up to power. No decadent ghetto fabulous fantasies. None of that. Just plain rhyming about the simple truth that everyone can see out of his or her window. “Africa is hungry, OK?” Ousco continues, making sure I’m getting his gist. “In Europe and America, people eat so as not to feel hungry. In Africa, people eat when they’re hungry. Everything is very very different, you know?”

Ousco is the ‘O’ in SMOD, a trio of hard working musician MCs from Bamako, the capital of Mali in West Africa. He met Donsky, the ‘D’ in the name, Mouzy the…ok, you’ve it now…and Sam at the Lycée Biya, a progressive high school in the Sogoniko district of the city. The four friends were fans of hip-hop but that was nothing special. Everyone below a certain age in Bamako was falling in love with hip-hop back in the late 1990s, along with the rest of Mali, and Africa for that matter. “Tupac Amaru Shakur, Snoop Dogg, Notorious B.I.G, The Roots, 113…they were our idols,” Ousco recalls.

The new rap sounds came in through the few liberal cracks in Mali’s media and cultural landscape, like the pioneering show ‘Generation 21’ on the national state TV channel ORTM, the radical Radio Kayira…’The Radio Station of the Voiceless’, or foreign channels like Black TV, M6 and NRJ.  They took hold of young kids who loitered on street corners around a charcoal brazier and a small bubbling enamel tea pot full of extra strong sugary tea, the kind that puts fuel in your motor in all weathers.  Such a cluster of aimless youth was called a grin in local Bamako street slang. There music was discussed, pirated cassettes were exchanged, frustrations were aired, and raps were born. Sam, Ousco, Donsky and Mouzy hung out in Faladié, one of Bamako’s most happening hoods, with its immense market and inexhaustible street-level energy. “We used to organize these little free flow jousts between the rappers,” Ousco remembers. “There was always a rap showdown or a dance showdown happening somewhere, and we always took part.  Sometimes we came first or second, sometimes lower down.”

Mali’s homegrown rap scene was young but spurting. Veterans like King Massassi, Fanga Fing and Tata Pound had pioneered rap in the local language Bamanan, with plenty of rude boy French thrown in, from the early 1990s onwards. “Tata Pound were the first,” Ousco states firmly. “And, tell the truth, we saw them as leaders.” But hip hop was still an illicit adventure for most kids, the kind of thing they wouldn’t dream bringing back home to meet the folks. “We were like clandestinos. My parents didn’t know anything about my rapping, right up until the time when our songs started to be played on the radio and our videos appeared on TV. Rappers were considered delinquents at that time.”

The four friends were beginning to get quite a following in their locality, so they had to solidify and find a name quick style. They opted for the acronym route and settled on SMOD. That was in 1999. Then, just a year later, Mouzy cut loose and left for Europe, like so many other Malians of his age.  The remaining trio stayed loyal to the name as a token of their lasting friendship with the departed Mouzy.  “Sometimes we even do interviews with Mouzy,” says Ousco reassuringly.  “In a way, he’s still in the band, and still in our hearts too.”

Sam, Dronsky and Ousco found a space to breathe and rehearse in the house of Sam’s parents, who happened to be the imminently world famous blind Malian couple Amadou & Mariam.  “We got together there every evening, in ‘seventh heaven’, on my parents’ roof,” Sam recounts.  “That terrace has always been our place of creation, of inspiration.” The trio were grafters right from the start. Sam says that hard work was the most important lesson his parents ever taught him. “Music is a tough career. Nothing is ever preordained and you have to persevere.”

The first fruits of this work ethic appeared in 2002 with the release of the group’s debut cassette ‘Dunia Kuntala’ (‘The path of life’).  It was recorded at Bamako’s famous Bogolan studios, with help from Amadou and Mariam’s French manager and friend, Marc-Antoine Moreau, and the French producer / arranger, Marc Minelli.  SMOD’s appearance at both the opening and the closing ceremonies of that year’s Cup of African Nations, which was held in Mali, brought national fame knocking at their door. They then toured all over the country, supporting the Afro-disco coupé décalé sensations Magic System, as well as Tata Pound and others.  “It was great to play in places like Gao and Timbuktu,” reminisces Ousco. “They really know their hip hop there.”

At that point, SMOD were following the rap textbook pretty closely. It was all about fat beats, baggies, white trainers, b-boy stances, skewed baseball hats and no instruments. The style is evident on the video clip for their song ‘Dakan’, which appeared on the band’s second album ‘Ta I Tola’ in 2004. But the independent spirit of African rap asserted itself in the flow. ‘Dakan’ accused the country’s leaders of being a bunch of robbers, and the video was censored by ORTM. It was typical of SMOD’s lyrical concerns. “We talk a lot about politics, about corruption and injustice,” Ousco asserts.

Everything changed when Sam decided to learn the guitar in 2004. “We couldn’t beat the Americans at their own game,” says Ousco. “We had to try and come from our own culture. So Sam took up the guitar and we tried to mix African singing into the rap.”  SMOD developed their own hybrid, which they call ‘Afro-Rap’, with rich tactile instrumentation and bubbling afro-centric rhythms providing a warm bed for their lyrical flow. It’s not American, or French, or even recognizably Malian. But it’s fresh and African. “In some ways I think we opened a breach,” says Sam.

SMOD got to know Manu Chao up on the roof, in the balmy air of the African night, above the raucous hubbub of the streets. He was in Bamako in 2005 to record the hit album ‘Dimanche à Bamako’ with Sam’s parents. One evening, when most of the household were already in bed, Sam found Manu strumming his guitar down in the house, so he invited him up. Manu was charmed by these three hard-working dreamers, with their radical lyrics that reminded him so much of his own. Being a night owl, Chao spent most of the following evenings up top, buzzing on tea, chatting, jamming and minting new friendships. “Whenever he come up to the roof to take some air, he would see us there rehearsing,” remembers Ousco. “Jeez! – he said, “Those guys are real warriors!” One of SMOD’s songs, ‘Politic Amagni’ (‘Politics Are No Good’), found its way onto ‘Dimance A Bamako’.

Back in France, Manu Chao sent SMOD an email telling them that he really liked what they were doing and would love to produce an album with them, if they had the songs

“We wrote back saying that if he was interested, we were interested too. To be honest, we didn’t who Manu Chao was at the time. He was an international star, but he wasn’t known in Mali.”

Manu Chao came back six months later and recorded SMOD with his little portable studio, up on their roof, or down in the house. His credo was, “You don’t mess with what happens on the terrace.”  In other words, keep it simple, natural, rooted. Then Manu took the tapes home with him to mix. “ The album ‘SMOD’ was released in May 2010 in France, and will soon be released in the UK.

SMOD started touring Europe in 2008, supporting Touré Kinda, Matthieu Chedid, Tiken Jah Fakoly, Salif Keita, Amadou and Mariam, Oumou Sangare and Manu Chao amongst many others.  They also took time to experience the French hip-hop scene and see an old idol like Snoop Dogg, in concert at The Zenith in Paris.

But far from being hypnotized by the bright lights of Paris and Europe, SMOD’s attention is still focused on their homeland. “To help hip-hip in Bamako,” Ousco explains, “We’d like to set up a studio with some French friends, because there are plenty of rappers who have no means of their own. We want it to be free. And we’re hoping to do more tours in Africa. That idea is dear to our hearts. We care about what’s happening around us. I mean, look at Ivory Coast. They have two presidents! We always said that Africa should never have celebrated the 50^th anniversary of its independence.  How can you talk about 50 years of independence when there’s no real democracy.”

In many ways, SMOD, along with many other Malian rappers, embody a new spirit, a new freedom of expression, unchained by old social constraints or the need to kow tow to the rich and powerful.

“Hip-hop is rebel music,” Ousco affirms. “It came along because things weren’t working right. Back in the day, the griot sang the praises of the King, except that the king wasn’t thinking of his people any more. Many people were marginalized and rejected and it was those people who became rappers. They said to the king, “Your power may be fine and all that, but there are people dying of hunger. And we who are from the ghetto, we want something better.””

Andy Morgan. (c) 2011

Artist Biography for Because (France) – March 2011.

The post SMOD – Folk? Rap? African? Smart? No doubt! appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Someone had the idea of organising a rai festival in the suburbs of Paris.  All the A-List raimen and women were invited: Cheb Khaled, Cheb Sahraoui, Chaba Fadela, Chaba Zahouania….  But only one singer was deemed worthy to open the event.  She was la mamie du rai, a living legend to whom all the younger singers owed their freedom of expression, their linguistic and moral rebelliousness, their sense of unchained hedonism, and a significant proportion of their repertoire too.  She was Cheikha Remitti.

“I had the impression that I was being used,” Remitti explained two decades later to Le Monde. “I suffered, I even cried.  They used me to launch the new rock-rai sound.  I’m the mother of rai music, but I’m rooted in a tradition… Remitti is like the plam tree that provides dates for all and sundry.  But all the young ones have evaporated, and I’m still here.”

Remitti is most emphatically still here, well past her eightieth birthday, sharp, defiant, halogenically lucid, still giving her audiences the proverbial cru-cut with her freight-train baritone holler and still raising the temperature with her shimmying shoulders and pulsating midriff.  Moreover Remitti really does seem to have overtaken and outlived much of the younger generation that she originally spawned.  Her brand new album ‘N’ta Goudami’, is creatively more ambitious and successful than 95% of the rai being recorded by singers one third her age.  It seems like Remitti has trounced the rai youth at their own game.

Under direction from her long-time manager and producer, Nourredine Gafaiti, Remitti took the bold step of recording ‘N’ta Goudami’ at the Boussif studios in the western Algerian seaport of Oran, the city where rai music was born over a century ago.  She also used a 100% Algerian crew of musicians and arrangers.  Younger pop-rai stars have been in the habit of paying through the nose for top-flight studio time and trophy producers from France or the USA, in pursuit of off-the-peg musical credibility.  Remitti likes to keep things 100% homegrown.  Her penultimate album ‘Nouar’, which was produced by the talented and often overlooked Algerian Mohammed Maghni, is a modern rai masterpiece.   Her creative juices are flowing as freely as ever.

To place the Remitti legend in its proper context, you have to take a trip back to a time when Algeria was still under French colonial rule, when 78rpm shellac was still the only format in town, and trains still ran on coal and sweat.  Cheikha Remitti was born on 8^th May 1923, in Tessala, a lost burg near the French garrison town of Sidi-bel-Abbès, deep in the countryside of western Algeria.  She was christened Saadia, which simply means ‘happy’ or ‘joyful’.  The name didn’t deliver on its promise, however, and Remitti lost both her parents at a very early age.  In those remorseless days when the welfare state was still a socialist dream, a young female orphan had to learn the game of survival quickstyle, the hard way.  “Misfortune was my teacher,” Remitti is fond of saying.

The young Saadia would sleep rough in local hamams (‘Arabic baths’) or shrines dedicated to local saints.  She made her clothes from old mattresses, and her coffee from ground wheat germ mixed with syrup.  By day she would earn a few francs working as a maid for French families, or helping out with the harvests.  At the age of 15 she joined a troupe of traditional hamadja musicians, who devoted their lives loosely to some revered Sufi saint, and travelled the countryside entertaining the populace.  In their company, Remitti felt something approaching familial warmth and security.  She also learned how to sing, and dance.

“She used to dance like some kind of possessed spirit,” remembers an old-timer.  Amongst her repertoire of crowd-pleasing tricks was the ability to balance a tray laden with brimful glasses of water, and shake her hips without spilling a drop.  She would also dive under feet of galloping horses at fantazias, which were traditional displays of breakneck horsemanship mixed with gun practice.  Audiences were so aroused by her antics that would shoot their rifles in appreciation, and came close to terminating the young Saadia before she had even begun to make her mark.

At the age of 20 Remitti moved to the moribund provincial town of Reliziane which sat in the middle of the vast hot plains of Oranie, surrounded by vineyards, wheatfields and water melon plantations.   She was still singing and dancing herself to exhaustion at festivals, weddings and henna parties, and her reputation was beginning to grow amongst the rural poor of Algeria’s far west.   But she was also beginning to compose her own songs with the encouragement of the renowned flautist Cheikh Mohammed Ould Ennems, who became Remitti’s protector, partner and champion.  It was he who took her to Algiers to record her first radio broadcasts.

From an early age, Remitti had adopted the style known as folklore oranais or bedoui rurale which was championed by venerable old male singers like Cheikh Hamada, Cheikh Al Khaldi or Cheikh Madani.  These folk troubadours would intone ancient epic poetry which spoke of the heroic deeds of yesteryear over a bed of pounding goblet drums, known as guellal, and the hot breath of rosewood desert flutes, known as gasba. Remitti kept the gasba and guellal but dispensed with arcane verses of the cheikhs. Instead she adopted a rich linguistic stew of local slang and rural patois, liberally sprinkled with metaphors and popular sayings.  It was the language of the common man, and Remitti became its champion.

The late 1930s and early 1940s were a time of intense hardship in Algeria.  The mediterranean was at war, famine was widespread and the western provinces were scourged by typhoid epidemics, immortalised by Albert Camus in his novel, ‘The Plague’.  Remitti didn’t flinch from singing openly and directly about these contemporary miseries, and about the more personal traumas of alcoholic oblivion, lost love, emigration and carnal pleasure.  Her music was like a clear and exhilaratingly sharp mirror, which reflected the daily grind of the poor.  In that sense it was both revolutionary and delectable.  To date Remitti has written over 200 songs on subjects as diverse as sex, alcohol, oblivion, nocturnal pleasure, the telephone, the TGV, virginity, enforced emigration, the carnal desires of workers at a chemical refinery, the offensive nature of forced marriages between older men and teenage brides, friendship, war…and the list goes on.  “Songs canter through my head and I tie them to my memory,” she says.  “I don’t need paper or pen.”   Illiteracy has never posed her the slightest problem in pursuit of her art.

By the her late 20s, Remitti had become the queen of the cheikhate, (plural of ‘cheikha’) a new breed of popular female singer, who would tour the countryside with a retinue of dancers, musicians and berrah, or MC.  In order to protect the reputation of their families and loved ones, the cheikhate would operate behind a soft-focus gauze of anonymity, adopting nicknames, decorating their cassette covers with Alpine scenes or stock library shots of young models and performing infront of their male audiences wearing a veil.  They were martyrs to the hidden desires of the population.  Dealing with the all-pervading moral hypocrisy of the nation required considerable courage, guile and self-belief.

It was sometime during the second world war that Saadia became Cheikha Remitti.   One day, she was performing at one of the biggest Festivals in western Algeria, dedicated to the saint Sidi Abed.  The sky burst open and the rain came down in sheets so Saadia and her retinue were invited to take shelter in a tented watering hole normally reserved for Europeans.  She was recognised, fêted, and to show her gratitude she offered to buy a round for some of her admirers.   The problem was that the bar woman was French, and Remitti has never spoken more than a few words in that language.  So she just kept saying, “Remettez panaché, remettez, remettez!”   (Another shandy, and another, and another).  When spoken by a North African with a strong accent, ‘e’s tend to mutate into ‘i’s.   And so the gathered crowd took up the refrain and started shouting, “It’s Rimitti!   It’s the singer Rimitti!”    “My name became Remitti because of alcohol,” she says, “it’s a great name.”

In 1952, Remitti recorded her first 78 for Pathé Marconi under the name Cheikha Remettez Reliziana.  It was a roots rai standard called ‘Er-rai er-rai’.   Two years later she recorded ‘Charag Gatta’, a barely veiled invitation aimed at young women to trade in their virginity for the pleasures of carnal love.  “Tear, lacerate…Remitti will mend,” she sang.  The song was a monstrous success, and Remitti’s fame was assured.

The bitter war between the moujaheddin of the FLN and France started the same year.

Remitti was unequivocal in her support for the rebels, but she also found it hard to refuse the growing number of invitations to sing on radio and TV.  The colonial authorities knew only too well that Remitti was the most popular singer amongst the poorest of the poor.   If they could only keep the mind of the masses  focused on forbidden love, alcohol and oblivion, then they might dissuade them from thinking too much about rebellion and independence.   To Remitti , the radio was just another gig, another way of making a living.

Nonetheless the FLN, high on hardline Nasserist Pan-Arabic socialism, denounced Remitti as a purveyor of hedonistic frippery and “folklore perverted by colonialsim”.  When independence finally came in 1962, the new government did everything they could to silence the cheikhas, who continued to sing in the everyday language of the streets.    Their high-minded strategy was to try and impose classical Arabic on the nation, a language which noone spoke, and hardly anyone understood.  Remitti was banned from radio and TV.  She continued to perform at weddings and feasts, and to release a few 45rpm singles and later cassettes.   But in effect, her country abandoned her, officially at least.

From the 1970s onwards Remitti became increasingly popular amongst the growing number of Algerian immigrants in France, who led a nostalgic existence in their factories, worker’s hostels and high rise low rent housing, pining for home, stranded in a kind of mental ghetto with no hope of release.   It became a habit to spend the month of Ramadan back home in Algeria, and the rest of the year living modestly in a hotel room in the Parisian immigrant quarter of Barbès, where she would perform regularly in North African bars.  Remitti could command very good fees for wedding performances, but officially, in Algeria, she was still persona non grata.   In 1971, after a rare concert appearance in Algiers, she was involved in a terrible car crash near Mostaganem, not far from Oran.  She went into a coma that lasted several weeks.  Three of her musicians died.  The incident is the subject of the song ‘Daouni’ (JENNY PLEASE CHECK NAME) on ‘N’ta Goudami’.

Perhaps it was this close encounter with death, coupled with her increasing age that prompted Cheikha Remitti to go on the ‘hadj’ or pilgrimmage to Mecca in 1976.   Since then the doyenne of hedonism has actually lived quite an ascetic life, devoid of cigarettes or alcohol, and sustained mostly by rice and water.  This might go some way to explaining why Remitti is still singing, dancing and speaking her remarkable mind at the age of 82.  The disappointment of the Bobigny Rai Festival, and the blatant way in which the new pop rai starts like Cheb Khaled or Chaba Fadela have plundered her repertoire without moderation or recognition, or even thanks, all weigh heavy on Remitti’s mind, but they haven’t managed to destroy her spirit.

In 1994, partial recognition by the self-proclaimed guardians of Algerian culture followed Remitti’s two triumphant performances at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris.  For Algerian audience members present, whose lives and hopes were being torn apart by the increasingly brutal civil war back home, Remitti’s appearance was a triumphant homecoming, a deeply moving exposé of Algeria’s true character, which is Mediterranean and not middle Eastern, a handsome mongrel mix of Berber, Christian, Jewish, Ottoman, Spanish, French, and Maltese  influences with a corresponding language of infinite richness which has no better champion than Remitti herself.

Since then Remitti has been hailed in every continent, and fêted at festivals from Tokyo to Toronto.  In 1994 she collaborated with Robert Fripp and Flea from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on the album ‘Sidi Mansour’, which nudged the creative boundaries of the rai genre out further than ever before.  She has always avoided the spangly cabaret pop approach to rai so favoured by the younger generation.  Even though she has adopted the bare bones of the rock format in her last two releases, the pure essence of the North African blues, whose active ingredients are powerful unpolished vocals, driving trance beats and the searing swirl of the gasba flute, remains the most crucial element in Remitti’s music.

Remitti is nothing less than the living surviving incarnation of Algeria’s long lost lust for life.  Like some dauntless liberated aunt at a dysfunctional family feast, who sings, laughs, chides and surveys the psychological torture going on all around with her knowing eye, Remitti continues to remind her fellow Algerians that spiritual faith can coexist with a love of life and physical pleasure.  No regrets.  Live and let live.   Let’s have another one Remitti…remettez, remettez!

Andy Morgan, c 2004

(Artist biog for Because, 2004).

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If your power is almighty,

Then help the Touareg man.

Since his beginning,

He has lived in arid zones,

Rigorous, deserted

And without means.

He looks at the ever-changing world,

That overtakes him,

And he is left behind

In his ignorance.”

‘OUTAMACHEK’ from the album ‘Adagh’ by Tamikrest (Written and composed by Ousmane Ag Mossa – Translation by Andy Morgan).

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s Tinariwen who created the path,” declares Ousmane Ag Mossa, frizzy-locked leader of Tamikrest, in a pre-emptive strike against a thousand inevitable questions. “But the way I see it, if younger bands don’t come through, then Touareg music will eventually die.  They created the path and now it’s up to us to walk down it and create the future.”

Ousmane was born twenty-seven years ago in a village called Tin-Zaouaten, a solitary speck squeezed up against Mali’s northeastern border with Algeria.  It’s a remote marginal place.   Or to put it another way: there’s distant, there’s remote and beyond both of those there’s Tin-Zaouaten.

To an outsider, the village would appear to be nothing more than a motley collection of one-storey adobe and breezeblock houses, huddling together for protection against the burning sun, the black rocky hills and the lonely immensity of the surrounding desert.   But to Ousmane, it’s home.

Like its ‘neighbour’ Tessalit, two hundred and fifty kilometres to the west, Tin-Zaouaten is blessed with a water table that lurks benignly just below the surface of the gritty soil.  Dig a few metres and you can usually find water in abundance.   That’s why Tin-Zaouaten, or ‘Tinza’ for short, is famed in the desert for its gardens and garden produce. Ousmane’s father Mossa was born a nomad out in the bush, but by the time Ousmane arrived he had settled in Tinza, making a living from growing onions, beetroot, carrots and dates, and selling them in the local markets.

Ousmane Tamikrest & Abaraybone Tinariwen

In 1985 drought shook desert life to its core. The rains had failed for several seasons and the village was haunted by famine. “I was born in a time of calamity,” says Ousmane. “In the middle of dreadful events for the Touareg people.  My parents knew so much hardship. Then when I was five years old the rebellion broke out. It was 1990, the year of war. I was a child, and I used to hide in amongst the rocks with the other women and children, just a few kilometres north of the village over the Algerian border. When I think of that time, it’s as if it’s all still happening in front of me.”

Thus Ousmane’s childhood was buffeted by the searing winds of recent Touareg history. The droughts of ‘68 to ’74 almost destroyed the animal herds and with them the ancient nomadic way of life of the Touareg. The drought of ’84 to ’85 almost dealt the final blow. Thousands of young men fled into exile in Algeria, Libya, Burkina Faso and beyond. That’s where the modern Touareg guitar style of music was born and then nourished by anger, homesickness, frustration and dreams of a better life. It was this generation of Touareg men, known as the ishumar, who returned to Mali and Niger in 1990 to rebel against the callousness, corruption and arrogance of the governments in the distant capitals of Bamako and Niamey.

At first Ousmane just listened to traditional Touareg music at home, and the newer guitar music on battered old cassettes. “I well remember hearing my first Tinariwen songs. I was about five. After the death of my mother, my father was obliged to take me to live with my grown-up sister.  One morning I was sitting in front of the house and this guy walked by singing a song by Inteyeden called ‘Imidiwan Kel Hoggar’ (‘My Friends the Hoggar People’).  It went straight into my brain…ha ha ha.”

A few years later Ousmane began to play the guitar himself, and write songs.  He was attending a school in Tinza called Les Enfants de l’Adrar, set up by a French NGO and a local man turned community leader called Hama Ag Sid Ahmed. At the end of every school year the children would create and perform musical plays about pressing themes like ignorance, drought, education and culture.

Hama bought the school an acoustic guitar, and Ousmane adopted the instrument. With his constant friend Cheikh Ag Tiglia, he would write songs and perform them at the school shows. He learned the Tamashek guitar style by listening to a particular cassette which Tinariwen’s leader Ibrahim ‘Abaraybone’ had recorded in Algeria back in 1998.

In 2002, events once again undermined the tenuous calm and stability in Tinza.  The village was home to one of the southern desert’s most infamous freedom fighters and warlords, Ibrahim Ag Bahanga. For this reason it became a military no-go zone. Ousmane’s father left to live with his eldest sons in Libya, and both Ousmane and Cheikh went south to Kidal

Kidal is the capital of the far north east of Mali, a region known as the Adagh des Iforas (‘The Mountains of the clan Iforas’). With its wide sandy streets and dispersed one storey earthen houses, Kidal has the feel of a frontier town. For the Adagh Touareg, it’s where it all happens.

Tamikrest: 'Adagh'

Ousmane and Cheikh played the guitar and sang in hidden corners of Kidal, around a fire, drinking bittersweet Touareg tea with their friends. Their reputations grew very slowly, steadily, without wild leaps or fanfares. After a while they heard that a local cultural centre called the DDRK or ‘Maison du Luxembourg’, founded by the Duchess of Luxembourg who had fallen in love with the town when she visited it in 2001, was offering music classes. The teacher turned out to be Juhan Ecaré, a musician from Ivory Coast.

Then this French theatre troupe called La Calma arrived in town and enrolled over fifty young people to perform a massive theatre piece featuring sketches about a host of local issues.  It went down a storm in January 2006 at a local festival called ‘The Saharan Nights of Essouk’.   Although Ousmane didn’t take part in the project, claiming disinterest in theatre (“I’m a musician…theatre’s not my thing”), Cheikh went along and played with a local percussionist called Aghaly Ag Mohammedine and a bass player called Ibrahim Ahmed, aka ‘Pinnochio’ or ‘Pino’ for short.

On their return, Pino proposed that they form a proper band and record a demo at a small studio, which had been set up at the Maison du Luxembourg. They also decided that they needed a name, and agreed on ‘Tamikrest’, which means the knot, the junction, the coalition, in Tamashek, the language of Touareg.   “Each of us came from a different place, a different zone,” explains Ousmane.  “Cheikh and I from Tinza. Aghaly and Mossa Maiga from Kidal. Pino from Gao.  But we found each other and we had the same ideas, the same intentions.  We were like a coalition.”

On the 23^rd May 2006, the army garrison in Kidal was attacked by a new Touareg rebel movement called the Alliance Démocratique pour le Changement (ADC). “It was a hard time for me,” remembers Ousmane. “I woke up early that morning and discovered that the town had turned into a nightmare. Those who wanted to join the rebels had already done so. But, in general, that wasn’t the choice of me and my friends. Because we’d never been in the army. We were musicians, not people who carry arms.”

By the end of the year a fragile peace had been restored, although Tinza’s recalcitrant son Ibrahim Ag Bahanga refused to compromise and remained on the run with his own splinter militia. Tamikrest performed at the peace Forum in March 2007, when the Touareg rebels met with the Malian government and thousands of community representatives in Kidal to map out a way forward.

The group were developing their style and their fan base, which consisted mainly of Kidal’s younger generation. They knew the Tamashek guitar style intimately, but they were also deeply into rap, metal, Maghrebi pop and afro-disco music from Ivory Coast. They had new tastes, new desires, new ambitions and Tamikrest was their band.

Pino was quite the mover and shaker. In late 2007 he contacted Manny Ansar, the director of the now world-famous Festival in the Desert and clinched a gig for Tamikrest. The band found the money to transport themselves the 600 miles eastward to Timbuktu.  In the silky dunes of Essakane they met Dirtmusic, a group of rock’n’roll veterans from the USA and Australia. It was one of those meetings fashioned by fate in destiny’s workshop.

Chris Eckman of Dirtmusic remembers the meeting thus: “On our first morning in Essakane we woke up hearing music, so we went across the sand to the tent opposite ours and that’s where Tamikrest was playing.  Chris Brokaw grabbed his dobro and headed over, then Hugo and I eventually did the same and basically for three days we didn’t leave.”

Once again music overflew all barriers of language, culture, style, shyness and reticence. The friendship formed at Essakane grew in the following months and lead to an invitation by Dirtmusic to come to the Malian capital Bamako to make an album, and contribute to Dirtmusic’s own oeuvre. After another epic journey of 1,200 miles, by car and bus, Ousmane, Aghaly and crew entered their first professional studio and ‘Adagh’ was born.

“It felt very natural to play with Dirtmusic,” asserts Ousmane. “I’ve always appreciated all kinds of different music and it was such a pleasure to play with a different kind of band. Music isn’t something you study; it’s something you learn with your ears. I’d been listening and playing along to Bob Marley, to Marc Knopfler and Dire Straits, to Tinariwen for years.  We’d been listening to so much international music and that’s why the marriage with Dirtmusic worked.”

The end of 2009 finds Tamikrest on the cusp of the world and the next chapter in their great adventure. “This opportunity to go to Europe feels like a big responsibility,” says Ousmane. “I feel like someone who’s done this exam and is now waiting for the result. We’ve already achieved quite a bit, but the hardest is still ahead.”

One thing is certain: Ousmane is clear about the band’s mission. “The situation of the Touareg is very difficult right now,” he declares.  “Even before I played the guitar and started recording, I had this ambition to be a lawyer or you might say, an ‘advocate’. I wanted to be capable of expressing the hurt I felt in my heart, and speak out about the situation, even at the United Nations.  Because we’re a people who don’t have journalists, we don’t have lawyers, we don’t have advocates. But it was only later that I realised that a musician can play that role.”

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“What is the weakest part of any nation or people? It’s ignorance. We are stuck in our ignorance. I see the world changing, racing ahead, and leaving us behind.  And the only thing that is holding us back is our ignorance. As artists, it’s our duty to make our problems known to the world, to sing songs about the nomadic life, about our traditions and culture. But above all, revolutionary songs, about what we see, about what the government is doing to our people, which makes no sense to me.”

There it is…Tamikrest, the knot, the coalition, the future.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2009

Artist Biog for Glitterhouse Records, Dec 2009.

The post TAMIKREST – The coalition, the knot, the future appeared first on Andy Morgan Writes.

Rachid Taha

“Who are you?” “Who am I?”  It sounds like there’s an existential storm broiling deep inside the soul of France’s number 1 musical upsetter.   ‘Tékitoi?’, the title of the latest in a long line of probing, provocative and highly original Rachid Taha releases,  is a punchy piece of French street lingo whose tone actually says something more like “Who the f**k are you?”.   If Taha is feeling the need to ask himself and others the most basic questions, then at least he’s doing it with all the verve and vivacity of a straight-jabbing southpaw boxer.

But that’s the man all over.  Some strange mutation in the Taha gene over forty-six years ago created a phenomenon as rare as as an albino tiger; a musician of Arabic origin with the courage, intelligence and insight to speak the truth as he sees it, loud and direct, without the softening comforts of metaphor, parable or nostalgia.  Or perhaps this uniqueness can be put down to the simple fact that music hit Taha, and vice versa, in the first few years of the 1980s, a period when rock’n’roll still meant rebellion rather than dollars, and when young North African immigrants and sons of immigrants living in France were beginning to shake off decades of timidity with their very own equivalent of America’s Black Pride movement.

Rachid Taha was born in Oran, western Algeria, and spent his first ten years in the Algerian town of Sig, famous for its olives.  Defeated by the legacy of war and the political corruption of Algeria’s new rulers, Rachid’s father moved the family to France in 1968.   After a village adolescence and fruitless stint in a catholic school, Rachid took the first of many parachuteless leaps into the void at the end of his teens by leaving the family home in the picturesque eastern French province of les Vosges and moving to Lyon. The false security of the immigrant ghetto is something that he has tried to avoid all his life.   “You have to be an adventurer,” he says.  “Just staying in your own community is more to do with laziness.  It’s conformism.”  In the big bad city, Rachid was greeted by the concrete-hard reality of racism.  A shitty factory job was almost inevitable, but the impulse to set up a club with his mates in order to provide an alternative to the city’s established and often overtly racist nitespots definitely wasn’t.  There, at ‘Les Refoulés’ (‘The Repressed’), Taha hit the decks and span everything from Oum Khalthoum to Kraftwerk, with salvos of The Clash, Led Zep, The Who, Neil Young and Johnny Cash mixed in between.

It was a musical education to die for.  When Taha formed his first band Carte de Sejour (Green Card) with a couple of North African mates from the heating appliance factory where he was working at the time, it was soon clear that a completely new voice had arrived on the scene, one that had very little to do with the cabaret rebellion of Algerian rai music, and everything to do with pure rock’n’roll energy and defiance.   Rather than smother protest in the cotton wool of metaphor, the Arabic way, Rachid indulged his natural appetite for challenging gestures and open revolt.  Carte de Sejour stirred up a twister of outrage and irony by releasing an arabesque cover of Charles Trenet’s ‘Douce France’, a sentimental wartime ballad beloved of nationalists and red-faced patriots.   He then persuaded Mitterand’s notorious minister of culture, Jack Laing, to distribute copies of the single to every member of the French parliament.  Rachid Taha was undoubtedly France’s first real punk, with balls, brains and plenty of heart to boot.

Since then Rachid Taha has gone solo and never looked back.  Looking back is the quickest way to dusty death in his book.  His twenty-two year collaboration with the English producer Steve Hillage has created a whole canon of innovative, powerful and enduring songs which jostle rock, electronic and North African influences in the service of honesty and risk.  ‘Voilà Voilà’ was like a national wake up call to the growing tide of racism in France, and a one-off marriage of the physical hedonism of techno with the verbal attack of protest music.  “I think therefore I dance!” is Rachid’s philisophical summary of this unique approach.  The album ‘Olé Olé’ was a head-on collision between the sounds of the Maghreb and techno culture, and its cover, depicting a peroxide blue-eyed Taha, was a perfect piece of social and sexual disorientation.  ‘Diwan’ was an homage to the Arabic and North African stars of yesteryear or “my equivalent to John Lennon’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ album”, as Rachid himself calls it.  Rachid and Hillage skilful restoration work was rewarded with the ballistic success of ‘Ya Rayah’, a brilliant 21^st century ressurrection of a classic song, which broke into clubland and rode the charts in France and far off places like Lebanon and Colombia.  ‘1-2-3 Soleil’, the live recording of Taha’s epoch-making encounter with rai rulers Khaled and Faudel at the Bercy stadium in Paris in 1998, was a million seller which hoisted the name of Rachid Taha overground in one neat strike.  ‘Made In Medina’, released in 2000, heralded a new maturity, a new fascination with the voodoo roots of rock and trance, and a new obsession with the dark and gathering storm clouds on society’s horizons.  The album picked up a ‘Victoires de la Musique’ statuette, the French equivalent of a Grammy, in 2001.

It took three years of hard touring to reveal ‘Made in Medina’ to the world.  Rachid and his long-standing band of fellow-adventurers visited far off places like Istanbul, Tokyo, New Caledonia, Mexico City, Saigon, Phnom Penh, Ottawa, LA, Adelaide and performed at WOMAD festivals here and there.  During those nomadic years a new album was already brewing.  “I dreamed of singing my nightmares,” says Taha.  The apocalyptic vision of a society careering into a wall was the impetus for a marathon of questioning; his motives, other people’s motives, the dirty victory of experience over innocence, the root causes of the virulent anger and chaos that grips our world.  That’s what makes ‘Tékitoi?’ Taha’s most harrowing and yet fascinating album to date.

“I worked with Steve right from the beginning on this project,” Rachid recounts.  “We’d never quite worked like that before but this time I wanted to do things differently and collaborate in the studio from the start.”  Steve Hillage was already a big fan of Egyptian and Moroccon music when he first heard Carte de Séjour in the offices of Virgin France way back at the dawn of the 1980s.  And with perfect synchronicity, Rachid had just become a fan of Steve’s thanks to a mangled psychedelic rock cover of an Oum Khalthoum track which featured on one of Steve’s latter solo albums.   Steve ended up producing Carte de Séjour’s first album ‘Rhoromanie’ in 1983, and the two have collaborated unswervingly ever since.  “Rachid has had a very consistent vision of where he wanted to go musically, right from the beginning,” Steve claims.  “I remember visiting him in his dressing room after a Carte de Sejour gig in Lyons in 1982.  He played me a cassette by the great Algerian chaabi singer M’hamed Hadj el Anka and said, “Hey, listen to this.  It’s just like Robert Johnson.  C’est le blues!””

In 2004 the world has got the blues, and got it bad.  But ‘Tékitoi?’ is so much more than a one-dimensional gut rant about the dismal realities of a post 9/11 world.  Its lyrics dovetail the personal and the universal, with the gouging power of a hawk’s beak. Although Rachid punches straight, he’s not afraid of a mental waltz or two with ambiguity or complexity when necessary. The opening track ‘Tékitoi?’, with its Clash meets Cramps meets Egyptian strings back beat, is a duo with Christian Olivier, lead singer of French nouvelle chanson rockers Les Têtes Raides.  The song sets the tone by raising more questions than answers.   In ‘Li Fet Met’, Rachid urges us to accept the past and face the future.  “Nostalgia is a kind of pathology in a way,” he says.  “I’m a little melancholic, but never nostalgic.”  ‘Hassbouhoum’ is a song inspired by a demonstration in Algeria which Rachid saw on TV.  The title is a slogan which the demonstrators used on banners and placards.  It means something like ‘Get rid of them!’.   ‘Safi’ is a poem of anger and frustration at the lack of democracy in the Arab world, and Rachid’s own search for a pure heart in the cynical wastelands of modernity.  “It’s a naïve song, almost adolescent,” he says.  In ‘Winta’, Rachid sings “When will I find peace?  Where is paradise?” in a duet with the Georgian superstar Kaha Beri.  ‘Nahseb’ is about time, the biggest oppressor of them all.  “I’m forty-five now and I see time going by,” Rachid muses.  ‘Dima’ which was co-produced by Brian Eno, tackles issues of freedom, danger and auto-censorship.  “Freedom is the hardest thing, but it’s also the most generous.”  Mamachi is a tribute to a rural rai singer of the same name from Oran, and the first man Rachid ever saw perform.  It’s also a clue to the origins of Rachid’s rough and ready percussive vocal style.  “Mamachi was very rock and roll,” remembers Rachid, “very close to Bob Dylan or Lou Reed, people like that.”

And last, but by no means least, there’s ‘Rock El Casbah’.  In 1982 a young and eager Rachid went to see The Clash at The Mogador in Paris.  “I don’t know about the others, but I especially liked Joe Strummer’s sincerity, his humor, his awkwardness,” Rachid reflects.  “He had nothing to do with that typical punk cynicism.  This cover is a tribute to him really.”   Before the gig at the Mogador, Rachid met the band, spoke to them for a few minutes and handed over a tape of Carte de Séjour songs.  “I felt that they were interested,” remembers Rachid, “but when they didn’t get in touch afterwards I just thought that’s life.”  “Having said that, when I heard ‘Rock the Casbah’ later that year, I thought that maybe something really had happened after all,”  he adds with a wry mischievous smile.

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Iness Mezel

It was one of those perfect moments, when passion burns up the concept, and Iness Mezel’s words begin to canter excitedly as she remembers it: “You arrive at the studio with all your baggage and paraphernalia and you lay them out and something just happens, beyond all expectations. Beyond trance. Beyond consciousness. And I love everything about that invisible world beyond, into which you travel with music, because you’re no longer here. We had plenty of moments like that in the studio, when we were just shouting out, “YEAH!” It wasn’t self-satisfaction, it was just about “Wow!””

The concept had already been around for years; a fearlessly modern blend of North African Amazigh or ‘Berber’ music and other styles that inhabit the flipside of Iness Mezel’s complex identity, such as funk, soul and jazz. “My music was there,” says Iness, “but it just needed something or someone to optimize it.” That someone was Justin Adams, English guitarist of blossoming fame, sideman to Robert Plant, half of the award-winning duo Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara, producer of Tinariwen, Natasha Atlas, Lo’Jo and many more. “I looked up Justin’s profile on the web,” Iness continues, “and I thought to myself – he’s going to understand!” And the result of this marriage made in some musical heaven?; ‘Beyond The Trance’

It’s taken a long time coming; seven years since Mezel’s previous album ‘Len’ and thirteen since her debut ‘Wedfel’.  “I want to be sincere and I don’t want to compromise my artistic choices so I work slowly. I can’t really say more than that,” Iness states by way of explanation. Her life story doesn’t lend itself to easy conclusions and a flat-pack quick-assembly musical identity. Woman, North African, Berber; there’s so much there to defend, to be proud of, to proclaim but so many pitfalls too, so many easy dead ends and clichés to avoid at all costs.

Fatiha Messaoudi, aka Iness Mezel, was born to a Franco-Italian mother and an Algerian-Kabyle father. The Kabyle are the largest Amazigh minority in North Africa, descended, like all Berbers, from the tribes who inhabited the region before the arrival of the Romans, the Visigoths, the Arabs, the Ottomans and the French. They speak their own language, and are fiercely proud of their distinct culture, which is Mediterranean rather than Middle Eastern or Arab. They inhabit the lofty heights and foothills of the Djurdjura Mountains that rise up to the east of the Algerian capital Algiers. The land is beautiful but hard to cultivate and emigration is hard-wired into the Kabyle experience. Kabyle women are strong, proud and independent. Not for them the veiled subservience prescribed by fundamentalist Islam. Like all Berbers, the Kabyles love music and poetry.

Iness Mezel’s father was born and raised in Ighil I Azzouzen, a tiny Kabyle village not far from the Kabyle capital Tizi Ouzou. He came to France in 1954, on the eve of the Algerian War of Independence.” My father was involved in the struggle,” reveals Iness. “But it was his battle. I can’t really talk that much for him.” Her mother was born and raised in the Auvergne, the wild, remote and hilly heartlands of central France. Iness’ maternal grandfather was an Italian, from the hills of Lombardy. Thus Iness’ blood flows in from hills and mountains on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean, from people who worked the land and lived a tough life softened only by poetry, music, food, family and cultural pride.

For the first seven years of her life, Iness lived in the working class suburb of St Ouen, to the north of Paris, where her father worked as a taxi driver, and her mother as a nurse. Then, at the age of seven, she went to live in Algeria. For two years she spent her holidays with her grandmother and aunts in Ighil I Azzouzen, and went to school in Algiers. “Algeria has left an imprint on me like a tattoo. The strongest memory is the colour of the earth and the grasses, which were dry and brown. I remember my aunts in long dresses with soft materials and simple prints, their bare feet grazed and scratched. I remember the ceremonies and rituals like the jdev, when the Cheikh and other village elders comes to bless a house that has just been built and there are processions of women holding torches. It was just village life. Anything musical was linked to feasts and village occasions.”

At the age of nine the family moved back across the Mediterranean and lived with Iness’ grandmother in the town of Riom es Montagne, deep in the green hills of the Auvergne. Iness and her sister Malika were given the keys to the clubhouse of the local brass band, and they spent many weekends having fun on the instruments. “I didn’t have much of an idea about who I was, but on the other hand I realized that I was absorbed by music. It was like a lifebuoy for me.”

Iness’ grandmothers taught her some profound lessons, not in the literal sense but sub-consciously, by their presence and their actions. “My Algerian grandmother is the archetype of the woman who won’t let herself be pushed around, who runs the household and commands her world. And it wasn’t just her, because my aunts were like that too. My French grandmother was a very very strong woman, whose life was even harder in some ways. I was very close to her.”

After two years of life in the hills, Iness returned to Paris with her family and settled in the suburb of Levallois. She fell in love with pop, disco and funk and remembers the thrill of buying her first record, “Don’t Blame It On The Boogie” during a school trip to London at the age of 14. Other early favourites were Christopher Cross, Elton John and Donald Fagen.  Her own musical life was discreet and home-based, mucking about on the piano or cutting up and changing the melodies and lyrics of favourite songs like ‘Yellow Brick Road’ by Elton John with mates from school.  She also studied piano at the local conservatory throughout her teens, a rock solid grounding for future musical adventures.

Studying law at the University of Paris, Iness realized that a straight and narrow career path in one of the liberal professions would never satisfy her soul. “At that moment, I asked myself – what’s the most important thing for me?  And it was then that I started getting into music more seriously.”  She took lessons in lyrical singing with Nicole Maison, a baroque singer with the Camerata de Paris.

Iness had been composing at home on the piano for some years, but now she started to work professionally, mostly as a stand-in singer for various African, jazz and covers bands. Her musical territory became the bars and clubs in the Châtelet area, especially one called the ‘Caf’ Conc’, where she learned the unavoidable lessons of stagecraft and met a new world of musicians, some of whom like bassist Étienne Bapé, drummers Paco Séri and Christopher Henry, pianist Dominique Fillon and guitarist Eric Sauviat became key players in her solo career. Another important teacher was Claude Cesaire, nephew of the famous Antillean poet Aimé Cesaire, who taught Iness the jazz songbook and the inner workings of jazz chord progressions.  She also learned jazz improvisation with the Paris-based American singer Sarah Lazarus.  After a huge variety of ‘solo’ experiences, Iness formed a vocal duo, which began to earn a useful reputation as a backing vocal unit on the scene.

It was when the established Kabyle singer, writer and film-maker Djur Djura asked Iness to join her group that Iness’ diffuse musical ambitions were suddenly redirected towards a new and compelling objective.  Djur Djura was already a name of some renown in the world of Algerian and Amazigh music. With her, Iness started to perform in major concert halls and festival, and gain a privileged access into the heart of the Amazigh music scene. “When I was approached by Djura it was like an answer to my self-searching as an artist,” Iness remembers. “I discovered the music of my brothers and sisters and I discovered what it meant to sing in Kabyle. I also began to develop a political conscience. Things began to make sense.”

Djur Djura also introduced Iness to her life-long friend, manager, mentor, percussionist, adviser and rock in troubled times:  Nora Abdoun-Boyer.  Iness, Nora and her sister became a unit of musical adventurers, like a family of like-minded sisters with shared origins and creative ambitions, who would spend many hours working together, inching towards a new and very personal idiom that mixed Kabyle music and lyrics with the most extraneous styles. Iness and her sister would compose songs together, and Nora was the sounding board, the trusted ‘ears’ of the trio. After many months the trio performed together with a violinist and a second percussionist at the Palais de la Mutualité in Paris supporting Idir and many other Amazigh ‘greats.’ “They must have thought we were a UFO which had just landed,” Iness recalls with a resigned chuckle. “Admittedly, we were heading the right direction, but we hadn’t gone deep enough.”

The trio worked at home, whilst Iness was still going out to sing with a range of different artists, including the avant-garde singer Tamia Valmont. The grail was a modern, North African, Mediterranean but intensely personal style, in other words, a true reflection of Iness’ identity. The first album ‘Berber Singing Goes World’, released on Auvidis in 1997, was only a partial realization of this dream, despite being warmly received by the critics.  In 1999, the album was released under the title ‘Wedfel’ with extra tracks on the the French label Naïve.

After the release of the album and a series of concerts in Morocco and Canada, her sister quit. “She left without warning,” Iness admits reluctantly. “I think she was searching for herself at the time.” It was a difficult period, but calamity turned into a strange kind of blessing. “It’s almost as if I was reborn after that incident,” she says. “I had to walk on my own two legs. I had to define myself. Nora and her father Boussad helped me a lot. They’re Kabyle, and he’s very open and young at heart. At one point I asked him to ‘dub’ me, like Kings used to do to Knights in the old days. And he suggested the name ‘Iness Mezel’, which means, ‘Tell him never to despair’.”

The next album ‘Len’, which Iness calls the first real Iness Mezel album, with its ever closer marriage of Kabyle with funk,  pop and western classical music, was recorded in 2001 and released in 2003.  “It’s the album on which I really began to express my whole self for the first time, to lay my guts on the table,” she says. “I had things to prove, technically, musically. It was more radical than anything I had done before. I was no longer looking for myself. I knew which ideas I wanted to pursue and I was very proud of the result in fact.  I needed the recognition which that album gave me.”

Nora and her father also helped Iness to crystallize her attitude towards Tamazight, the loose collective name for the many distinct dialects of the Berbers. It became a precious tool that Iness felt the need to defend.  “I love the musicality of Kabyle but I don’t master the language in a poetic sense of the term,” says Iness. “So I write in French, and then translate that into Kabyle and base my lyric on that translation. I used to freak out about the idea of singing in French because I feel completely naked when I do. But singing in French is also a way of expressing all aspects of my personality. It allows me to be more objective. I’ve also used poems by Si Mohand ou Mohand, a famous wandering 19^th century Kabyle poet, in some of the songs. I wanted to pay tribute to him”

So, in many ways, ‘Beyond the Trance’ is a reaffirmation; a reclamation of confidence, “of giving myself to myself, ” as Iness describes it.  “I was able to see myself how I am, and express the whole me; French, Kabyle, Parisian, everything.” Not only was there the new-found courage to bare her soul more fully in her everyday language of French, but also the strength to allow others into her creative process without fear of loosing control. “I’ve tended to operate in quite a solitary way at times. And I’ve never been part of a group in the classic sense. So this meeting with so many new musicians is wonderful and interesting. I feel I’m liberating myself.”

Self, identity and musical style walk hand in hand, each one defining the other. For Iness Mezel, none of the three has been easy to grapple, to pin down and define. In many ways, it was a feat that could only be achieved when her music stopped asking so many questions, and demanding so many answers. It could only be achieved when the music broke free of the concept and went into that space beyond; joyful, confident and complete.

Andy Morgan.  (c) 2010
Artist Biography written for Wrasse Records – Dec 2010

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