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FINDING THE ONE

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

(English / Welsh)

 By Andy Morgan

AVAILABLE FROM:  Mwldan Theatr Shop

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read some extracts from the book:

If your name is Keita,  you’re still royalty

Meths, gunpowder and the revival of harp making in Wales

How the kora came to mankind

For more information or preview copies please contact:

2 Short Extracts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This tune that I am now playing

I learned it from my father,

And he learned it from my grandfather.

Our grandfather’s name – Koriyang Musa.

That Koriyang Musa

Went to Sanimentereng and spent a week there;

He met the jinns, and brought back a kora.

The very first kora.

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

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

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

(c) Andy Morgan 2013.

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

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