Toumani Diabate on Al-Jazeera

Yesterday's discussion of Oltremare touched on Toumani Diabate, Jali extraordinaire and one of my favorite musicians on the planet. As a follow-up, here's a fantastic find a reader emailed me -- the Arabic news network Al-Jazeera has done a detailed, respectful and very interesting piece on one of Mali's great musical ambassadors.

Furtherology: Djelimady Tounkara's Sigui.

Translating "Oltremare" | Part 2

As a cue from both Boubacar Traore and John Fahey, I spend a lot of time with my left ear pressed against the body of my guitar. Especially when I'm writing. I've discussed the Chorus Effect once before, and I didn't do it justice. The physics here are integral to Oltremare, both as an abstract composition and a throbbing mammal experience. The key concept is Sympathetic Resonance, something that just happens to relate directly to the origin and nature of the Universe as you and I know it.

For now, though, just listen to this great live version of Oltremare by the composer himself...



Listen to the huge floating cloud of sympathetic resonance that reveals itself whenever Einaudi pauses. Listen to how it actually, audibly moves. You can hear those final notes spreading out in both directions and through specific, radiating intervals. It's gorgeous beyond words and it perfectly illustrates two completely different stories about the history of music theory. The first one starts in the Sahara.



The kora is considered a hybrid instrument by musicologists who should know better. The instrument is not a "world music" curiosity but a proud & unbroken cultural lineage. It exists in a generational ecosystem of luthiers, musicians and ritual context. The Mande Jali knew about counterpoint harmony, pentatonic modes, and tonal gravity a thousand years ago -- yet music history gives Africa curiously shallow treatment.

Let's begin with an important addition the ancient griots made to the fundamental recipe of wood and strings: goat flesh. While your guitar is built around a resonant chamber constructed entirely out of dead trees, the kora is built out of something more like a drum head: a taut membrane of treated goat skin stretched over a calabash frame.



When critics refer to Toumani Diabate's recorded work as "African classical music" I think that owes just about everything to the huge waves of sympathetic resonance the kora can summon. It's not so much the ornamentation and chord changes as the raw sound itself. The tonal space is unmistakeably similar to a piano, especially in the midrange counterpoint lines (umbengo, non?) -- less so on the droning bass dives. The high end has the short, stabbing attack and almost instant decay that gives the kora away as a harp instrument. It's worth noting that, connected to sufficient signal chains at sufficient amplitudes, the kora becomes something very different and probably superior to all other stringed creatures. That's not what this is about, though.



Let's bring it back to pianos. Big, booming, beautiful and expensive ass pianos. There is a remarkable amount of foot action going on in apparently simple pieces like Oltremare, but our TV generation has been trained since birth to watch hands, closely. Piano players make their art faces and caress with cultivated care, but come on, the basics of a piano trigger escape mechanism mean that there's actually not much fine control going on above waist level. In fact, even with three foot pedals the basic acoustic impedance and ASDR envelope of any given note doesn't change a whole lot. For the most part, low bass pedal tones "float" because they are usually strung with two or three strings of unusually heavy gauge which vibrate very slowly -- which means the tone spends more time transferring to the soundboard and the wooden frame of the piano itself, teasing out overtones and hidden colors that tend to stay the same no matter what you play.

Writing about music always reduces me to run-on sentences. If only soloing was as simple as talking too much.

Here's an example of how this applies to transcribing. This phrase in E minor shows up a lot and it can be played a dozen ways. Here's two, and I think they demonstrate the importance of careful phrasing and active listening when you're writing something out. Lately I try to keep phrases and runs in three or four string groups. It forces me to learn the fretboard and I really like how it keeps longs passages sounding consistent.



Play 'em both as repeating loops; savor the flavors. If you think the version on the left sounds better, you are objectively out of your mind. The switch to the timbre of the G string is jarring, plus the ringing open string is loud enough to compete with the low drone of the E tonic/pedal/root. The E thing, man, that. Keeping it on the 5th fret of the D is awesome because it makes your pinky get into the damn ring and fight like a man, and doubly so because it sounds like it's part of a distinct counterpoint phrase that supports the open, ringing low E. Blaow.

Let's bring it back to pianos again. Those low notes move through the body of the piano slower than higher register waves, and this is colored further by 1) post-Industrial conventional cross-strung pianos designed to enable mass production, 2) Aliquot stringing, which makes harmonics ring out louder and longer, and 3) Railsback Curve equal temperament tuning. The result is a very specific set of constraints.

The instrument is tuned toward the middle of the keyboard, so most melodies and classical solo pieces carve themselves through that center C line. Most of all, though, it's the ringing sustain of the piano's sheer elephant mass that dictates what chord changes "work" and which definitively do not. If you shift to something that doesn't have enough harmonics in common with what you just finished playing, it's like throwing a light bulb at a brick wall. On a nice big piano, those waters run deep and you don't win when you fight 'em.

Oltremare, front to back, is architecture. It sounds like a piece that was worked out carefully, late at night. Even the nicest in "digital piano" keyboards can't do this song much justice. Einaudi plays both with and against the washing overtones as they drift out of audible range. The stage itself seems to play a key role in giving the live version so much dirt and character. It's far from an original observation, but there's still so much to unpack from that simple insight I'm going to have a busy life.



NEXT: Finally, some guitar tabulature.

Djelimady Tounkara's Sigui

It was when I first became obsessed with the music of Mali that I realized how little information is actually available online. Despite the hype, the World Wide Web remains mostly advertising copy in English, and the only places you can really see multicultural globalization at work are porn sites. If you want to seek out meaningful facts about other cultures and continents, your best bet remains the local library in 2012. Even then: Slim Pickens.

When it comes to African music, that tide has been turning slowly over the past 20 years, thanks in large part to the work of musicians like Ry Cooder, Bela Fleck, or Bill Frissel -- all of whom are white, established musicians with a spotlight to share. Music critics are so far incapable of taking in the music without reflexively comparing it to Mississippi blues (or even, bizarrely, Techno) and so the artists remain in the exotic top shelf of World Music, where CD purchases are a cultural signifier, intended to be seen not heard.

And, well, shucks. That's the ecosystem you get when your culture is less than an inch deep, and at least the money pipeline keeps Vieux Farka Toure and Tinariwen touring in the US. At the end of the day, I'm grateful that it's fashionable to simulate an appreciation for African music. There's a lot of money in Faking It.

Bill Frisell, of course, is anything but. A musician of remarkable range, he's a seamless fit here. He's also unafraid to step out and make the song his own, and the result is probably the best rendition of Sigui this cracker has ever heard. The drummer is especially insane, his dynamics and beat juggling had me rewinding at a half-dozen points when I first watched this. (There is also a lesson to be appreciated in how attentive the violin player is: tuned in like a fucking hawk. Dig it. Her responsiveness is pure Bruce Lee, you won't see it at first.)

My introduction to the unparalleled sound of Djeimady Tounkara came through this Super Rail Band track, Kongo Sigui. I was old enough to recognize he was taking full advantage of the slapback delay in that beautiful & slippery intro, but his articulation and behind-the-beat phrasing still amazed me.



At the time I was really studying the Super Rail Band catalog, because they're one of the finest examples of Mali compositional theory for a kid raised on rock to wrap his head around. These are big-band, electric-amp arrangements of traditional melodies, bridging the gap between a Saturday night hotel bar and the ritual celebration of Mande music. They also fucking rock.

I later found out that Djeimady is even more amazing on the acoustic guitar when a good friend & mentor passed me a burned CD of Big String Theory, which approximately melted my skull.



It was some of the most geometrically perfect music I'd ever heard, a sweet spot between classical and folk and the aching high notes of the Qawwali Arabic devotional jams I'd been into for a few years prior.

It was also Bajourou that first gave me a taste for the fact this is Desert music. (Side note: if you haven't already, check out this classic David Byrne lecture on Architecture in Music. There's always a stage.)

Which brings us back around to what, exactly, a "Sigui" is. The name refers to a Dogon ritual that's practiced once every 60 years, involves three months of purification and preparation, and gets conducted entirely in a secret language that remains forbidden outside of the chosen few who are charged with perpetuating this tradition. This is a pattern you will find everywhere once you dig into Mali music -- these waters run deep.

It may be an academic point, but I want to clarify that the Dogon are not "the" indigenous peoples of Mali. This is something you see repeated a great deal, especially in connection with the legends of Sirius and the Nommo. The Dogon are themselves the product of geography, with a history shaped by the incredible Bandiagara Enscarpment which kept them separate from the Mande and Songhai empires that shaped the rest of Mali.



I'll do us both a considerable favor and not even pretend to summarize or explain the mythosphere at work here. Just listen. That's Oumou Sangare in a Sigui context...and here's Oumou Sangare doing trip hop in a London studio. The next Sigui comes around in 2027. Here's a toast to both of us being around for it.



Related: Guitar Atlas: Africa, by Banning Eyre

The Nommo will be back eventually.

Guitar Atlas: Africa by Banning Eyre

Banning Eyre has been documenting and studying African guitar techniques for decades, including months of study under the Super Rail Band legend Djelimady Tounkara. My sole complaint about this book was the brevity. Considering how much there is to learn, the reader will probably feel there's far too few exercises here. There's also not a lot of background theory and history here, despite featuring some superb writing about African artists and music.

In a field with so few available works, however, Guitar Atlas: Africa is an indispensable guide, for now. It will probably remain so long into the future, thanks to Banning Eyre's infectious love for the sound and his far-ranging approach. The roadmap he provides here may be sparse but in the Youtube era, intelligent readers can flesh it out into a fuller education.



VERDICT: 8/10 - Flawed but essential, sparse but ambitious, good writing and solid teaching.