Summer 2008 Playlist

What can I say, meant to get to see Janelle Monáe, Little Jackie, and José James, on Sunday, at Central Park Summerstage but stayed out late after seeing EXPATRIATE and didn't get into Brooklyn until late afternoon the next day. Plus there was that whole thing with the F being the C and the G being the F, or something like that, making traveling crazy. So I heard Malian musicians Habib Koite & Bamada and Zimbabwe's Oliver Mtukudzi & Black Spirits at Celebrate Brooklyn's African Guitar Festival. If you want the word on the Summerstage, head over to Bold As Love's one, two, three (!) part "Scenes from Summerstage" coverage, including some outstanding audience-shot video of Janelle Monáe reputedly setting the performance bar up-up-and-away somewhere in outerspace according to BAL's Rob Fields.

They were both great but I enjoyed Mtukudzi more, I think because he was more of an entertainer. This "festival" wasn't a traditional guitar showcase: all the acts were vocal based, and played polyrhythmic, dance-friendly music. If you didn't care about observing guitar skills, and just wanted to dance--which seemed to be the case with much of the crowd--neither Koite or Mtukudzi's technique overshadowed the overall feel of their songs. The voice is how many people make a human connection with an artist; having a working voice is much more common in most places than having a similar dexterity with a musical instrument. It's not surprising that the voice is a point of access to which most of us feel readily acclimated, albeit perhaps unconsciously. It is as Rachelle Farrell titled her album the "first instrument" and as such it carries the melody more memorably than other instruments.

On the other hand if you were a guitar geek you could certainly get a lot out of what Koite and Mtuzudki were doing. Koite had a rhythm guitarist in his band, so he had more leeway to play with the melody and play skeins of arpeggiations. African guitar styles from different parts of the continent tend to play with an open treble sound, so while some Afropop guitar parts seem to stay in the upper range there are still a lot of middle frequencies in effect and this allows a warmer sound even when there's a distinct finger picking-on-strings aspect to those tones. Both musicians played with a full drum kit and multiple percussionist. It was hard not to think of the cross-pollination between legacies of African polyrhythyms, nascent Afropop, and James Brown back in the day.

I also found myself enjoying Mtukudzi more because he had female musicians in his band. Yep, I have a bias, and appreciate seeing women making music in these contexts. I mean the day we see an internationally touring African woman guitarist playing on a bill of this kind, that will mark a major cultural shift. Koite stepped on my toes in that area with his song for the young men of Mali who have different kinds of women to choose from: "in the North the beautiful white girls with their pale skin. He started out his list this way, and mimed the beauty of the pale skin by drawing caressing fingertips up the inside part of own outstretched arm. I think there was a collective caught breath from some of us in the audience. This continued with the delineating of the beautiful girls in the South, "who have black skin"--this drew some appreciative applause from the audience, and the girls in between who are either black or white or (surprise!) a mix of the two. OK, you see why I'm not even going to go there. I'm just going to focus on what an amazing guitarist Koite is, and how tight his band is. Great bass player, even if he sometimes seemed to be phoning it in.

Meanwhile the women in Black Spirit weren't T&A with a tambourine. One was a percussionist and the other played amplified mbira (unfortunately, not amplified enough I really couldn't hear her at all). The 56-year old Mtukudzi played with some gender expectations in the staggering and swaggering dance routines he shared with both his other percussionist, a male marimba player, and the female percussionist. He shared those energetically playful moments with them as equals, and he had a great way of doing a staggered step to the right at the end of a phrase that deceptively ended and then began again. My friend cracked up with pleasure every time Mtukudzi and his bandmates matched these steps to the musical phrase, uprighting themselves just as the phrase uprighted itself and repeated. It was great inside musical joke, that also had a layer of humor broad enough that everyone could appreciate it--people were roaring with each repetition.

Those performances and the soundtrack of EXPATRIATE’s duo, Black Venus, were in my head this weekend.