World Music Features

Leo Blanco                  Boban Markovic                Tanya Tagac Gillis       

Vieux Farka Toure               Omar Sosa 

 

Oumou Sangare - reaching the brain through the pelvis

Oumou Sangare remembers when she realised that she had a special voice. As a ten and twelve year old, looking after her younger siblings while her mother was away working in Mali’s neighbouring countries, she would manage the small amount of money she’d been left carefully until it ran out.
 
Then the young girl, who was father as well as mother to her siblings, would go out into the streets of Bamako, the Malian capital, and wait until she heard the djembe drum that led the wedding crowds in their celebrations. Throwing herself into the middle of the crowd, she’d sing – just as her mother had done when she was young – and when she opened her mouth, the wedding guests gave her coins. Lots of them.
 
The day her mother came back from her latest trip and found the family all wearing new clothes and sitting down to a meal that Oumou had bought and prepared was the day that the now forty-year old Sangare, whose songs have changed attitudes in her homeland and whose business sense has boosted Mali’s economy by providing employment – she owns an hotel and a car franchise, among other undertakings – knew that she could sing for a living.
 
“My grandmother was a great singer and I used to go along with my mother when she sang at weddings and baptisms,” she says. “So I acquired a taste for singing pretty quickly. But when I was left alone, in charge of the family, I sang more to console myself. To begin with, I cried a lot and I didn’t want anyone to see my tears. So I’d sing and then I took courage, because I had to look after the family, make sure we were all able to eat, and I’d go out on to the streets and sing. When my mother came back that time and found us sitting down to a lovely meal and wearing brand new clothes, she started to cry because she thought that suffering had forced me to become a singer. But it was in the blood, too.”
 
At sixteen, Sangare took the first significant step towards the fame she now enjoys at home in Mali and across West Africa. She joined the traditional percussion troupe Djoliba, which also included a young Toumani Diabate, on a tour of Europe. It was, she says, great experience and taught her something vitally important: she needed to find her own style. Up until then she had been singing songs learned from Coumba Sidibe, who pioneered a sound with an emphasis on djembe percussion and electric guitar. Sangare teamed up with a flautist, a percussionist and a kamalengoni (the small, cricket bat-like African lute) player and began writing songs.
 
The Wassoulou style that she sings in has traditionally addressed social issues but while some sections of Malian society welcomed the messages that Sangare delivered in 1990 on Moussulou, her first cassette – the easiest medium to circulate music in Africa at the time – the more conservative thinkers were appalled by them.
 
“The idea at the start was, I had something inside” she says. “I wanted to encourage my mother and thank her for having such a strong character. And then, in doing that I also wanted to encourage all women. The basic idea was that even if you were a woman, you could still be someone. Women had this idea that they had to stay in the shadow of their men, you see, and be with them all the time. I said, ‘No! You can even be equal.’ Not beating the breast and saying I’m the toughest woman. But just being yourself, having dignity. In my first album, I incited women to do any kind of work they wanted. I even said, ‘Why not become a policewoman?’ I never expected it to be so successful, although not everyone approved. No, no, no.”
 
The scandalised elders who frowned on Sangare’s outspokenness were similarly nonplussed by her kalamengoni player, Brehima Diakite’s adaptation of an instrument, previously only played by hunters, into a vehicle for rock ‘n’ roll and they briefly banned the instrument altogether.
 
Sangare and her band already had their audience, though, and her progress towards superstardom was unstoppable. Two more albums followed, Ko Sira and Worotan, and international touring in their wake showed audiences in the US and Europe why this statuesque and stylish woman had captured hearts across Africa.
 
With her music selling in vast quantities at home, after 2001’s Laban album Sangare took a break to spend time with her teenage son and to look after her various business interests. As well as building an hotel in response to the Malian government’s appeal for more visitor accommodation during the 2002 African Cup of Nations, she has a farm just outside Bamako that grows maize and oranges and she plays an active role in Mali’s Mother & Child Association, donating milk and rice to mothers in need. She also uses her name to import cars from China that she offers at affordable prices.
 
Her break from music was by no means complete, however – she sings in her hotel every Saturday when she’s not away touring – and she used the time off the road to develop, at her own pace, the songs for her latest album, Seya.
 
“I wanted the album to be the best it could possibly be with really strong messages,” she says. “The title track is happy, a celebration, but although things have definitely improved over the past twenty years, there are still things we need to change. And music can change society. My message has evolved over the years. To begin with I concentrated on women’s issues. You know, you can say no to polygamy and no to forced marriage. But we have to keep up the struggle until everyone is equal. What we’re trying to do is to change and influence attitudes, the way people think, by informing and entertaining – not everyone is open to the message, but we give them music that makes them dance and then slip in the message when they least expect it!”
 
From The Herald, February 25, 2010.
 

Leo Blanco - Selling Venezuela by the piano

Leo Blanco is a man on a mission. The Venezuelan pianist loves the music that pours out of Brazil and Cuba and understands perfectly why it’s become so popular around the world. There is, however, much more music from South America and the Caribbean that deserves to be heard – and Blanco has taken up its cause.

His words are as persuasive as his piano playing, and that’s saying something. Back in August last year, Blanco made his first appearances in Scotland in a pair of low profile gigs during the Edinburgh Fringe. To say he was sensational would be no exaggeration.

This paper had no hesitation in presenting him with one of our coveted Angel awards for outstanding performances. It seemed the least we could do. A piano – not the best Blanco had ever played on, it has to be said – was summoned to the awards ceremony and Blanco duly obliged by rendering his solo arrangement of fellow countryman Aldemaro Romero’s El Negro y el Blanco. It brought the house down.

Here, clearly, was a naturally, indeed, supernaturally gifted musician whose playing also indicated a wide range of study and playing experience, although the truth is broader and deeper than any of us might have guessed.

To jazz and classical studies, add local dance band gigs on piano, bass guitar and drums, acting as keyboards player and musical director to a Brazilian pop singer, and youth orchestra concerts on violin. There’s more but, heck, this a newspaper feature not a book.

"When I started playing professionally, you just had to learn and play everything," says Blanco by way of explanation. "You have to remember that because of Venezuela’s location – it’s on the Caribbean and next door to Brazil – we hear lots of different music. Plus, as happens all over the world, when you have ports, you get even more music. So we had American, European, all sorts of stuff."

Blanco was fourteen when he began his professional career. Some years before that, a piano had arrived in the Blanco household in the Andean city of Merida. Neither of his parents played but they listened to music all the time and decided that one of their children might take an interest. Enter Leo, who spent hour after hour experimenting with sounds and making up tunes. After a while it became clear that the boy was seriously interested, so Leo was sent to music school to study properly.

"At the same time I had a couple of friends who were really good intuitive musicians," he says. "They had no training, just played by ear, and I really enjoyed playing with them. So I was already coming at music from both the popular and classical sides, and I think that helped a lot."

Merida, being a university town with prestigious film and music schools, had a thriving music scene. The teenaged Blanco immersed himself in it, joining one band as a pianist, learning bass guitar so that he could play in another and acquiring a drum kit so that he could join another who already had piano and bass covered.

"I was just enjoying playing music so much that I never really thought that the other instruments would have any significance," he says. "But they turned out to be really influential in my compositions. Even now, I might start with a rhythm and then come up with a chord sequence and the bass part will act as the bridge between them. I like really strong bass lines, which probably comes from having been a bass player, and although I don’t play any more, I’ll sometimes demonstrate something on the bass when I’m teaching."

At seventeen Blanco moved to the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, to continue his classical studies, although there were plenty of other musical distractions to keep him busy too. Before long he had joined a band – he went to hear their soundcheck and when their piano player was late, he sat in and was later offered the job – and he began to get work composing TV film music and advertising jingles.

He was, he says, doing quite well for himself financially. So, a few years later, when some friends who had gone off to study at Berklee School of Music in Boston got in touch to say he should follow them, he wasn’t entirely convinced. Rather half-heartedly, he sent a CV and demonstration tape and didn’t expect to hear anything further until he got a call, saying he was being offered a scholarship and he had to come.

"My friends were right, it was a fantastic move. I got to go to Japan to represent the college over there, which was wonderful," he says. "But actually, the thing that I like about Boston and New York, too, although I’m sure this happens in cosmopolitan cities all over the world, is you can travel musically without having to go to another country. I’ve played Yugoslavian music and all sorts of things just by going to someone’s house or a bar."

The most important musical link, however, remains his connection with Venezuela. Now established as an assistant professor of music at Berklee as well as forging ahead with his own playing career, he keeps in constant touch with his family and friends back home and listens to as much Venezuelan music as possible.

"Before I left Caracas I was always experimenting with jazz and Venezuelan music and that’s what I want to continue doing," he says. "I think when you leave your home, it’s inevitable that you’ll be affected by the music in your new surroundings and I love that, but I need to keep my roots and my identity."

En route to a concert at Aberdeen Jazz Festival, whose organisers are always quick to spot special talents, he has reunited with his old friend and record producer Steve Shehan in Paris, where he is recording his new CD, Africa Latina. It will be, he says, a celebration of African music’s influence on South America. At the same time, though, it will be an invitation to listeners to dig further into the continent’s music.

"I hear why world music and jazz audiences have taken so strongly to Brazilian and Cuban music but they’re really just scratching the surface of Latin American music," he says. "In fact, audiences outside South America are only scratching the surface of Brazilian music. There’s so much more to hear. Argentina has much more than tango, and Colombia and Peru and Venezuela have great music too. So if I can draw people’s attention to this and change their vision of Latin American music, I’ll be doing something rewarding."

From The Herald, March 10, 2007

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Boban Markovic – Keeping the Serbian brass band tradition in the family

There’s nothing like a few home truths for keeping a musician’s feet on the ground. Whenever Boban Markovic thought he was improving as a young trumpeter, his mother would tell him yes, he was good … but not as good as his grandfather was. Since his grandfather had died when Boban was very small, he had no way of gauging how far he had to progress – and he still doesn’t because his mother is still telling him that he’s not the trumpeter that his illustrious relative was.
 
Judging from tunes such as Beli Dvor and Paun from Markovic’s latest album, his grandfather, who played for royalty by invitation, must have been quite a musician. Paun is Serbian for peacock and this musical impression has all the hallmarks of its subject, poise, pride, colour – and all delivered in a scarily detailed melody with fabulous expression and panache, although Markovic notes with good humour that his mum probably thinks he can improve on this performance.
 
Markovic was an initially reluctant follower of the family tradition. The music that his grandfather and his father played has a long, if uncertain, history. It’s a confluence of Oriental, Roma, Serbian and Bulgarian strains passed on orally because no-one took the trouble or perhaps didn’t have the necessary skills to write it down. As a young boy Boban felt that it was in his blood but he had a more important pursuit in mind: football.
 
“My father was playing in a band and he wanted me to play as well but I was more interested in being like the other kids, playing football,” he says. “But when I was about nine or ten, my father gave me a trumpet. He gave me some hard lessons and a lot of practice and I fell in love with the instrument.”
 
An all-consuming passion might not be an overstatement of this love affair as Boban practised at every opportunity and his father began showing off his son’s progress whenever and wherever possible, even if it meant walking ten kilometres to get there. By the age of thirteen the youngster was playing professionally with his father’s band, working on weddings and other social occasions. Unsurprisingly, his schooling suffered – anybody’s would, he says – and he left after the eighth grade with, he adds, not great marks.
 
With his father’s encouragement, however, at sixteen Markovic was becoming an attraction in his own right. The Golden Trumpet competition – the Dragacevski Sabor - in Guca was the holy grail for trumpeters following the gypsy brass band tradition in Serbia and winning it became the main event in Markovic’s career. It required a lot of hard work, both as an individual musician and as a bandleader, because the judges were – and are – looking for the strongest soloist with the most disciplined band and the most original arrangements.
 
“Gaining that title was an important step in anyone’s career,” he says. “And I wanted so badly to win that, once when I didn’t get the prize, even when everyone said that I deserved it, I was really hurt.”
 
He couldn’t have felt this disappointment too often, though, because he went on to win the Dragacevski Sabor so regularly that he was eventually asked to step aside and give other competitors a chance.
 
These days there’s another Markovic among the trumpet kings and in the Markovic band, Boban’s son Marko, who inherited his father’s love of the instrument and may even, says Boban, have eclipsed him in terms of work rate.
 
“Marko, when he was just a little boy, used to go to sleep with the trumpet still in his hands,” says Boban, “and by the time he joined the band at the age of fifteen, he was playing really, really well. It makes me proud as a father. His skills and energy are amazing. He surprises me all the time. His role is so important now: composing, recording, rehearsing, mixing the sound, doing most of the solos on the concert.”
 
Another skill that Marko has brought to the band is his own form of musical notation. Previously, Boban would compose a tune – or rather have one come into his head – then learn to play it and work it up with the band. Now Marko writes down his own compositions and teaches them to the band by sections, a skill and a quicker way of working that impress Boban no end. The band still rehearses like crazy, though, to get its trademark tight sound.
 
“I’m lucky because all the boys in the band are ready to work as hard as I want them to,” says Boban. “We rehearse back home when we come off a tour, then when we go back on the road, we’re rehearsing whenever we get the chance, during soundchecks, even during the concerts we’ll work on stuff and polish it as we go. It’s important that we do this because we want people to dance to our music and feel the passion in it. If everybody leaves our concert with a smile on their face, then I will be very happy.”
 
From The Herald, July 7, 2009.

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Tanya Tagac Gillis - Music from the heart, via the throat

Tanya Tagaq Gillis is feeling claustrophobic. People often do in London, especially on a Saturday afternoon in Oxford Street, from where Tagaq is speaking.

Mind you, having grown up in the tiny hamlet of Cambridge Bay in the vast Inuit territory of Nunavut in north-eastern Canada where, statistically at least, everyone has nine square kilometres of space to themselves, Tagaq probably feels claustrophobic in most places.

She shouldn’t complain, she says, because London gave her one of what she calls her "cosmic coincidences." Back in 2002, Tagaq, who is almost single-handedly taking the ancient Inuit throat-singing style into a new dimension, lived in London briefly. She played a few gigs, not expecting much to come of them, then in quick succession found herself appearing on roots music champion Charlie Gillett’s radio show and included in fRoots magazine’s winter CD compilation of music deserving wider attention.

The CD somehow found its way into the hands of the Kronos Quartet, who invited Tagaq to perform with them – a "cosmic coincidence" that has led all the way to Carnegie Hall, New York. Another of those coincidences, when two friends of Bjork happened to hear Tagaq give an impromptu performance at an arts festival that she was actually attending to exhibit her paintings, resulted in Tagaq working with the Icelandic star – she appears on Bjork’s Medulla album and Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack.

Meanwhile, a rather more straightforward audition - going up to fiddler Angus R Grant and singing in his hear – brought her to the attention of acid folkies Shooglenifty. They featured Tagaq on their latest album, Troots, and have followed up their Celtic Connections 2007 concert together by inviting her onto their Scottish Arts Council Tune-up tour, which began last night.

Tagaq’s singing style is intensely physical, involving rhythmical grunts and whispered syllables which she uses circular breathing to enunciate on both "in" and "out" breaths. But although she was aware of throat singing when she grew up, it wasn’t until she was studying fine art and in her final year at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, in Halifax, that she began to teach herself the traditional style.

"I was homesick and my mother sent me some tapes of throat singing and I thought, I can do this," she says. "At home we listened to Top Forty music most of the time, and there wasn’t much throat singing in our community. But when I went back to Nunavut after college I was able to find people who could teach me songs. There’s not that many throat singers, maybe between one and two hundred out of a population of twenty-seven thousand Inuit people."

Traditional Inuit throat-singing takes the form of a game in which two women stand face-to-face. One creates a rhythm out of the sound of her breathing and the other fills in the gaps until one or other – or both – collapses in fits of giggles or through exhaustion. Tagaq had no partner to begin with, so she practised in the shower and made her first public appearance at a friend’s wedding. As seems to be the way, her second "gig" involved another cosmic coincidence.

By this time teaching at Nunavut Arctic College, she entered a local talent competition with a friend, just for fun. They won. Someone at the Folk on the Rocks festival in Yellowknife heard their winning performance on CBC radio and invited them down to appear at the festival.

"It all grew from there," she says. "I met Shooglenifty at Yellowknife, so they’ve been around since the start of my career. Then, when I went to exhibit some paintings at the Great Northern Arts Festival, they were short of performers, so I sang on my own. That’s where the Bjork connection was made but it also encouraged me to go out and sing by myself and develop this further."

She makes no claims towards being a tradition bearer and politely declines when people ask her to teach them throat singing.

"I’m not trying to keep it to myself but it wouldn’t be right for me to presume that I can pass on this traditional skill because I taught myself and what I do is entirely my own take on it," she says. "I also don’t want to see Inuit culture belittled. It’s bad enough when people think that we live in igloos and I just dread the idea of hearing throat singing on a Coke commercial or something."

On the other hand, she can recommend singing generally as a cathartic experience, which is what it is for her.

"The songs I sing aren’t about telling a story," she says. "They’re more about emotions, whatever I’m feeling at the time. If you’ve had a horrible day, you can get rid of all the crap this way. It’s primal. When I sing I can go right back to when we felt like animals."

From The Herald, November 15, 2007

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Vieux Farka Toure - Following in the footsteps of a legend

Vieux Farka Toure reels off a list of plans and recent experiences, weighs them against what might have been and pronounces that life is good.

There was a meeting this summer with former James Brown horn master Pee Wee Ellis when Vieux and his band had a great time playing JB classics. He has a soundtrack with Ry Cooder in the pipeline and a track on an imminent U2 covers album. He’s being doing some gigs with Saharan gypsies Tinariwen, has met and was impressed by Americana singer-songwriter Dierks Bentley, and bumped into South African poet of the people Vusi Mahlasela. Oh and there’s the Heatwave tour with Brazilian singer Nina Miranda’s new band, Zeep, that brings Vieux to Glasgow this weekend, which is "really cool."

None of this would have happened, of course, had Vieux done his father’s bidding and joined the army.

His father, the Malian singer and guitarist Ali Farka Toure, despite the Grammy winning successes he enjoyed after his late 1980s discovery led to world-wide attention, knew all about the struggles a musician faces and did his best to stop Vieux following in his footsteps.

"I always loved music," says Vieux. "We heard American music on the radio all the time as well as Malian music, and even as a child I dreamed of being a great guitarist. But when I spoke about becoming a musician, my father sent me to work on a farm with a family friend."

Vieux isn’t his real name (which is Boureima) but it’s common practice in Mali, where French is the official language, to nickname a boy named after his grandfather "Old." Vieux’s grandfather had been an army officer, so having been named after him, Vieux was expected to emulate him.

In the event, the family friend with the farm sympathised with Vieux’s dislike of the army and helped him to register for the entry test to the conservatoire in l’Institut National des Arts in the Malian capital, Bamako, where Vieux began studying in 2001. Ali wasn’t best pleased but five years on, not long before he died last year, and an accommodation having been reached, he played lead guitar on some tracks on Vieux’s self titled first album.

Vieux didn’t grow up with Ali on the family farm – one of twelve siblings, he spent his childhood with an uncle near Mopti – and although he knew his father was away abroad a lot, he didn’t pay much attention to how famous he was until he moved to Bamako.

"I was about sixteen then and quickly realised that everyone there, and it seemed everyone in Mali, knew Ali Farka Toure," he says. "When he won his first Grammy it was like a national holiday."

By this time Vieux was playing calabash and percussion with his cousin Afel Bocoum’s group. The guitar, which is now his first instrument, didn’t figure until he enrolled at the National Institute.

"While I was studying I started to listen closely to jazz, rap, rock, reggae and a lot of my father’s music," he says. "Carlos Santana and Ry Cooder are also big favourites, so the guitar seemed a natural choice. But my biggest influence would have to be the kora player Toumani Diabete, who has been a family friend for years. It was Toumani who persuaded my father that I could make a go of music and my father asked him to supervise my career. Toumani has always been like a father to me. He has helped me enormously in all my professional decisions. He was the one who negotiated my album contract but he also takes care of me and my family too."

Vieux joined Diabate’s Symmetric Orchestra while still at the conservatory in Bamako. He turned professional in 2004 and toured South Africa and France with his father. He also added calabash and backing vocals to Ali’s Savane album. Working alongside his father he was able to see how hard Ali worked and to understand why Ali had been so set against him becoming a musician.

"Ali worked and worked and worked and then worked some more, always honing his craft," he says. "I want to do that, too, and if possible be even better than him."

Although rhythmically and melodically they sound in keeping with his desire for audiences to be happy, Vieux’s songs tend to have a serious lyrical content. He isn’t interested in telling the world about his love life when, for instance, his country is enduring what amounts to a malaria epidemic. His CD carries a message about the seriousness of this situation and he is donating 10% of the proceeds from CD sales to Bee Sago, a UNICEF-affiliated organisation, towards the distribution of treated mosquito nets to children and pregnant women in his home town, Niafunke.

He is also supporting Mali’s cotton industry in the face of competition, through cheaper labour, from China, by kitting out his band in stage clothes made from Malian cotton.

This is, he says, a gesture against globalisation, not an attempt to become a hero in Mali. As the son of a national figure, it’s difficult enough to succeed in his own right and he wants to be judged on his music, not his actions or his parentage.

"Following in the footsteps of a legend like Ali is impossible," he says. "But he was Ali, and I am Vieux and I have my own music to create and keep working on. Music is playing in my head all the time, and even on the road I have songs, new riffs, coming out all the time. We sometimes sit at sound check and work on new songs, or in the room on a day off. It’s pretty constant."

From The Herald, November 22, 2007

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Omar Sosa - Making the music come true

 

It’s a question straight out of a pub quiz: to which family of musical instruments does the piano belong? Omar Sosa has no hesitation in answering, “percussion.”

The Cuban pianist, who makes his Edinburgh Jazz Festival debut this year, has a well-earned reputation for producing exciting concerts, where his hands become a blur as he trades rhythms and phrases with his drummer. He can play with extraordinary delicacy, too, creating melodies like the most sensitive love songs. When Sosa gets into percussion mode, however, it’s best to fasten your seatbelts.

“You hit the key and the hammer hits the string. The end is melodic but the means is entirely percussive,” he says with an air of friendly certainty to back up his answer. “I was a percussionist before I became a pianist and the only thing that’s changed, really, is the instrument.”

Sosa was actually a child prodigy on marimba, the African xylophone, in his home town, Camaguey, Cuba’s largest inland city. He studied at Camaguey’s Escuela Provincial de Musica between the ages of five and twelve, then progressed to the national music school in Havana. There, in his mid-teens, he needed a second instrument, so he chose piano.

“I’m a late starter compared to Mozart and all these great composers who were creating major works when they were still children,” he says. “But I’m glad I did it this way. When I started playing piano, I listened a lot to Chopin – I still do. But then I heard Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, McCoy Tyner and Thelonious Monk. I knew the great Cuban pianists like Ruben Gonzalez and Gonzalo Rubalcaba, naturally, but it was Monk who showed me that the piano is an African instrument.”

Africa is Sosa’s spiritual home. At a time when Cuban music still enjoys huge popularity partly due to the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon, to say nothing of salsa dancing’s enduring appeal, he could cash in by playing the dance music card. He knows salsa and son intimately from his time as musical director to popular Cuban singer Vicente Feliu. But he prefers to dig deeper into the music that the African diaspora brought to the island and has made field trips to Morocco, Burkina Faso and Senegal to study with local musicians.  

“People ask as why we don’t play salsa and I tell them, we can but we just want to approach it from a different direction,” he says. “I love Cuban music and Cuban musicians. They’re my heart. But my brain is Cecil Taylor. One of my hands is Frederick Chopin, the other is Thelonious Monk, and I want people to hear my whole body.”

The group he’s bringing to Edinburgh features Mozambican bassist-vocalist Childo Tomas and Senegalese percussionist-vocalist Mola Sylla. Sosa describes this as a trio-plus, the plus being the audience.

“We can practise to make sure it’s right ‘upstairs’ in our heads but where it matters is ‘downstairs’ when the audience and us play together,” he says. “We play the instruments but it’s the audience who make the music come true.”

From Edinburgh Festivals Magazine, Summer 2008.

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