A Composer for Every Country: Côte d'Ivoire
Côte d'Ivoire is last of a number of names given to the region over the course of history. Others include Côte de Dents, or Coast of Teeth in reference to the ivory export, Côte de Quaqua, after the Dutch transliteration of a local tribal name, and Côte du Vent, the Coast of Wind. Eventually, Côte d'Ivoire stuck, although English speaking countries tend to refer to it as the Ivory Coast in spite of the the local governments preference for the French name.
As the name implies, the area has a long history with France, being a French protectorate in 1843, then a French colony in 1893. Independence was achieved in 1960 under the leadership of Félix Houphouët-Boigny. His rule continued until 1993, and the government remains a republic with a strong executive authority. Houphouët-Boigny himself was an extremely interesting individual, working as a medical aide, union leader, and planter before his election to the French Parliament. Even after independence, he maintained close ties with France with a policy known as Françafrique. I haven't double checked dates, but I do wonder if the French treatment of Guinea's referendum for independence from France might have had something to do with Houphouët-Boigny's diplomatic decisions. Probably so.
One thing about Africa I am becoming increasingly less surprised by is the staggering number of languages and ethnicities that can be found within relatively small regions. Côte d'Ivoire is home to no fewer than 78 (!) languages within its borders. French is the official language, and acts as a lingua franca (ha!) alongside the African language, Dyula. Aside from local tribal groups, people from Liberia, Burkina Faso, and Guinea often immigrate to Côte d'Ivoire due to the country's relative political stability and economic prosperity.
Music in the area has strong ties to the region's tribal cultures. Compared to other West African countries I've visited in this blog so far, it is also distinctly not influenced by the Mali empire. I have not found any reference to a griot tradition, and the music is more strongly centered around vocal and percussion music. Reggae is quite popular, as is hip-hop and jazz. Genres originating from Côte d'Ivoire include Coupé-décalé, zouglou, and zoblazo. Each of them draw upon different elements of local drum rhythms and traditions, and tend to feature voice and drums with limited, or even a total lack, of pitched instruments.
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Speaking of zoblazo! Today's composer is Frederic Desire Ehui (b.1962), known by his stage name, Meiway. An ethnic N'Zema (one of the larger tribal groups in Côte d'Ivoire), Meiway started recording in 1989, releasing the album Ayibebou with his group, Zo Gang. He is one of the driving forces behind zoblazo's popularity, becoming second only to reggae singer Alpha Blondy in fame and sales. Unfortunately, his bio (in English) is sparse. In the videos I've watched of him, his stage presence is energetic, playful, even kind of goofy. Here he is in his song Tu dis que quoi. I haven't found an English translation of the lyrics, but he's apparently singing about how great Cameroon is.
- Hits: 890
Canon in the Smelting Pot: Manuel Gregorio Tavárez
(EDIT: Well, this is embarrassing. I have been informed by my mom that the mother in the family was from the Dominican Republic, and the father was Mexican. I suspect that, because child me didn't know what the Dominican Republic was, and because I knew she was from one of the islands, and the only islands I knew were Cuba and Puerto Rico, but I knew it wasn't Cuba, I just filled in the blank with the only other option child-me knew at the time. I assumed the mother and father were from the same place, so... Well. Since this blog is partly about how perception and memory and categorization are all squishy, but work together to create something which appears concrete and unalterable, I'm going to leave it as written, but now with this caveat that I was wrong. Imagine that! /EDIT)
In most States, "Latin American" usually is just another way to say "Mexican," which I'm sure is irksome to anyone from... well, from anywhere else in South America or the Caribbean. You might get some white Americans who know the word "Latino" without much change in definition, while scratching their heads at why there are people pushing for Latinx instead. My spellcheck sure doesn't recognize Latinx, I tell you what. It's a term also complicated by the fact that there are many Black Latinx of African descent, as well, so how those people approach the census asking their ethnicity must bring at least a pause for consideration.
Where I grew up, in a mostly white suburb outside of Houston, TX, if you saw any Latinx, you saw guys working construction, or mostly women working janitorial and cleaning staff. I just happened to live right across the street from a family of Puerto Ricans, however, and having something of a glimpse into a rather different lifestyle than is commonly found in suburbia. Their mother cooked basically all day, and their house always smelled delicious. Their father I hardly ever saw, as he worked incredibly hard and usually came home after us kids left for dinner. As a kid, I knew they shopped at Fiesta rather than HEB, which is one of those weirdly specific details children sometimes pick up on. All in all, a nice family, but in my mind they were "just" neighbors and I had no inkling of their past or the culture they left behind when coming to the States.
One day, however, I did get a brief glimpse. I forget exactly the occasion, a birthday or something, but my family was invited over to their house for a party. They had a number of extended family visiting, and it was one of the few times I ever saw the father of the house. I think it's my child-mind's sense of scale, but I remember him being rather tall, and he was very stern and didn't talk much. Not knowing much about him, I had assumed the guy was a total square. Then they turned on the music.
Holy cats, could this guy dance. Like, absurdly good dancer. His wife. His family. Her family. They all could cut a rug. Oddly enough, the kids couldn't. Looking back, though, the reason is clear. Suburban American does many things, but dancing is not one of them. I mean, sure, there were school dances and things like that, but those were the awkward exception to the unspoken rule - thou shalt not bust a move. The only exception was if you did ball room dancing... but only for exercise. Anyways, there was a clear generational split. Those who grew up in Puerto Rico could dance. Those who grew up in the States couldn't, because dancing never happens.
Nowadays I wonder what exactly brought that family here. I mean, I have guesses. Puerto Rico comes up in the news sometimes, and the news is generally not great. Like anything involving the media, I have to wonder how much is perspective, but it's a small island that keeps getting hit by hurricanes and keeps not receiving emergency funding from Congress, so... I imagine the outlook is grim. At this point, I highly doubt I'd have the opportunity to ask them. Wherever they are now, I hope they are well.
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Speaking of dancing the composer I will introduce today is Manuel Gregorio Tavárez (1843-1883). He was a classically trained pianist, learning first from Gonzalo de J. Núñez then travelling to Paris and studying at the Music Conservatory of Paris with the help of a scholarship from "The Economic Society of Friends of Puerto Rico." Tavárez wrote a number of piano works, somewhat echoing the style of Chopin, and wrote a number of danza, a genre of dance that had been the national dance of Puerto Rico for a time. There's not a lot to the biography on Wikipedia, and I can't find much beyond that. He is referenced as "The Father of the Danza," but the links which are attached to those attributions are dead, so who knows? Maybe you do. It sounds reasonable, so why not. Here's one of those piano works titled "La Ausencia," or "The Absence."
- Hits: 602
Canon in the Smelting Pot: Kanno Yoko
Somewhere along the foggy banks of my memory, there is an article titled "Japan: The Land Feminism Forgot." I can't find the article, not for lack of trying, but because when I searched "The Land Feminism Forgot," I found it was not just an article. It was a bit of headline trope, phrased alternately to emphasize a country (I found an article for Italy with basically the same title, as an example) or for a demographic of women (either married women or single women, depending on the slant of the writer, I suppose).
The top hit I found was a BBC article* discussing "Western Myths about Japan," and they bring up the phrase verbatim. Dr. Christopher Harding writes "Japan has been seen as the land that feminism forgot. Both Japanese and Western commentators have tended to see the geisha girl as the ideal of Japanese womanhood - attractive and subtle, subservient to men, but clever enough to be good company." This "geisha girl" ideal was leveraged by an artist in a previous article, Tamaki Miura, to craft her performances of Madame Butterfly. Her personal life, on the other hand... Lets say the Japanese media had a difficult time reconciling the two personas.
How entire countries could come to be viewed as "left behind" by feminism, or to lack feminist thinking entirely, has much to do with media representation. (As an aside: Portland, OR is learning the hard way how much media representation matters. That's for another time. Maybe.) Speaking anecdotally, it seems like much focus is spent on Japan's problems with things like groping on subways or the as yet uncracked glass ceiling. My sense is, whenever these topics come up, it comes up with an air of superiority, as if America has solved these problems and those poor backwards Japanese are languishing in the distance. (More related aside: this attitude seems to be present for the Middle East and Africa as well.)
As if. Of course there are feminists in Japan, but I suspect the language barrier in consort with a host of implicit assumptions prevents their names from travelling far. I will not pretend to be an expert**, so if you're curious you can look up some of the historical movement: Shin Fujin Kyokai (新婦人協会), or The New Women Association, in 1919; the Sekirankai (赤蘭会), or The Red Wave Society, in 1921; uman ribu, or Women's Lib, in the 1960's and 70's... There's a lot of there there, and there's always more to be said.
**For the love of all that is holy, don't take me as the final word on any of this.
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One trend which has been pretty consistent in my Composer for Every Country series has been - women who compose academic music ("classical") don't pop up in Google searches very often unless you search for them specifically. Even if you do, you don't always find many. The pop world, on the other hand, is a place where women composers have consistently found prominence and success, and it seems like this has been true as far back as the 19th century with the advent of the salon.
There's plenty of ink to be spilled about how women consistently end up in the world of popular music, how such music's ephemeral nature and lack of perceived seriousness and "genius" work to quickly erode women out of the historical record... But that's not what I'm here for, go look for someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
Searching for women composers in Japan, I find a handful of women working in the academic and symphonic stage world, and a whole lot working as composers for anime or video games. Michiru Yamane, Manami Matsumae, Harumi Fujita, Yoshino Aoki... The list goes on. But for today, I'm going to focus on a composer very near and dear to my heart: Kanno Yoko. As a film composer, I do not hesitate to say that Kanno Yoko is a composer of a caliber on par with John Williams. I am well aware that in certain circles, that is damning with faint praise, but lets be real - the attitude relegating film scoring to a lower tier of talent and compositional skill is part of the reason there's such a mess of inequality to begin with.
Anyways. Kanno Yoko's work spans a number of disparate genres, both in anime and music, and she has provided the scores for (in no particular order): Wolf's Rain, about a group of wolves looking for Paradise in an apocalyptic future; The Vision of Escaflowne, a story about the conflict of individual freedom and fate and giant robots... and... Isaac Newton? Somehow?; Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a story about... something... there's a lot of talking and then shooting and then talking some more; and Cowboy Bebop which is probably the best story ever told. Say what? That's an exaggeration? Fight me.
And because part of what makes Kanno Yoko great is the breadth of her stylistic talents, here's a second video.
Ok, one more, then I'm done.
- Hits: 555
Canon in the Smelting Pot: Keiko Fujiie and the Kazuhito Yamashita Quintet
I was not born into a musical family. My father was an engineer, and my mother was a teacher for a time. Neither of them play any instruments whatsoever, and they certainly don't have any experience in the music industry. They were always supportive, especially because I think it was very difficult to get child me to commit to anything, so seeing me commit to music must have come as a bit of a surprise. I would not say I showed any talent or promise at the beginning, that is for sure.
While my parents did what they could to help, there were always limits to what they could do. They could sign me up for youth orchestras, drive me to lessons and auditions, agree to send me out more or less unchaperoned (my orchestra director was there, along with a few other students from my class) to San Antonio for All-State. They did a lot. But when it came time to jump the gap between high school and college, and particularly from college to career, there wasn't much they could do other than cheer from the sidelines. Which they do, as they always have. Thanks mom and dad!
But looking at famous musicians, I can't help but notice how many of them had family members with connections in high places. Yo-yo Ma's father, Hiao-Tsiun Ma, was a professor of music at Nanjing National Central University. Jacqueline du Pre's mother, Iris Greep, was a wonderful concert pianist and music educator who attended the Royal Academy of Music. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's father, Leopold Mozart, was an exceedingly well connected violinist of his time. What, you think 18th century opera impresarios just let any old talented 14-year old waltz in an write an opera for them? No, of course not. Don't be silly.
Does this detract from their talent and hard work? Gods no. Do not mistake me for saying "Oh, if only I had musical parents, I'd be as famous as Mozart." But the soft power of social connections cannot be denied. My life, had either of my parents been musicians at all, would have unfolded in an altogether different manner, and not necessarily for the better. Which makes me wonder: how many exceptional talents are lost in the noise of history for want for a letter of recommendation? For that matter, does it matter?
I suppose it might matter to them.
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Speaking of musical families, this brings me around to the Kazuhito Yamashita + Bambini Quintet. Kazuhito Yamashita is a classical guitarist of some small controversy. The man is an absolute wizard at the guitar, transcribing works one would assume impossible to arrange for the instrument: Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, Dvořák's New World Symphony. From what little I have read, not everyone thinks he should have done that, but it's a bit too late for complaining now, isn't it? He is also quite dedicated to the performance of newer works for guitar, giving upwards of 60 premiers, including the works of his wife, Keiko Fujiie.
Fujiie's music has proved frustratingly difficult to find. This frustration is familiar, cropping up whenever I dig around for composers farther afield than, you know, France or something. It turns out, written records are easier to get ahold of than recordings. Anyways. Fujiie has written a number of orchestral works, twice winning the prestigious Otaka Prize. She also has composed a number of works for her husband and for the family guitar quintet.
Family guitar quintet, you say? Yes! The Kazuhito Yamashita Family Guitar quintet has done a number of tours, and has one album, Kasane, featuring the music of Fujiie. If you're looking for the CD, it's kind of hard to get ahold of. It has a listing on Amazon, but is labeled "unavailable." It's not on Spotify, either. In fact, out of all the searching I've done, I've found exactly one video of the quintet playing together, from a performance at the Festival de la Guittara de Córdoba. Supposedly, they are playing one of Fujiie's works, but it was not credited, so who knows?
One daughter of the group, Kanahi Yamashita, has been going on to pursue of guitar career of her own. You can see some of her work at her website here:
https://kanahi.de/media-2/
https://kanahi.de/media-2/
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- Hits: 550
A Composer for Every Country: Liberia
Liberia, like Sierra Leone, is a country of two populations - the native indigenous tribes, and people descended from freed slaves who came to the area during the 19th century. In this case, the freedmen were settlers from the American Colonization Society. Founded by Robert Finley, the basic idea was to encourage free African-Americans to go to Africa. If your reaction is "That sounds dumb and is probably racist," well... That was kind of the reaction of just about everybody else at the time. Opposed by both African Americans, who had lived in the US for generations and didn't want to leave, and abolitionists, who quickly learned that the Society's motives had more to do with preempting slave riots than finding a workable solution to the end of slavery. In the words of Gerrit Smith, "This Colonization Society had, by an invisible process, half conscious, half unconscious, been transformed into a serviceable organ and member of the Slave Power."
Still, some 15,000 freed African Americans and 3,100 Afro-Caribbeans were settled in what would become Liberia. They created a flag resembling the US flag and drafted a constitution modeled on the US Constitution. Joseph Jenkins Roberts was elected the first President. Missionaries began to go forth and spread the gospel. Things were looking ok, but you might be wondering, "Sure, this sounds fine for the settlers, but how did the locals take all of this?" The answer can be summarized thus: poorly. It turns out, the settlers brought more than their government's structure with them, they also brought US attitudes towards Native tribes with them. The Kru and Grebo peoples, in particular, reacted rather violently as the new Liberian government dispossessed natives of their land and excluded them from birthright citizenship. Indigenous tribes would not be granted citizenship until 1904.
Who were the Kru? As a tribe, they are indigenous to the eastern Liberia area, but they had also migrated and settled to various areas up and down the West African coast. More than anything, they were known for their sailing and nautical abilities. This made them valuable to European colonizers and slave traders, who often hired Kru onto their ships to act as navigators and sailors. The Kru, for their part, leveraged their expertise to stay free, and even developing facial tattoos to mark themselves as Kru to prevent capture by slavers. Since the early 1900's, the Kru have been one of three large indigenous groups of political sway, the other two being the Krahn and the Mano peoples.
More recently, Liberia has suffered two civil wars, the first lasting from 1989 to 1997, the second from 1999 to 2003. The inter-war years saw Liberia become a pariah state under the leadership of Charles Taylor who helped fund the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone's own civil war. I haven't gone too far into reading about this time period, but a lot of the strife leading up to 1989 had to do with the Cold War and reactions to corruption brought by US financial backing of the People's Redemption Council in 1980, along with inter-tribal conflict between the Kru ad Krahn. Coming on up to today, Liberia is again fully democratic in its election process, and has most recently elected former football striker George Weah in 2017.
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Music in Liberia is influenced greatly by gbema, which is local traditional music, and various strands of Western religious and popular music. One particularly popular genre is highlife, originating in Ghana and traveling along the West Coast in the 1950's. My reading suggests that while highlife is still played regularly, it's on the old-fashioned side of things. The younger generations have been more into a Liberian brand of hip-hop called hipco, or just co for short. Developing through the two civil wars and becoming increasingly popular since 2000 or so, hipco is full of social and political commentary, with lyrics directed at corruption and economic inequalities. While the lyrics are mostly delivered in English, rappers fold a local dialect called Kolokwa (hence "co") into the flow.
Our composer of the day is hipco artist Takun J (b.1981). Born in Monrovia, he lived with his mother and three sisters through both civil wars and started singing professionally when he was 17, releasing the single "We'll Spay You" in 2005. After relocating to refugee camps in Ghana and the Ivory Coast for a time, he returned to Liberia and released his first album The Time which spoke against corruption in the Liberian National Police. He was promptly arrested and beaten, but he soldiered on. The track I will share, "They Lie to Us," draws on his biggest musical influences, Bob Marley in particular. It's message and intent is crystal clear, and speaks for itself.
- Hits: 973
A Composer for Every Country: Sierra Leone
Continuing south down the West African coast from Guinea is Sierra Leone. Like Guinea, Sierra Leone is quite ethnically diverse, with sixteen different groups. The Temne and the Mende people form the largest percent of the population, each being about a third of the total. One ethnic group stands out compared to Guinea: the Krio. This group of people is the result of Sierra Leone's curious history as a British protectorate, and to understand where they come from we have to go back to the American Revolution.
You see, it turns out that chattel slavery is not just morally reprehensible and probably economically disadvantageous in the long run. It also causes national security problems (slave owners knew this, of course, given the universal fear of slave riots breaking out). So when the American Revolution started, a not insignificant portion of slaves joined the British army, some joining because, seriously, screw the slave owners, but many joining because the British promised emancipation.
After the war, the British lived up to their promises of compensation for the loyalty of these now-former slaves and relocated them to Nova Scotia. That didn't last long because it turned out there were just as many froth in the mouth racists in Nova Scotia as there was any other place on the continent, and that suddenly transplanting large groups of people from one location to another naturally causes friction.
At the same time, a number of freedmen had been relocated to England, with somewhat similar results. There was a big to-do about what to do with their "Black Poor," and, seeing that their plan to relocate certain sections of the British population to Australia was starting to really pay dividends, the British government proposed a solution the logic of which would make Patrick Star proud: they decided to take the freedmen from Nova Scotia, and the "Black Poor" (who, lets be clear, were also freedmen) and put them somewhere else. That somewhere else happened to be Sierra Leon.
Sierra Leon continued to be the location of choice for sending people liberated from slave ships throughout the 19th century. Due to the nature of the slave trade, the Liberated Africans came from all manner of locations and ethnicities. The end result was a new creole ethnicity, or "Krio," as they came to be known in Sierra Leone. Somehow, despite making up only about 2% of the population, the Krio language became the lingua franca, spoken by almost every ethnic group even though English is technically the official language.
Like every African country, there's more to say about Sierra Leone than its history with colonialism, but the downside of writing about a new country every week is to sacrifice some depth for breadth. More recently, Sierra Leone has been wracked by civil war and the outbreak of ebola and now the novel coronavirus. That said, the country is doing somewhat better than some of the other countries I've covered so far, at least as far as economics are concerned. That growth is tenuous, though, and a lot will have to go right to stabilize the country.
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Today's composer is Asadata Dafora (1890-1965). I say "composer," but that really sells the guy short. He was also a dancer, choreographer, and operatic concert singer. He was born to a wealthy family in Freetown, where his father, John Warner M. Horton, was city treasurer. In 1929, Mr. Dafora went to New York. Given the Great Depression, it wasn't the best timing, but his talents as a musician and dancer eventually saw him through to success and the founding of his dance troupe, the Shogolo Oloba.
Asadata Dafora also had a remarkably productive collaboration with Orson Welles, performing in Welles' all-Black production of Macbeth, as well as co-authoring a radio play called Trangama-Fanga. Mr. Dafora's magnum opus, Kykunkor, is a dance/opera telling the story of a bridegroom who is cursed by a witch doctor and her groom's attempts to lift the curse. The opera was a literal overnight success, it's afternoon audience of 60 or so attracting so many people for the evening performance the concert venue had to turn people away (this may be exaggeration, because the numbers don't quite add up, but it's hardly my place to throw away a good story).
Unfortunately, I cannot find any recording of the work. In fact, I can hardly find any recording of anything Dafora wrote. But I did find this performance of his solo dance, Awassa Astrige/Ostrich, composed and choreographed in 1932.
Dafora is a really intriguing figure I had no knowledge of. It seems his legacy lives much more strongly in the world of ballet, where his work laid the foundation for future Black dancers and choreographers to be taken seriously in a (still) largely white profession. I hope his work sees a revival, because it sounds super interesting, and if it's even half as good as Awassa Astrige, it will still be worth revisiting.
- Hits: 882
A Composer for Every Country: Guinea
Guinea stands separate from Guinea-Bissau because Guinea was colonized by the French, while Guinea-Bissau was colonized by the Portuguese. Something I learned from reading about Guinea which hadn't popped up yet is the collapse of the French Fourth Republic in 1958. The founding of the 5th Republic saw Charles de Gaulle (of World War II fame) basically told the West African colonies: stay with us, or else. Guinea, under the leadership of Ahmed Sékou Touré, voted for independence by referendum and found out the "or else" part of the ultimatum.
The French settlers pulled out of Guinea in a two month time frame, displaying just about the ultimate in human pettiness in the process. As The Washington Post reports, French "unscrewed lightbulbs, removed plans for sewage pipelines in Conakry, and even burned medicines."
Politics within Guinea after that became... complicated. Touré aligned the country with the Soviet Union, which, you know, makes a certain statement in the 20th century, and advocated a combination of socialism and Pan-Africanism. As you might surmise, this led to a certain degree of conflict considering the country was surrounded by countries still occupied by European powers. Not least was Guinea-Bissau, through which Portugal launched a kind of proxy war in an attempt to remove Touré from power. The Portuguese ultimately retreated after freeing a number of political prisoners. Before you go feeling bad for Touré, though, know that he followed that conflict with a huge purge, killing almost 50,000 Guineans and arresting and torturing many others.
At the bigger picture, there are three main ethnicities which hold the most political power now: the Mandinka, the Fula, and Soussou. There are quite a number of smaller ethnic groups which tend not to be well represented in the government. Though French is the official language, some 24 languages are spoken across the country. Religiously, the people are mostly Muslim, with a minority of Christians and indigenous traditional religions making up the rest.
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The composer I have picked for today is Mory Kanté (1950-2020). He was kind of a big deal, and I'm not just being facetious. I mean, I am a little, but seriously, his album, Akwaba Beach (1987), was the best selling African record of its time. Please do take a moment to remember Africa is a continent, not a country, to get a sense of how big that album was. One song in particular, "Yé ké yé ké," also became a number 1 hit song in Europe. It was the first African single to sell over a million copies in Europe.
Mr. Kanté was born into a Mandinka griot family. His father, El Hadj Djeli Fodé Kanté, and his mother, Fatouma Kamissoko, were among the most famous griot families of the early 20th century. Mr. Kanté also learned kora, balafon (relative of the marimba), and griot singing in Mali. In addition to being influenced by Islamic music, he became known as "The Electric Griot" for incorporating electric instruments and various pop and electronic dance styles into his traditional song writing.
Every country I read about, I find something surprising about how connected the world is. In this case, Mory Kanté's songs were the inspiration for at least two Indian Bollywood songs: "Tamma Tamma" and "Jumma Chumma."
Mory Kanté died of complications from various chronic health issues. Unfortunately, it was lack of medical care that did him in. He had been receiving treatment in France, but the outbreak of COVID-19 overwhelmed hospitals and he could no longer get adequate treatment for his illnesses. It is a story I am sure we will learn is all too common in 2020.
- Hits: 1160
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