Siddhartha Mitter

Sounds like Africa -- and rock 'n' roll

Boston Globe, November 10, 2006
With its 21 strings, the long West African instrument called the kora delivers a sound rich in nuance and finesse. It also requires lengthy study. Together these factors have made it a vehicle for the preservation of traditional music by griots -- the praise-singing troubadours of Mali and Guinea -- rather than innovation and fusion with modern genres.

Then Ba Cissoko came along, with the band that bears his name. The Guinean combo, which visits the Somerville Theatre tonight on its maiden US tour, has jolted tradition by matching Cissoko's conventional kora with an electric version invented and played by his cousin Sékou Kouyaté . And they have taken their koras into unlikely terrain such as reggae, salsa, and rock without jettisoning traditional themes.

"Electric Griot Land," the band's second album, available as a European import, states the group's approach in its title. The Jimi Hendrix reference is no accident, but the interplay of acoustic and electric kora, backed by Kourou Kouyaté, another cousin, on bass and Ibrahima Bah on percussion, is more elegant, less dissonant than the comparison might imply. Contributions from French-African soul duo Les Nubians, Somali rapper K'Naan, and Ivorian reggae star Tiken Jah Fakoly bolster the overall global-groovy feel.

Significantly, the critical plaudits for Cissoko on the world-music circuit have not come at the expense of local credibility. He spends as much time in Guinea as he does on the road, and his music has grown popular with the home audience despite his act of kora-goes-electric heresy.

"What works at home isn't always what works out in the world," Cissoko says on the phone from a tour stop in Florida. "I try to mix the traditional and the modern. There's a lot of traditional folk music in Guinea that's only consumed in Guinea. I thought, why not modernize it?

"At first it wasn't easy. A lot of old griots couldn't accept the idea of an electric kora. They said, you're turning it into a guitar. I said, it isn't a guitar. The kora is a complete instrument; it can do lots of things. It was a way of creating an opening for the kora."

Brad Powell, who runs the Boston-based online world-music store Calabash Music, says he was "blown away" the first time he saw the group play, in Marseille. "They will start off and launch into this very nice Afrobeat groove," Powell says. "However, [Sékou Kouyaté] has this whole bunch of effects racked up on his kora, and when he steps on the pedal, he lifts off into this other place. He sounds like Eric Clapton or Led Zeppelin."

Something of a late bloomer, the 39-year-old Cissoko developed only slowly his investment in the kora and its future. Though he was born into a family of griots, and therefore musicians, as a child growing up in northern Guinea his overriding interest was soccer -- until an uncle, kora player M'Bady Kouyaté, intervened and took him under his wing. By traveling the country and playing with his uncle, Cissoko gradually found his vocation.

Cissoko moved to Conakry, the capital, and began to play at hotels in order to save up the money to baptize his kora -- a ritual that signifies the end of apprenticeship and that involves expenses such as buying and slaughtering a sheep. When the time came, he says, he named his kora after his grandmother, Djéli Fatouma Kouyaté. He now owns several koras, but that one, which he keeps in Guinea, is the most precious to him.

The hotel gigs had another effect: forced exposure to different musical styles, which guests would request he play interspersed with the traditional music.

"At the hotel, people asked me if I could play other things, like Phil Collins, Bob Marley, or popular French songs," Cissoko says. "It isn't easy to play reggae on the kora." To illustrate, he sounds out a hard, syncopated reggae beat, quite different from the kora's subtle sonority.

He also met a French trumpet player, Gilles Poizat, who was doing a year of overseas work in lieu of military service. They became friends, and Poizat spent time with Cissoko's family learning kora basics. The idea of a kora-trumpet duo was outlandish enough to tempt them. The group they formed, Tamalalou, lasted several years in the 1990s and afforded Cissoko time in Marseille soaking up influences.

Ba Cissoko, the group, came together in 1998, first as a trio with the Kouyaté cousins and, Cissoko says, quickly adding percussionist Bah, whom they discovered at a music festival in Mali after traveling all night by bush taxi, lugging their instruments. The foursome finally released their first album, "Sabolan," in 2004. It earned them critical acclaim and touring opportunities in Europe and Japan.

All three of his bandmates are considerably younger than Cissoko, who therefore acts not only as a leader but also as an older brother, an important role in African society. But he hopes to go further and help a whole generation of musicians develop their careers.

"There are many young, talented musicians in Guinea," Cissoko says. Nor is there a lack of audience; what is missing, as in many other developing countries, are performance, recording, and other facilities. He has set up a cultural center in Conakry, he says, where musicians can rehearse and perform.

Cissoko also hopes to spur a greater dialogue between the kora and instruments of other traditions. For two years running, he has convened an international festival of kora and strings, which aims to bring to Conakry guitarists and masters of other string instruments such as the Middle Eastern oud or the Indian sitar.

Initiatives like these are part and parcel of a refreshing artistic philosophy. For Cissoko, traditional and modern sounds need not crowd each other out, and local and global ears can be satisfied at the same time. It's up to young artists to make it work.

"At first I played only traditional music, but at some point I wanted to modernize it," Cissoko says. "Our parents before us created new things. Why shouldn't we, the younger generation, create new things too?"

In pianist's hands, the jazz tradition evolves

Boston Globe, March 2, 2006 (Photo: Marc Cary/Motéma Records)
NEW YORK -- On the middle floor of a Harlem brownstone that once was home to Langston Hughes, the pianist Marc Cary holes up in a studio crowded with computers, keyboards, partly depleted bottles of red wine, and other flotsam of the creative process.

In the next room, his collaborator in business and music , Shon "Chance" Miller, a hip-hop artist and producer, lurks in similar fashion. Motema Music, the indie label on which Cary records, has its office in a space upstairs. And on the parlor floor, in the one fully renovated room, a concert piano stands proudly beneath a bank of stage lights.

Folks trundle up and down the narrow staircase and maneuver past drywall and over ripped-up carpet. Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, may have lived here, but the house is no elegant Harlem dowager. When the artists leased the building last year, they found it in a state unbecoming to the memory of its illustrious resident.

"It was in such disrepair and disrespect," Cary says. Now, he says, they're bringing the energy back, and he is starting to feel the presence of the luminaries who once met here. "Sometimes when you sit here -- quietly -- you can see something out of the corner of your eye. There's a certain joy in here that's come back to life."

At once idiosyncratic and in the tradition, the vibe in the house aptly encapsulates the spirit of Cary's music, an eclectic portfolio that is grounded in jazz but overflows into hip-hop, soul, house, Indian music, spoken poetry, and much else depending on which of his various projects and musical accomplices he's dealing with.

One of Cary's working groups for the last five years has been the Focus Trio, an acoustic, straight-ahead collaboration with two San Francisco-based musicians, bassist David Ewell and drummer and percussionist Sameer Gupta . On Tuesday Cary brings this group to Scullers, in somewhat belated support of last summer's "Focus," the trio's debut release.

"Focus" is one of those criminally under-the-radar jazz records. It finds Cary in a rarefied entente with Gupta and Ewell, who are steeped in both jazz and the music of their heritage, respectively Indian and Chinese. Gupta switches between drum set and tablas. Cary's compositions meld the influences in elegant, intuitive fashion, with the complex rhythms and patient development of raga, yet the unabashed lyricism of fine R&B.

"It's a very dynamic record rhythmically," Cary says. "I'm dealing with a lot of different odd-meter phrasings, I've got some songs in 7, in 5, and some different rhythms layered, a lot of polyrhythm. But the melodies are beautiful, man."

The boundary-pushing musician acclaimed by his peers yet little known to the public is a jazz archetype: It may be a tiresome cliche, but it's also a frustrating reality. Cary, who recently turned 40, fits the bill. His credentials include stints with Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, and Roy Hargrove, and with young bloods junior to him but also better known, such as vibraphonist Stefon Harris.

Cary takes this situation with self-esteem intact. "Even though I am a top-shelf item, I'm not acknowledged as that," he says. "But I don't necessarily like people talking about the fact that I'm not talked about. I don't want them to feel, 'Oh, poor Marc.' Because I'm doing what I gotta do."

Taking his lumps, in fact, is a Cary specialty. It's not exactly that life dealt him lemons -- he grew up in a musical family, with a great-grandmother, Mae York Smith, who played piano for silent movies and offered him guidance until she died at 103 -- but he is still the product of some remarkable tough-love experiences.

One of these came at age 15, when he was, as he puts it, "a wild kid" growing up in Washington, D.C., immersed in go-go, the local pop music, and behaving badly. His parents placed him in a 12-step program where he encountered people with daunting problems, but also remarkable abilities.

"There were people coming off the street with open abscesses on their arms, 20-year veterans of cocaine and heroin addiction, and they were brilliant people but they were killing themselves," he says. "And I realized, I came here to learn who I was."

One man, he said, became his mentor. He was a musician who could take apart a Fender Rhodes and reassemble it perfectly. Cary once witnessed the man listen to the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" and write down the score as it was playing.

"He saw my talent and he encouraged me," Cary says. "I hung around him the whole year I was in the program. And I emerged from there with the ability to audition for the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. It was full steam ahead from there. Things just emerged and people embraced me."

He credits Calvin Jones, a famed D.C. bandleader who drilled him like an obstreperous football coach; saxophonist Antoine Roney, who put him up when he came to New York, 21 and broke, and kicked him out of the house every morning; veteran drummer Art Taylor, who brought him into his band after an unexpected audition.

Now an uptown jazz lifer himself, Cary could have succumbed to nostalgia or neotraditionalism. Instead, he says, the opposite happened.

"Once I got so involved with the jazz scene to the extent that was the only thing I was doing, I started to feel funny," he says. "I realized that I write pop songs, I write R&B, that's where my head is. Those are the rhythms that I remember and that I feel. I started to incorporate that sound with what I learned by going head first into the jazz idiom. That gave me my identity."

In a sense, it also gave Cary his freedom -- to explore genres and work across creative boundaries, but also to continue to make jazz like "Focus," pure without purism, obviating jazz distinctions that are sclerotic and premature.

"Jazz is such a new music, and it's still in its development process," he says. "A lot of the development seems to have already happened in most people's minds, but I see so much more, so many more possibilities."