It is difficult to comment on The Salif Keita show held at the price of P400 at Botswana Craft last Thursday.
Former Mass Media Construction manager and trade unionist, Bashi Sengwaketse, attended with his artistic wife who also appeared the following day on television discussing ways in which teachers can improve their methods of teaching about sexual reproductive health.
They have experience running a record shop and they have that as an additional reason for taking interest in Salif Keita. P800 plus drinks and or food.
Hugh Mogwe is trained in the culture of the French and, apart from his own personal musical training, his ear would have been adjusted to the French West African sound that found its way to France through the likes of Keita himself and Cameroon’s Manu Dibango years before.
That is probably enough reason to attend the show.
Perhaps Hugh must also support because he has family connections there. But Hugh attends anything and everything that has to do with good music. He has also been involved with the management of local Reggae band, Stepin Razor. Hat trip could easily have cost him P400, P800 or P0.00.
Joe is a teacher. Apart from urging me not to be intimidated by my obsession with perfection, which appears to be preventing me from completing any one of my three attempts at recording, he appeared absolutely enchanted. I did not see any attached company, so I place him at a clean P400 minus the drinks.
Keineetse Keineetse, a literatue and arts fanatic, arrived in full African regalia. The wife works in far off lands outside Afriaca. He was alone. P400 bucks and a bunch of yellow plastic coins.
I confessed that I had lost my cellphone and cash after burying Malombo the previous Saturday. He describes himself as a retired socialist, but he did extend to me the benefit of one of his plastic coins. He can’t be that retired!
It was my only beer for the night. I savoured it handsomely. John Selolwane and wife Lizzie had reason to be there. John was part of Banjo’s ‘The Veterans’ band, so they had good reason to be there. John would have found his way there anyway, P400 or not.
Sol Monyame was there, happy, it seemed. It could have been P400 or a complementary. My neighbour is an Orange person. Every Sunday she returns to report that she was at church.
“I have watched the likes of Ishmael Lo and Kadje in Johannesburg. Perhaps his show is not made for open air. It was not outstanding though it was not too disappointing. These kind of shows probably come off better in more intimate settings like the jazz clubs I went to in Jo’burg.
“I have to give them credit. Usually the place is uncomfortably full. This time it was mellow. You know what I mean; mellow,” she comments.
She must have forked out the P400. Otherwise she might have been institutionally sponsored by Orange, who are also associated with the Tatso cuisine programme that McJohn Mosenene did for television on Sunday. In Jo’Burg, it might have been R50 at a festival or R200 at a club!
The north Africans, especially in the West ÔÇô Ghana, Cameroon, Guinea, Cote d’ Voire, Mali, Senegal, Nigeria ÔÇô are notorious for their drumming prowess.
That comes through in the music. That contributes greatly to the success of the French West Africans in France and their counterparts from the British colonies in England. The rhythmic quality of the music competes favourably in tandem with the declining interest of the youth in the electrically engineered sound of the Rock musicians.
I, unlike Kelvin Kaluza, keep my mind open to the harmonic possibilities that the modal approach brings to modern African music. Kelvin, a formally trained musician, will not tolerate anything that sounds like an in-harmonic approach to harmony.
There is much of that in Salif’s music; a place where the note wanders out of the general pattern of the scale as we have been trained to appreciate even as we struggle to reconcile western
approaches to harmony with Afro based ‘scale’ forms.
It does not make it any easier that the Africans of the North, the West, South and East have on their own evolved different methods of creating scales and relating them to harmony. The influences of the Arabic languages, English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Flemish, Italian, Dutch show up against the natural force of the indigenous languages, themselves as varied as the cultures of the African peoples.
Yes, I felt the energy, but not the music. I heard poetry but not song. I heard Mali but not The World. The guitarist worked hard to bring melody by way of improvisation into the rather restrictive chord patterns but that did not make up for the lack of imagination in the harmonic makeup of the music.
‘Afrika Ye’ stood out. As my neighbour says: “He did not play his best music”.
Well it is a hard one to call, but when you ask people, even the nouveux riche of Gaborone, you have to justify the price, even if you are Salif Keita.
