Youssou N'Dour, the subject of a new documentary by Chai Vasarhelyi
Music, like cinema, is a language that glides across borders, and no continent has sent its song as far and wide as Africa. Two documentaries out this week, “Soul Power” and “Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love,” look at how African music, one of the great nomadic phenomena of global culture, has spread itself across the hemispheres, and ask whether it’s possible for it to come home again.
Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s “Soul Power” is the record of a diaspora-defying concert that took place in 1974, when larger-than-life African-American performers—including James Brown and BB King—flew into Zaire (now the Congo) for a three-day festival. Despite the talent involved, the event actually came to fruition as a sideshow to the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman—the result of organizers Hugh Masekela’s and Stewart Levine’s vision for a back-to-roots extravaganza combined with the promotional genius of Don King.
The film draws on footage that didn’t make it into “When We Were Kings”, Leon Gast’s Oscar-winning documentary about Ali’s surprise victory. Like “Kings,” “Soul Power” is a Black Pride relic, capturing a moment when the ancestral continent was thought to hold answers to racism, identity issues, and other struggles of the African-American experience. “I never felt so free in my life,” Ali proclaims in his new surroundings. (He’s even impressed with African flies—which are faster, it seems to him, because they don’t have “too much to eat.”) “The music festival,” says Levy-Hinte in the press notes, “was the expression of a profound desire to forge musical, cultural, political, spiritual connections and to rediscover a common heritage and sensibility.”
The African-American diaspora would turn out to be more complicated than that, the boundaries involved much more than geographical. Connections between host and visitor weren’t instantaneous. Most American guests, as the film shows, didn’t speak a word of any African language, much less French. George Foreman steps off the plane in Kinshasa accompanied by his pet German shepherd, the very dog the Belgians used to terrorize their colonial subjects. And BB King looks more comfortable sparring with Ali than he does meeting locals. The cinematographers have a similar bias; Levy-Hinte says he would have liked to include more Africans in the film, but “the footage simply wasn’t there.”
What is there, though, is music—lots of it. It’s in the air, as a nifty cut from a drummer playing in the streets suggests. During the 12-hour concert, the Spinners, Sister Sledge, the Crusaders, the Fania All-Stars, and Miriam Makeba temporarily bridge the gap between cultures and continents, and both concert and film culminate in an explosive, crowd-thrilling performance by James Brown. “We’ve worked in one corner and they’ve worked in the other corner,” singer/songwriter Bill Withers says, to an unseen interviewer, of the two sides of African music’s continental divide. The two groups don’t meet exactly in the middle. Then again: would you want them to?
African, and global, unity is one of Grammy-winning musician Youssou N’Dour’s favorite themes: “Open the borders and come together,” he sings during a concert shown early in “Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love.” American director Chai Vasarhelyi, who started shooting six months after being introduced to N’Dour’s music, got the message. “I didn’t understand a word, but it didn’t matter,” she explains in the press notes. “His songs were magic.”
One of the world’s most successful musicians, N’Dour is also Senegal’s most respected griot, or bard—“Remember where you come from/When you hear my voice,” he sings—not to mention the patriarch of Dakar nightlife. Having always lived in Senegal, apart from a brief period in his youth when he ran away from his disapproving father to play nightclubs in the Gambia, he’s managed to share his local traditions with the wider world without ever straying too far from his roots—and he’s pretty much managed to keep all his fans happy in the process.
That is, until he steers his music into religious territory. N’Dour, like the vast majority of Senegalese, is a practicing Muslim. But as Vashelyi’s film shows, the local audience that N’dour had in mind when he composed Egypt, his groundbreaking celebration of Islam, vehemently rejected it. Ironically, the 2004 album, which N’Dour originally didn’t even want to release internationally, was a hit in the West. A European audience doesn’t seem to mind when, before a show during Ramadan, Egyptian members of N’Dour’s orchestra request they put their drinks away. N’Dour says he believes that “everything can be expressed through music.” Muslim authorities in Senegal, though, draw the line at faith. Their position, as a friend of N’Dour’s explains, is that “you can’t sing pop songs about our religious leaders.”
Scenes of N’Dour traveling the world—New York in particular, where he performs within the hallowed walls of Carnegie Hall and cab drivers hail him as though he were a long-lost friend—are intercut with private moments spent with his adoring family in Dakar. (His nonagenarian grandmother, who has since died, was also a griot, and it is because of her that N’Dour became the singer he is today.) as is the way the global tides affected the world’s reception of his music. N’Dour, worried his album’s peaceful message would be missed, delayed its release for three years after 9/11. And he only secured the collaboration of Senegalese religious singers, and consequently hopes of the album’s acceptance within his own country, after Egypt won a Grammy.
In Dakar, N’Dour says he loves to visit the mosque by day and play at his club by night. As comfortable as he is on his home turf, though, he in some ways has more freedom abroad, where he, like the R&B stars who wow their Zairian hosts in “Soul Power,” is embraced as a messenger of a distinct culture.
Darrell Hartman, a former assistant editor at Travel + Leisure, has written for Budget Travel, Departures, Style.com, and the travel section of the Chicago Sun-Times. A collection of his writings is at darrellhartman.com.
The impulse to promenade is strong in Croatian culture. In almost every limestone Old Town dotting the country’s coastline, promenades fill daily in the late afternoon. By the time the weekend rolls around, from morning until night these walkways are particularly dense with humanity: families, gangs of teenagers, couples, solo strollers, and of course the constant ebb and flow of tourist amoebas—those groups whose members wear matching hats or vests and who speak conspicuously in non-Slavic languages. In the coastal town of Zadar, all these people, local and foreign, come to amble and talk to one another and listen to Croatian architect and artist Nikola Basic’s sea organ, a public art piece that manages to harness the undeniably human impulse to mingle. The structure—part architecture, part sound, part science—is a point of convergence and conversation.
Basic collaborated with Dalmatian stonemasons, who seamlessly carved the organ directly into the promenade’s walls, completing the project in 2005. The sea pushes air through the organ’s underwater pipes resulting in unique ambient musical chords that float down the walkway, changing in intensity and tone as the sea moves. The project, which is the only sea organ of its kind, recently received the European Prize for Urban Public Space.
Traditional Croatian music uses melodies and harmonies in the diatonic major scale (a scale that roughly translates as the successive playing of the white keys on a piano). The five musically tuned pipes of each section of this organ are arranged to create chords that obliquely reflect this traditional style. Each organ pipe is blown by a column of air that is a direct result of a column of wave-moved water. From any given point on the organ’s fifty feet of steps someone can experience several grouped chords at a time. So in addition to reflecting the music of the tides and movements of the ocean, the organ also reflects the culture of the residents on the shore.
Approaching the organ at dawn on my first visit, not a soul was on the boardwalk and I was struck by the peaceful pastel tones of the sky and sea reflected in the smooth stone. As I sat to capture the sounds of the organ with my minidisc recorder, the sea pushed its way through the organ, slowly humming me awake. The morning wore on and pedestrians began to appear along the shore. Boats began drifting in and out of the port, their wakes changing the intensity of the organ’s tones. My initial plan was to interview people about their impressions of the organ, but after the first few conversations I realized that I would be engaging in a much larger social commentary about the nature of peace and conflict in the area.
The history of strife in the region is, of course, vast. This city has been destroyed again and again—from oppressive Venetian rule, the constant looming Ottoman threat, and the destruction of the original promenade by Allied carpet bombings in WWII. The reconstructed promenade suffered more attacks during 1991-1995 when Serb Krajina rebels with the protection of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) under Slobodan Milosevic’s control, converged on the city and shelled it. Attacks on Zadar and other Croatian cities, as well as concomitant brutal attacks by Croats on Serbs, continued until the end of the war in 1995.
Just ten years later the sea organ serves as a reminder of how important newfound peace is to the region. I first interviewed a woman dressed in all black with kempt dyed-blonde hair solemnly taking footage of the organ on her cell phone. When I approached her and asked how she was enjoying the sounds of the organ she broke her serious façade and smiled broadly, “I love the sounds. So lovely!” Ines, as I found out, was from Slovenia, visiting a friend in Zadar. I approached several others, many of them in their thirties and forties: a group of women from Zadar who like to come and talk on the steps who said the sounds make them nicer people; some Serbian artists who were putting on an auction to support a Belgrade playwright. Everyone gave glowing praise for the organ and its relatively new presence on the seaside promenade. But it wasn’t until three 19-year-old boys from the neighboring town of Preko accosted me that I got a more in-depth perspective on the social function of the sea organ.
I was skeptical of them at first. Perhaps it was the two liter plastic Coke bottle filled with red wine that they took turns pulling off of at 1pm. Who knows? But the boys, named Ante, Ante and Josip respectively, were full of smiles. In a strange role reversal, they began asking me questions about what I was doing with the microphone (recording the organ’s music) and where I was from and how I liked the organ. After just a moment of hesitation, I quickly let my guard down and entered into a chatty conversation with the boys about Croatian pop stars and the differences between college in the U.S. and Croatia. They told me only roughly 10% of high school graduates continue on to college in Croatia (in stark contrast to the >70% estimate in the U.S.), and that the rest go to trade school or directly into the work force. Finally, they broached the topic of the recent conflict between the Serbs and the Croatian army. A dark cloud passed over the taller of the Ante’s faces.
“Fuck the Serbs,” he said. My heart tightened to think of the tragedy both sides suffered. And then very quickly, he amended, “I’m sorry. I don’t mean that. People are individuals. Individuals are not their government.”
Considering the U.S. role in world affairs at the moment, this statement resonated profoundly with me, a foreigner in a foreign land.
As it turns out, Ante’s father was killed while serving in the Croatian army in 1993. Josip’s uncle was also killed in the war that same year. I could feel the resentment the boys held for the conflict that pervaded their youth.
Ante described the sound the bombs made in the water as they dropped in the Adriatic corridor between Preko and Zadar, raising his long arms to show the explosions. “Why they would bomb the ocean I don’t know,” he said. “But the organ would’ve sounded much different then,” the shorter Ante pointed out, and the boys laughed. “Not such a peaceful piano,” the taller Ante said, fluttering his fingers through the air as if playing one.
And then it struck me that the organ is more than just a sound piece—it’s a symbol for stability, marking the slow breath in and out of the tides. In this way, Nikola Basic has performed an invaluable study of the human condition, not only for the people of Zadar, but for all the people who flow in and out of the city as visitors. As long as those grouped chords wheeze gently from the ocean’s lapping, the organ will mark the absence of war. Residents and travelers will continue to come together on the organ’s shore to talk to one another of places near and far and to develop a progressive dialogue about the future with regard to their turbulent past.
Emily Strelow, starting at a young age, has lived all over the world. When she’s not possessed by a relentless urge to wander and explore both human and non-human cultures, she teaches writing at Portland Community College in Portland, Oregon.
