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.
