The Maestro - New English Review

by Geoffrey Clarfield (January 2011)

Although Sofrito is an instrumental piece I can imagine the late Santamaria, king of the Afro Cuban style, playing it while remembering his carefree youth on the streets and in the clubs of pre revolutionary Havana, before his move to the States.

In Dar es Salaam Tanzania, in the year 1999, I met two recording engineers who had come to Tanzania to digitally capture the remarkably diverse traditional and popular music of this nation of more than one hundred tribes. Although they had come in good faith, the ministerial bureaucracy to whom they were attached created constant Kafkaesque like scenarios for these two young idealists.

In despair they came to me and a Tanzanian friend and colleague in the hope that we could help successfully advise them how to negotiate the non linear nature of an African government bureaucracy that was acting towards them in the usual predatory manner.

As a token of their appreciation they let me use their studio free of charge for an evening. I had always wanted to lay down a guitar track and then play over it three or four times, a one man Gypsy king, and my friends helped me lay down and mix the tracks. I played my own version of Sofrito, for three guitars, and asked Michel, one of the engineers, to lay down a version with a drum set and another with congas as he was (and is) a fine percussionist. He did so and sent me back to the bush with a CD copy in my bag.

My version of Sofrito is not the most virtuosic performance I have ever given but, it was done with joy, in an effortless and playful manner, without desire for gain and for the love of the art as I was to discover to my surprise about eighteen months later.

I was sitting in my office in the middle of Tanzania, watching the spear toting Barabaig tribesmen drive their cattle past my window when the phone rang.

We had had no phone on the project site for the first year and half and then presto, the World Bank had financed a microwave relay station throughout the rift valley of Tanzania and one day, a technician came to install my phone and internet connection. I was miles from nowhere but suddenly, I was wired.

To get to the capital of Tanzania from my site in Central Tanzania, to the city of Dar es Salaam (the official capital is Dodoma in the center of the country, but none of the Embassies or Ministries are really based there) I had to drive on an unpaved road for six hours to Arusha town.

The drive is beautiful. It follows the rift valley up towards the Kenyan border. You pass Lake Manyara on the west, Tarangire game park on the east and on good days, you can see snow capped Kilimanjaro to the north east. Every forty or fifty miles there is a small trading post or missionary centre. You can tell if the settlements are old or not by the mango trees. The 19^th century Swahili and Arab slave traders established villages on the slave route to and from the Congo and wherever they settled they planted mangos. Some villages are surrounded by concentric circles of mango trees as far as the eye can see.

As you approach Arusha town Mount Meru faces you with its snow capped peak and on the plains nearby you see tall Masai and Barabaig herdsmen, dressed in red wrap arounds, carrying spears and clubs and wearing elaborate beads and ivory ear plugs, oblivious to the modern world around them.

Off the main highway (which is a wide dirt road) Masai and Barabaig women would sometimes herd their flocks, bare breasted, away from the puritanism of local government officials who have adopted the externals of the sexual puritanism of local missionaries. Many times on my drives north I would stop and watch Masai warriors jumping in unison, singing their tribal songs in a long low roar that sounded like Gregorian chant played through distorted speakers.

During the first year of my project the road to my site was flooded by the El Nino. The drive to and from Arusha often took 12 hours and when the road disappeared into flooded swamp lands, bands of ten to twenty peasants would build acacia tree paths and tracks through the water, and push and pull our jeep to the other side.

On one trip these local engineers miscalculated, as the water climbed up to the doors of our land cruiser and into our jeep. I ordered all of my staff out. We walked across the river from the jeep with our files and equipment on our heads.

When I reached the shore I looked behind me to see our dandy driver walking in a river of flowing brown mud and debris with his red tie, diamond pin and starched white shirt providing an urban contrast with that most African river.

Dar is a run down third world, port city. It attracts thousands of unemployed peasants from the country side who come to the city looking for opportunity and a better life for themselves and their children. They therefore end up living in slums, like the favelas of Brazil, where they eke out a living as hawkers and day laborers.

Women who have the looks for it, very often enter the world of prostitution, but it is different from that of the West. There are no pimps and the line between outright prostitution and being shown a good time and having your man of the day lend you or give you some money to get you through the week, is blurred at best. But, there is an AIDs epidemic that no one seems to care about.

Despite the poverty of Dar, it has its charm. It hugs the coast of the Indian Ocean. Tanzanians swim on those beaches where they have less fear of sharks. Tanzanians of all walks of life love the beach and spend time there when they can. And Dar is not as violent as other large African cities. The streets and bars are filled with people at night. The private transport is continuous and foreigners are not at terrible risk at least if, they keep to the main roads after dark.

Even in the middle class suburbs men walk the streets hawking everything from fried food and cassava chips to knock offs of leather Gucci belts that sell for two or three dollars. Cows walk through the streets and are tended by young boys. Small herds of goats and sheep can be seen grazing in any vacant lot. Around every corner there are outdoor fruit venders with racks of mangos, avocados and every other tropical fruit imaginable up for sale.

At stop lights beggars politely ask for money while displaying their infirmities while other men run up to your car window, selling cashew nuts and the latest Time or Newsweek. Dar is really a series of improvised villages with a semi modern city with its international hotels, its Hiltons, Holiday Inns and South African banks, transplanted from overseas.

It is in these slums where the many popular ensembles live and play for their local consumers. Sometimes they get money from a payment at the door and sometimes they get a cut of the drinks. Sometimes they play for a flat fee. Either way it is in these clubs where the real popular music lives, where bands compete for attention and where one band can dissolve and another reform. There is a constant circulation of musicians from one band to another and younger musicians are breaking in all the time.

They brought their tribal musical traditions with them to the city and there they also heard international music: European popular music, Jazz and the African influenced music of the Caribbean and Latin America. Young men bought cheap guitars and taught themselves how to play. They learnt the sax and horns in marching bands, both military and religious.

Like the blues men of old they combined European and African melodies, harmonies and rhythms, and created varieties of popular music which spoke to and reflected the joys, passions and suffering of these new urban immigrants. Much of the music was club and dance music. It was youth based and rebelled against tribal ways. It was youth music decades ahead of the youth music, rebellion that was to characterize the music of the 50s and 60s, in America and Europe.

Despite the kleptocracy and poverty that characterizes Tanzania today, Tanzanian friends and colleagues have often reminded me, nostalgically, that during the first ten years of independence, there was little visible corruption, the shilling was stable, salaries were reasonable, there was work for the growing number of educated Africans, the population had yet to explode and the future of Africa looked bright indeed.

I got off work at a reasonable hour. All my project accounts had balanced. All my meetings had gone well. My reports had been accepted. I had that temporary feeling of any rural development project manager, that I had made some dent in the local decline into poverty, some cessation of grief and hopelessness for a number of clients in one part of the country.

In doing so, I and my Tanzanian colleagues had shown that a project could function like a fair and rational bureaucracy in any Western democracy, thus providing some direct experience for peasants that things did not have to be the way they are and that maybe, just maybe, one day they would start demanding from their own governments what they and everyone else in East Africa seemed to demand and expect from the donor organizations of the OECD countries-transparency and fairness. But as I said, it was a good day and my mind was free from the daily concerns of a rural development project manager.

Only Rosa, Michel and I knew that the machine had no film, was made out of plastic, had been bought at a five and dime store in the States for a few dollars and was not plugged into anything. There must be a quote from Sun Tzu to support this kind of defense. I will find it.

They opened the door to the studio and we walked in. Ten men were standing and sitting around the studio doing various things. One was propped upright in a corner. He was holding ice against his cheek and he complained that he had just returned from the dentist. Another was peeling some bananas and handing them to various people. Another was sitting and tuning a guitar. Another was sipping a cup of tea.

Rosa and Michel introduced me to each person in the studio. It was informal but as customary in Africa I shook hands with each musician in turn and chatted with each one as I did. The obvious leader of them all, a tall, and constantly smiling man named Ndala Kasheba kept slapping me on the back saying,

Blown away by the kindness and warmth that permeated the studio I felt completely at ease. No stage fright. No worries about what I would do or how I would sound. It was one of those classic situations where you are poised and in the flow.

Within a few minutes I had plugged in my guitar, the head phones were adjusted, they played the first track and I just plucked away. Everyone was watching me, some from the recording room and some from within the studio. I was oblivious to it all and entered the flow of this music. It was familiar. It had the lyricism and melody of Latin music and the rhythm of Africa. I played and played and played.

On subsequent trips to Dar I spent much of my spare time with Rosa and Michel. They were about the age of my eldest son. But somehow we met half way in the ageless and timeless world of musicians. We would spend hours, listening to their growing number of digital recordings, hearing about their nearly constant but successful battles with the government bureaucracy and listening sympathetically to their plans to return to the United States so they could raise some more money to continue their work in Tanzania. After almost three years they had run out of funds and finally had to fly home.

In the States they approached a number of donor organizations but could not persuade them that man does not live by bread alone and that cultural preservation in Africa was and should be a serious part and parcel of social development.

On a recent trip to Johannesburg I found out that just about everybody I met had hired a Zimbabwean maid. They were honest, hard working and if they did not like you they would not call upon some friend or relative to car jack you at your garage or shoot you on the street.

The objective suffering of people in Africa causes many right minded people to wonder how on earth their lot can be improved and, what is it precisely that has made Africa the social and economic basket case of the world and once more, the burden of the Western donors.

Pop stars like Bono argue successfully for more aid. But he misses the point. So much of that Aid is stolen, perhaps more than 50%. It would be better if he campaigned for good government. If you ask Africans whether they prefer freedom and transparency to growing dependency on a Western aid machine that gets siphoned off by powerful politicians, they will tell you they prefer freedom and honest government to the dependency of development assistance.

So that the skeptical reader may wonder what I am talking about, despite the near infinite variations of melody and rhythm that are found across the African continent, there are a number of distinctive features that characterize the Pan African tradition. As the French historian Fernand Braudel has argued, sub Saharan Africa is a distinct civilization. It therefore has its distinctive musical world just like Asia or Europe.

Let me number the traits:

Instruments are varied and numerous and are used individually and in ensembles
There is a tendency to have at least two or more things going on at once and thus there is widespread rhythmic and melodic polyphony
Plucked instruments far outnumber bowed ones
They often have jangles of some sort attached to them so that there is a buzzing sound that is almost always present
Variation and improvisation upon short melodic motifs dominate melodic structure
There is a close relationship between language and melody
Melodies are often built upon major seconds and thirds
Antiponal and responsorial techniques pre dominate
Music is almost always associated with dance.

There you have it. Now, when you listen to African or African influenced music you will be conscious of what makes it African. It is a nice and easy grid to bear in mind.

As Wynton Marsalis describes it in the Ken Burns PBS series on Jazz, early in the 20^th century the Music Department at Harvard University held a conference on what the nature of a new American classical music would be. Marsalis smiles as he points out that the question was valid, but the answer was just down the street in the ghettos and speakeasies where African Americans were inventing Jazz, outside of the conservatory by using their instruments, melodies and harmonies in ways that Conservatory trained musicians could not and did not imagine.

Such is the unstoppable creativity of the African musical tradition. It never lets up and when Western pop music falters, the great continent draws on another tradition to reinvigorate the cultural life of the descendants of European migrants to the New World.

If you are a development professional it is easier to deal with a continent if you assume it is a total basket case. If each development worker or donor organization would come to Africa with the artistic humility that musicians do when they go there, or receive African musicians in their home countries, then, the development process might benefit from such an approach. For a variety of reasons that is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Rosa and Michel went home to America and the Makuti studio was no more. They said they could master the tapes better in the States. They said they would do it for free while they kept down day jobs in the music industry and, they said they would open a small Internet based label to try and stimulate interest for the materials that they had recorded. They were as good as their word.

I drive up to the Police Officers mess. I had arrived with some Tanzanian colleagues, largely middle aged technical experts who worked for my project and who over the last two years have become my friends. I suspect that rural development project work is akin to being in the army. You are thrown in with other people. You have goals to fulfill and tasks to do and you do everything in your power to do them well. You spend days, weeks and months together, often to the exclusion of your family and friends and you make sure that you work on the principle of all for one and one for all. Any other approach spells failure.

The Police Officers Mess is an L shaped building where on the open side lies an empty swimming pool. You enter into the building where there is a large bar on one side and then across to a large patio. There, there are hundreds of white plastic chairs and many tables. There you will see well dressed Tanzanian men and women, usually in large groups, drinking, eating, smoking, talking and laughing. There is a fair amount of flirtatiousness in the air but it is very modest and very low key. Beyond the patio there is an open stage. It is large and wide and at least ten to fifteen musicians are spread across it.

Behind the musicians, a few yards away are the coral cliffs and the sea, where you can hear the waves crash. Sometimes you can feel the spray near the stage. You can see the lights of the large container and oil ships at anchor glittering in the harbor. On moonlit nights you can see to the far horizon and the waves and water are aglitter as if they were sprinkled with moon dust. The air is humid but the wind makes it comfortable and at times pleasant. In January it is hot as hell but in July and August it is chilly and you may need to wear a sweater.

He starts his announcement in Swahili and it goes something like this:

I walk away from my table, I get up on stage and one of the young apprentices fusses over me and makes sure that my guitar is tuned, properly balanced and plugged in.

I quickly catch the chords and start doing some variations. I throw in some rock rhythms. I lay on some Flamenco rasguedos, those multi finger, and multi flaying infinity kind of chords that just keep on going. Kasheba takes one of his marvelous and classically Congolese solos and then signals to me.

They had finally mixed the album we had all played on. It was called Yellow Card (available on the internet at www.limitlesssky.com). Bravely, they sent a copy to the reviewers at the New York Times and the Village Voice and it got praise from both. Rosa and Michel are many things-artists, impresarios, entrepreneurs. One thing they are is confident that they work with artists that they choose and when in the studio they mix sounds like painters.

One evening while eating dinner at our place, he told us a story about crossing over the Tanzanian border near Zaire, sometime in eighties when the rebels and the government held different parts of the country under their authority. They had just crossed over from government territory on their way to Tanzania. A group of armed rebels stopped them and asked them who they were and what they were doing.

Kasheba took the disks and listened to them. He came back the next week. We narrowed down the song list to twenty five distinct pieces and we got to work. We started playing Congolese versions of Yesterday by the Beatles, Congolese versions of the blues. I wrote a Tango for us and we worked on that. Once I convinced our teenage son to sit in with us. He was very excited and Kasheba told him he was good and should practice more. Somehow, I felt this was a historic occasion but I did not know why.

I was not at all happy to leave Tanzania. By that time it was the music that was keeping me there and the connection that I had made with Kasheba over the last two years. When I got back to Canada I called Michel and Rosa and we had a long chat about just how to arrange the tour for Kasheba and his colleagues.

I had not lived in Canada for over twenty years. I was back in my home town, welcomed by my family and childhood friends. Yet I felt like Rip van Winkle. I had woken up in my home town twenty years later and everything had changed. It sure kept me busy.

One evening I was called to the phone. It was Rosa, from her studio in Seattle.

I was stunned. He was in his late fifties and although he had a heart condition he did not smoke and rarely drank. He lived a modest life and his mood was steady.

He could have gone to South Africa for better treatment or even Nairobi but there was always the question of money. When you rise in Africa, your extended family rises with you. The higher you rise the wider the set of people who demand your financial support. In the end, those who are most successful often end up as poor as they started, since the pressures and demands of the African extended family are almost impossible to avoid.

I am sure that that day will arrive. It is a pity that Ndala Kasheba, the Maestro, will not be there to see it.

Geoffrey Clarfield is an Anthropologist at large.

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