creative forces

Blog # 46…June 2015

Ah music, that most evocative, soothing and spirited art form. We’re lucky that we can listen how and when we like, and some of us can play a bit too.  Not so with musicians in some parts of the world where it’s seen as subversive and politically dangerous.

At the recent HotDocs festival in Toronto, I saw a moving account of some courageous and committed musicians in Mali (a large landlocked country in the bulge of west Africa) who responded to the banning of any form of music by going underground. 

Since 2001, Mali had been the site of Festival au Desert, held outside Timbuktu in the north, attracting world attention. Following the concert in 2012, fundamentalist jihadists adopted a strict interpretation of Sharia law, burning instruments and destroying radio stations. Many musicians refused to be silenced and either disappeared or went into exile, waiting and watching for a chance to re emerge.

The film I saw, They Will Have To Kill Us First,  is a battle cry of defiance. That spirit led Khaira Arby (The Nightingale of the North) - who’d been biding her time for a couple of years - to convince her fellow vocalist Disco to risk a small concert in a town square as a rallying cry to her fellow citizens. As I watched her determined organizing of the staging for the concert and the eager gathering of the crowd, there was a scary sense that guys with guns would arrive and it would end in violence.  Happily not, the crowd gathered a bit tentatively, soon started smiling and quickly erupted into dancing and singing along. Khaira speaks of peace and unity with tears in her eyes…most of the people in audiences on both sides of the screen had them too.

Songhoy Blues, a gritty blues band took another route and went into exile in the south. Equally committed to freedom they continued to keep the spirit of their music alive, attracting the attention of the African Express Team who invited them to a recording session when they came to Bamako. That led to a  collaboration with Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeah which got them an international tour that’s going on now…they were at The Garrison in Toronto on June 6.

Louis Armstrong was also brave in the face of political pressure.  In West Berlin, during a world tour in 1965, at the height of the Cold War and of racial tensions in the US south, he crossed unofficially to East Berlin and gave an impromptu concert. Pressed to comment on the situation of blacks in his country and conscious of the sensitivity of his position, he chose to answer with the song What did I do to be so Black and Blue? 

February 2015 brought a cease fire in Timbucktu, we’ll hope that it leads to peace and  a resumption of  Festival au Desert…and as you enjoy your playlist, give a thought to our brothers and sisters who risk their lives to keep their music alive. A huge shout out to Satchmo, Khaira and Disco and Songhoy Blues…