It is simplistic to speak of “African music” when so many cultures, histories and traditions nourish the richness of this vast and contrasting continent. Florent Mazzoleni is the author of a beautiful book entitled Africas Musics (Excluding Editions Collection) which strongly defends the ancestral plurality of forms of African expression. He offers us a journey through time to discover the thousand and one treasures of African heritage.
If the roots of African music have their sources in the original soil, it is interesting to note that interbreeding has nourished the creative spirit of performers and instrumentalists over the decades. Like a transatlantic round trip, melodies from the African continent are often revealed in a multicultural reading of rhythms and harmonies. The implacable impact of colonial history on the development of the arts is an indisputable reality, but the fierce desire to go beyond ancient times and to sublimate sound influences is a saving constant in Africa. The Americas were certainly this boomerang which sent back the echo of a creoleness suffered, but ultimately welcome. Cuban and American music, for example, has nourished African repertoires. Congolese Rumba, Nigerian Afrobeat, Ghanaian Highlife, in particular, have in them these idioms heard beyond the seas and oceans.
Obviously, we must not underestimate the soul of an ever-vivacious terroir, but sharing and listening create desire and inspiration. This is how African music has acquired an indisputable rainbow vigor. This musical resilience to social upheavals has unveiled accents and intonations that today identify African peoples and their place in the world. The M’balax in Senegal, the Makossa in Cameroon, the Kwaito in South Africa, the Morna in Cape Verde, are all melodic vocabularies that paint the portrait of a plural Africa in perpetual motion. These languages and cadences have also shaped personalities whose image and aura command respect. Fela Kuti, Manu Dibango, Cesaria Evora, Franco Luambo, Ernesto Djedje, Francis Bebey, among others, have defended a space of freedom that has become universal.
Technical means, political choices, artistic opportunities have often decided the fate of many formations. The Rail Band of Bamako, the Super Diamono of Dakar, the Poly-Rythmo orchestra of Cotonou, in particular, have valiantly withstood the challenges of daily life and, even if certain historical groups are struggling to continue the adventure, nostalgia prevails and pushes us to listen to their works, again and again, as if we had to freeze time and convince ourselves that African music is eternal…