Plan B

Phew. Well, this week was heavy and filled to the brim with bare-knuckled hard work--and the heaviness was only compounded by acute sleep deprivation, a New York heat wave, and a series of communication hiccups that almost derailed the train. But we did manage to stay on the track even if we’ve needed to hard-left to a kind of Plan B.

I’ll do my best to explain:

Famoro and Missia have been invited to perform next week (in the capacity of jeliw) at a wedding that will take place in Indianapolis, Indiana and I’ve been invited to join them.

At around the time that they told me about Indiana, I was reading an article by Kaba and Charry that discusses the history and cultural context for an event (and piece) called Mamaya. Originally involving singing and the instrumental accompaniment of three balaw and one dunun, Mamaya’s creation and development is widely attributed to a single family--and more specifically to one man and three of his sons. Well, it turns out that this man, Sidi Djéli Dioubaté, is none other than Missia’s father(and the sons, Missia’s elder brothers.) (Missia is the last child by her father and he died when she was very young. Her mother died at Missia’s birth.) In the article, the authors make mention of the earliest known recording of a Mamaya performance, a private recording made in 1949 by the American, Arthur S. Alberts. This is one of twelve bala recordings that Alberts made in Kankan in that year but thus far, only one of the twelve has been released on CD (Alberts 1988). The entire collection, though, is available in Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music in Bloomington ("the largest university-based ethnographic sound archives in the United States") so we’ve decided to make the trip from Indianapolis to visit the archives and listen to Mamaya (and the other Dioubaté brothers recordings.) It seemed appropriate, thus, to devote this week to the study of Mamaya in anticipation of that event.

But . . . Famoro and Missia have been unexpectedly called to New Hampshire (to continue work on Abou’s CD) and will be leaving me alone for the three days immediately prior to our Indiana departure. This wouldn’t necessarily mean that I can’t work on Mamaya on my own, mediating through video and audio recordings, but in order to do this, Famoro would need to help me clarify a few key questions--and for various reasons (some, related to our communication hiccups), he was unable to do so. My plan B, then is to continue to work on Soli and Fasson, and to leave Mamaya for our return from Indiana. I’m pretty satisfied with this option as I’ll be happy to have the opportunity to do some solitary practicing for a while--and the Bloomington trip will be interesting either way--but I’m sure that with three days devoted exclusively to Mamaya immediately before that trip, I would be better able to appreciate certain subtleties that will more than likely escape me now. But no problem . . . I can adapt. I’ll do what I can with Mamaya using the material I have already, and who knows? . . . maybe one of the Alberts recordings will be a version of Soli that I can sink my teeth into . . .