• ISSUE SIX/2001 • © Adrian Boot Essence of SoundScape BY SOLA OLORUNYOMI ONFRONTED with the urgency of fashioning a course outline for an undergraduate introductory poetry course, I found myself subconsciously returning to the pages of Kofi Agawu's African Rhythm. Poetry. Music. Rhythm. What's the connection? spanning Klaus Wachsmann's "there is hardly any music in Africa that is not in some way rooted in Speech", to John Chernoff's "African music is derived from language", and Francis Bebey's "vocal music is truly the essence of African musical art". Yet, there are others suggesting that its melodies are short and underdeveloped; it is rhythmically complex; and the feeling of its makers being naturally musical. In charting the course out of an obviously intractable web of claims, Agawu begins by streamlining the diverse perspectives before engaging them. First is his observation of the dissonance in the claim that African drumming represents the site of "complex rhythm" and the view of specialists in the field that songs hold the key to understanding these musical cultures. He further avers by noting the centrality of language in the discourse, and thereby foregrounds his intervention on such claims that "without African languages, African music would not exist." While affirming the broad universality of musical practices, he calls attention to some issues of overlapping taxonomy. An example is the absence of a single word for "rhythm" in Ewe which he says, does not imply the absence of the concept of rhythm. This phenomenon, he notes, is that "the semantic fields of the word are broadly distributed." this exercise of comparative musicology. to a multidisciplinary approach. Chapter one references a fictional ethnography, two, the author resorts In I approached the course with maximum trepidation, unsure of how to navigate this dangerous strait of anxiety, of students who had anticipated a kick-off with "the characteristics of the ballad." But how could I intelligently discuss meter, the variegated layers of the rhyming scheme, or even cadence's lengthening into meaning without a sense of rhythm! That sure felt—not quite wrong but—like a sin to me. But I initially sounded the greater sinner— some sort of campus loony—once the class commenced test diverse soundscapes from the heartbeat, pacing, to the crest and trough of the ocean surge, and the rhythmic, sometimes antiphonal, quality of the thunderclap! trying to Such can be the effect of the sheer novelty with which Kofi Agawu approaches the subject matter in African Rhythm. The author proceeds from a twin challenge: defining Northern Ewe perspective of rhythm within the matrix of a broad characterization of African rhythm, and negating the now familiar unitarist assumptions on African cultural production. These are the sorts of assumptions that gloss over the diversity in the continent's aesthetic production and invariably undermines its dynamism. In grappling with these, Agawu returns to the literature of the last four decades on African music and probes their assumptions. And, indeed, they are many as Agawu details. Kofi Agawu, AFRICAN RHYTHM: A NORTHERN EWE PERSPECTIVE, Cambridge University Press, 1995, 216 pp. Michael Veal, FELA: THE IIFE AND TIMES OF AN AFRICAN MUSICAL ICON, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2000, 313 pp. Glendora Books Supplement 33 ISSUE SIX/2001 A traditional African ritual drum Glendora Books Supplement 34 linguistics and. three and four, oral literature. While chapter five veers in the direction of musical performance, and six, language and oral literature, the concluding chapter serves as a precis to the entire text. Agawu seems to be telling us that a holistic appreciation of music, i.e African rhythm, necessarily points us in the direction of our environment and the society; in its language, in its songs, its drumming and dancing, as well as its folktale and musical performances. The strength of the book is in locating the ubiquitous rhythmic pulse in these diverse sub- themes, while essentially, the basic thread that binds them all remains musicology. Icon, On the other hand. Michael Veal in Fela: The Life and Times of an further African Musical intensifies the theme of rhythm, only differently, and spirits it into a much more destabilizing post- modernist context. Veal, an Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Yale University, had played as guest saxophonist with Fela and his band Egypt '80. His rendering here eminently smacks of an insider's account, but we are little surprised because, as the blurb reads, he had conducted interviews with Fela (recently deceased), his colleagues, and other Nigerian musicians. Michael Veal's is an account of an iconoclastic musician who is also revealed to us through the author's research in three continents (Africa, Europe and North America)—places where Fela had either lived, studied or worked. starting with The boob is rendered in eight chapters the introduction: "Abami Eda." This is followed with "Abeokuta" (1938- 1957), "Gentleman" (1958-1970), "Africa Message" (1970-1974). "The Black President" (1974-1979), "A Serious Cultural Episode" (1979- 1992), "Fear Not for Man" (1985- 1997), and the conclusion: "Look and Laugh". There is also a comprehensive discography and an appendix section detailing the different phases of Fela's musical career from the days of the "Koola Lobitos". to "Nigeria 70", Africa 70, and "Egypt 80". Style and content is fused in an interesting manner by the biographer. For instance, the narrative is rendered in some measure of flashback, it does not proceed from subject's youth, rather we encounter Fela, from the outset, at his "Afrika Shrine", playing and the latter part of punning. In this introduction, he is foregrounded against the context of his musicianship, after which we get a glimpse of the artistic and musical milieu of the earlier decades preceding Fela's emergence as a confident musician. The reader is also well-served with a precis on the social history of his composition, after which we get a chip of the family history. It is only after this that the author begins with the Fela story proper. And even this is amply buttressed through a narrative technique that beeps historicizing all contexts, such that even here Michael Veal first locates the musician's emergence within the general context of the socio-political development of Nigeria and West Africa, and the role of Fela's family in this development. As from "Abeokuta", the Fela story begins in earnest. This details Fela through elementary formal education under disciplinarian parents but, again here, we are also given a prism into the heady days of the protest era of Egba women and the leadership role of Mrs Funmilayo Ransome- Kuti (Fela"s mother) in those events. "Gentleman" further takes us through Fela's musical formative years in terms of professional musicianship. Part of this period allows us to see Fela in England and his exposure to diverse music traditions, and the particular influence of Ambrose Campbell. Then we have the radical turn of the early seventies in "Africa Message". This coincides with what observers have generally identified as the turning point, with the album track Jeun K'oku. The increasing role of the "Afrika Shrine" constitutes part of this section, so also does Fela's encounter with the police. But after this (through the remaining sections), we get the essential Feia, a truly counter- hegemonist activist musician. Whether in Nigeria or while traveling overseas, the new afrobeat perspective seems to have become Fela's passion as he begins to style his music "African Classical", while also emphasizing the spiritual dimension to the message. This takes us to the final phase where the author re-examines the musical heritage of Fela. both from a purely technical musicological reading and the political and cultural inflections that it carries. In the context of a continent yet to give voice to its cultural producers, here is a most welcome contribution. To my mind, the ultimate beneficiaries of this book, no doubt, are the teeming scholars of African cultural studies, musicians, the general reader, and a continent shying from confronting its truths. GBS