Amadou and Mariam: Storytellers for Change 3

The other week I had the great opportunity to speak with the Malian duo Amadou and Mariam as they headed to China on their concert tour. The two just published a memoir, titled Away from the Light of Day, recorded a new CD, and are planning another exciting series of concerts.

    Read what they have to say about their memoir, and changes in the lives of Malian musicians today, on Afropop Worldwide's site.

Music Against Malaria: Storytellers for Change 2

For World Malaria Day, here’s my conversation with Yacine Djibo, country director for Malaria No More, from my recent trip to Senegal.

    There as in Mali, the campaign to fight malaria highlights musicians committed to wiping the scourge from the countryside. In Dakar, Djibo described their intensive campaign to “surround malaria.” It involves Youssou NDour, catchy melodies, and an American Idol-style national contest. Watch the spot that appears every night on Senegalese TV.
    Djibo says their campaign also offers a starting point for early diagnosis and better prevention with antimalarial drugs. Senegal’s cases of malaria have declined steeply in two years, according to this recent report by Roll Back Malaria.

Storytellers as Change Agents in West Africa?

In Bamako on Sunday, I got to a wedding event (they spread through the weekend) where the families gathered and griots sang their praises. Griot is sometimes translated as "storyteller," and as a caste they have a fascinating and precarious place in Mali society and across West Africa: they traditionally depend on the patronage of wealthy families whose stories they sing at events, but they also sometimes speak truth to power.
    In this photo the female griot at right sings praises to the accompaniment of the djembe drummers in the foreground.
    Banning Eyre's book, In Griot Time, is a fun way into his story of learning Malian guitar from griots.
    In a growing global push against malaria, some health advocacy campaigns in Mali have enlisted griots. Recognizing how they have the ear of everyday people and thought leaders, the campaigns invite griots to integrate lyrics about how mosquito nets help protect children from getting malaria into their work. Some griots at the local-level have included that messaging at wedding gigs.

Iconoclast Rode the Rails for the WPA Guides

A number of hoboes made their way from freight cars to the federal payroll of the WPA Writers’ Project. The Soul of a People book features the stories of three: Rudolph Umland in Nebraska (featured in this review and this online exhibit), Eluard Luchell McDaniel in California, and Harry Partch.

Partch was born in California, grew up in Arizona, and as a young man bounced around the West, feeling freer among hoboes than in straight-laced society. Partch would later become famous as an avant-garde composer whose works were so iconoclastic that he had to create new instruments and scales for them. In between his times on the bum, he worked on the WPA guides to Arizona and California. He later memorialized his wanderings in U.S. Highball, which the Kronos Quartet recorded in the 1990s. John Rockwell, the New York Times critic, called Partch’s compositions “the musical counterpart to the Watts Towers,” that monument of folk art that rose over the working class L.A. neighborhood.

Partch will be featured at a September event in the Soul of a People series at the San Jose Public Library. The Harry Partch Foundation is based in San Diego.

More about Harry Partch from that talk here.

You can now watch the Writers’ Project afternoon at the Library of Congress with excerpts from the film. Click here.