Artist: JP Buse
Songs: unknown*
Recorded at Afrofest (Queen's Park), July 10, 2011.
JP Buse - unknownMy notes for this set can be found here.
N.B. This recording is a capture of CIUT's live broadcast.
* I'm pretty sure these are two songs that segue together — does anyone know their titles? If so, please leave a comment!
Afrofest 2011 (feat. Tich Maredza Band / Ijo Vudu / Ruth Mathiang and Waleed Kush / JP Buse / Dizu Plaatjies / Thomas Mapfumo)
Queen's Park. Sunday, July 10, 2011.
On the festival's second and final day, there were looming clouds overhead, the threat of rain turning the park into a humid sweatbox with just enough of a pleasing breeze to take the edge off. That wouldn't keep the crowds away, of course, but as usual, for the earlier acts you had to look beyond the open area in front of the stage to see just how many people were taking part.
I arrived just in time to see the Tich Maredza Band taking the stage. This unit evolved from Maredza's former band Masaisai, shifting from their mbira-based traditionalism to a more streamlined sound focusing on his own compositions. In fact, he started off on a gentle singer-songwriter note — recalling his idol Oliver "Tuku" Mtukudzi — in order to "give you some time to breathe" before ramping things up with more of a dance vibe.
Maredza would lead by example there, teaching the crowd how to say "dance" in Shona, and then busting out some moves, including his racehorse dance, which got the crowd's approval as the band showed off some co-ordinated backing steps. That four-piece backing unit would be described by Maredza as being like "honey without the bees" and featured Larry Lewis (guitar), Tich Gombiro (bass), Gordon Mapeka (drums) and Ruben Esguerra (percussion). Ever the showman, Maredza danced right off the stage to end the set.
For a little while it looked like the clouds were about to burst, but there would only be a few scattered drops of rain before the sun started breaking through as Ijo Vudu took the stage. This percussion and dance group was founded by Sani-Abu, who grew up in a family of traditional dancers in Nigeria before making his home in Toronto. The troupe featured five drummers behind the highly-kinetic dancers, but the ensemble started with some sing/chanting before getting down to the movement.
Once they got to it, the stage was a blur of beautiful costumes. Given that I was sweating through my sunscreen as fast as I could apply it, I could only imagine how hot it much be for the dancers moving like that up on stage. This was one of the points in the weekend where the visual element was predominant, but the pounding drums certainly held their own appeal.
Listen to a track from this set here.
This was a special weekend for Ruth Mathiang, who came to Toronto from South Sudan, which was celebrating its birth as an independent nation. And in a sign that musical alliances can matter more than lines on a map, she was joined by Waleed "Kush" Abdulhamid, born to the north in Sudan.
I'd previously seen the pair play as a more stripped-down duo, and here things started off based around their two voices, with a sort of invocation from each, delivered with a spiritual seriousness before the celebration (and the beat) kicked in and the crowd, waving their South Sudanese flags, started dancing in front of the stage.
With the full band treatment (drums/percussion/keyb/bass on stage) there were some more expansive arrangements to the songs. The band's celebratory uplift grooves were just right for Mathiang giving praise to "Mama Africa" before then moving on to a Miriam Makeba song.
The two voices made for a nice contrast — a dry desert wind and a lush green field — with Abdulhamid's rasp contrasting with Mathiang's pure, sweet tones. Abdulhamid was in more of a support role — though he did sing one of the songs I recalled from his Afrofest set the previous year, this was mostly Mathiang's set, and a memorable celebration for South Sudan.
Listen to a track from this set here.
A mid-afternoon set from JP Buse1 was quite likely something of a make-up date for his set at the previous Afrofest which was moved to the smaller Baobab stage and cut short after a falling tree shut down the main stage area. This time out, he had a younger group with a bit more of a casual vibe.
Buse gained renown in the Congo as a member of the renowned soukous group Zaiko Langa Langa — the same long-running band from which Papa Wemba had earlier emerged. Nowadays in Toronto, he works more in the gospel scene, but for this set he definitely brought the soukous rhythms — though there would be a few sanctified messages slipping their way in.
The set led off with a lengthy groove from the band, a half-dozen strong, before Buse took to the stage. His function here was to act as bandleader and elder statesman as much as a performer — a lot of vocals were delegated to a second-in-command/hype man — and to show off his work in mentoring the next generation of local Conolese musicians. If his eleven-year-old bassist — who played with dexterous aplomb — was anything to go by, he's definitely a good talent-spotter and musical influence. Sometimes, he'd pick out parts of the crowd to cajole into singing along, and then point out who in the band he wanted to play to accompany them.
Although the worst of the day's heat was starting to fade, it was still rather sultry out, and this was exactly the sort of music you could dance to in the thick, heavy heat — not so fast that you exhaust yourself right away, but groovy enough enough to get some momentum in your hips.
Listen to a track from this set here.
Between sets, the DJ threw down some Ethio-groove and soon there was a big circle of dancers in front of the stage that was quickly attracting its own onlookers. That gave a spark to the quickly-growing crowd, who were ready to be entertained, even if many on hand didn't know much about Dizu Plaatjies and Ibuyambo. Coming from South Africa, Plaatjies is a teacher as much as an entertainer, dedicated to preserving traditional sounds.
Plaatjies started the set alone on stage, making a musical offering to the ancestors with a mouth-bow and whistling, which together created an eerie effect. He was then joined by four more musicians, all playing animal horns — "they all look like rabbis," a guy behind me joked.
Every song would bring a different instrument or style to the fore — the set most certainly wasn't lacking for variety. "African Refugee", with its triple marimba action and 12-string guitar, was a rather gorgeous folk song in the mode of "Mbube"/"Wimoweh".
This project brought an interesting tension that I could feel a bit around me. A contemporary African is more likely to be standing in a city talking on a cellphone than dancing in a loincloth and facepaint, and I think to some folks this sort of folkloric display felt a bit out of the past — the sort of pageant that would be put on for tourists or for support-your-traditions edification. Or worse: the sense that this is your parents' music — there was a group of younger guys standing beside me, and I could sort of sense that they were a little put off by this at the start — eye-rolling awkwardness at a bit of enforced cultural appreciation apparently being a cross-cultural feeling in the young.
The flipside is that the crosswinds of modern cultural exchange made some of this sound downright contemporary — one song with pan pipes and backward-sounding yelps would probably be right at home on Tune-Yards' next album. At any rate, the joy of the performers and the power of the music were kinda undeniable — one song with non-stop rapidfire sing-speaking, sounding like the product of a Xhosa Spoonie Gee, got the young folks around me more on side. And then the percussion — not just drums, but also lot of homemade shakers and other implements — took over, and pretty much the whole crowd was fully into it.
Plaatjies also brought a lot of musicological knowledge to the stage, but presented it with a soft-sell smile. And though at first the crowd had a bit of a wait-and-see attitude toward the band, this was a big favourite by the time they finished. By the time Plaatjies introduced the players at the end, everyone got big cheers. Definitely a highlight of the weekend.
I had previously shared a track from this set here — and now you can check out a different style here.
New-found friends are one thing, but the crowd was pronouncedly eager to hear the night's headliner, and there was a huge cheer even for Thomas Mapfumo's first guitar riff as he soundchecked. Legends get an extra-warm welcome. Making his 3rd Afrofest appearance, though the first since '99, Mapfumo is a true innovator who transposed the plucked lines of Zimbabwe's mbira (thumb piano) to the electric guitar — his rocking recordings from the 70's and 80's are truly essential.
Border Trouble, that frequent pox on bands visiting Toronto, reared its head and the band's lead guitarist and bassist were not on hand. After some behind-the-scenes considerations, some local fill-ins were brought in to round out the band. They included Larry Lewis on guitar and Tich Maredza, who was playing bass. That's not his primary instrument, but as a guy who surely grew up with this music in Zimbabwe, he had a strong feel for it.2 And perhaps to act as reinforcement, there was also Evelyn Mukwedeya, a young but very talented local player, on mbira.
Mapfumo was apologetic for not presenting his full band, and seemed a little pained, at times — as if this was more a gig to be gotten through than cherished. That might be one reason why Mapfumo, dressed in black, and often singing while half doubled-over, gave off an air more of sorrow than joy. But still, it brought a shiver to hear that keening yelp in his voice.
I'd seen Mapfumo a few years before — he was last in town in 2006 as part of the International AIDS Conference — and even then, his rhythms relied more toward on mbira than guitar. At this show, there were two guitars on stage, but Mapfumo didn't always feel the need to play his own (sometimes he'd just comp on a single chord while the band was playing) and Lewis was, I'm sure, being careful to pick his spots. There were also drums, a keyboard player/percussionist and a pair of horns, and marshalling his resources, Mapfumo shifted the lineup a bit from song to song. One had no guitar at all, just stripped-down mbira lines intertwining behind his voice.
At first the set felt more like a triumph of perseverance than musically majestic. A couple songs felt like trucks bouncing around on a pothole-filled road, just barely making it to the destination. But as the set went on, it felt like everyone was getting a little more comfortable on stage. And when things were working, the band smartly rode out the grooves for a little longer, creating some tasty passages. Though Mapfumo never seemed quite settled or entirely happy with the sound until toward the end of the set, when he did relax a bit, it was ultimately a worthy effort — though telling that there would be no encore to close out the festival.
Listen to a track from this set here.
But on the whole, another fine year. Although there were a lot of calls from the stage of "next year we'll be back here or nowhere at all", the tradition of Afrofest is too strong to be derailed, and a year later, even without its traditional venue, the show would go on at Woodbine Park, leaving Al Purdy — who had spent the entirety of both days hanging around in the backstage area — to drink by himself.
1 It should be noted that his name has the French pronunciation gee-pay, not the English-style initials jay-pea.
2 The story, as I later heard it, was that after finishing their own set earlier in the afternoon, Maredza and Lewis rushed over to Mapfumo's hotel to cram in as much rehearsal as possible.
One of Toronto's signature cultural events — and one of the best weekends of the summer — is upon us. On Saturday and Sunday (July 9 and 10, 2011) the 23rd annual edition of Afrofest takes over Queen's Park. Simply put, there's no other festival that offers such great music and a relaxed vibe, all right downtown and steps from the subway — and all for free. That means it's great for a casual encounter for anyone who doesn't know much about the huge diversity of African music. Or for anyone who likes a little bit of rhythm — out of all the music spread over two stages across the weekend, pretty much everything will be dance-friendly.
I'm looking forward to the new discoveries that come with every Afrofest (and in that regard, Femi Abosede & Culture Force and Cheick Hamala Diabate, both Saturday night, look promising) but there's also some bands I know that I wouldn't hesitate to recommend. Hanging out under the beautiful trees, checking out the booths and getting some good eats make it worthwhile on their own to come down, but here's some suggestions for a guaranteed good time musically, with a few live samples thrown in so you know what to expect:
Afrafranto
Main Stage: Saturday 5:45 pm
Still one of the best unsung groups in the city, the last time I saw the band play they had added a horn section, moving toward a bit more of a classic highlife sound than the more stripped-down palmwine they had started with. But under the leadership of vocalist Theo Yaw Boakye, this band is as sharp as a tack and relentlessly groovy.
Listen! Afrafranto - Angelina
Resolutionaries Marimba Band
Baobab Stage: Saturday 8:45 pm
I've seen this group from Peterborough play a couple times now, and they always leave me feeling better than I did at the start. A non-stop rhythmic attack with players rotating between three full-sized marimbas, this is tuneful and easy to move along to.
Listen! Resolutionaries Marimba Band - unknown
Tich Maredza Band
Main Stage: Sunday 2:40 p.m.
Evolving from the more mbira-based Masaisai, this combo puts the focus more squarely on Maredza's strengths as a songwriter — but the solid rhythm section keeps things moving. And the secret weapon is guitarist Larry Lewis, whose nimble moves are almost as bright as Maredza's smile.
Ruth Mathiang and Waleed Kush
Main stage: Sunday 4:35 p.m.
With just two voices and a guitar, this pair can bring more of a groove than you might guess. It helps that Mathiang's voice is as striking as the singer herself, and that multi-instrumentalist Waleed "Kush" Abdulhamid plays with a vibrant agility. Both are as equally adept at melancholy ballads as upbeat anthems, and the pair will have no problem filling Queen's Park with their music while still feeling like they're playing an intimate show just for you.
JP Buse
Main stage: Sunday 5:45 p.m.
At least year's Afrofest, only luck prevented a collapsing tree branch from causing more than minor injuries. Safety precautions, however, sent Buse, the night's final performer, to the smaller Baobab stage, where band and crew did an admirable job to set things up for the large band on the fly. It was still a bit of a jury-rigged job, though, so I'm thrilled that Buse is getting another crack at the big stage. Especially as his classic soukous is a stone groove. Learning his trade in some big-name bands in his native Congo (including Zaiko Langa Langa, a band that once included Papa Wemba) watching Buse on stage brings to mind a classic soul revue — like, say, James Brown, Buse knows when to delegate to the crack players in his group, assigning solos with a gesture or glance. And then when the time comes, he can take the reins and show everyone how it's done.
Listen! JP Buse - unknown
Thomas Mapfumo and the Blacks Unlimited
Main Stage: Sunday 8:45 pm
If you don't already know about the "Lion of Zimbabwe", it might seem like any of the descriptions you come across are filled with hyperbole — but such is Mapfumo's stature. Mapfumo is a musical innovator of the highest order — I've discussed this at slightly greater length here, but long story short, his moment of genius came in applying rock'n'roll guitars to traditional Shona thumb-piano rhythms. But he's also a liberation hero whose music played a key role in the birth of an independent Zimbabwe. And as a resolute truth-teller, the same regime that he once celebrated turned on him when he dared to point out their slide into despotism. Now living in exile from his homeland, Mapfumo's recent music has played down the guitar in favour of the mbira, but he still brings the steely presence of a true champion.
For more information, you can visit Afrofest's website here, or skip to more information about the artists here. If you can't make it down to Queen's Park, remember that, as always, CIUT will be broadcasting live on both days.
Afrofest 2010 (feat. Mohamed Diaby & Manding Foli Kan Don / Waleed "Kush" Abdulhamid / Doody Le Tigre / Dramane Kone / JP Buse)
Queen's Park. Saturday, July 10, 2010.
Time again for one of the best weekends of the year. Regardless of who is on the big stage, Afrofest fills Queen's Park up with animated crowds, some of whom show up to check out the bands, some to dance, and a lot of people to just linger in the festival atmosphere. From the stage to the merchandise booths to the beer garden the park was filled from end to end, even if there was often a lot of elbow room right up by the stage. And even if the weekend's final didn't feature any of the African teams, World Cup fever was in the air.
As I emerged from the subway and made my way down to the main stage (set up near the north end of the park), I could hear the pounding beats of Mohamed Diaby & Manding Foli Kan Don rolling out to meet me. The percussion-based ensemble featured five brightly-dressed drummers at first, but by the second selection there were nine on stage — and then dancers on top of that — so there was a lot to watch. One song featured a vocal call-and-response, but by and large singing took a backseat to the interlocking rhythms. Which went pretty much non-stop — the set featured four different grooves in forty minutes, so these were long selections, one going for twelve minutes.
Diaby — originally from Guinea, but now calling Toronto home — didn't have much to say, but managed to spread some good vibes in a few words, telling the crowd, "music is supposed to make you feel good!" It doesn't take too much to get people up and dancing at Afrofest, and though most of the crowd was sitting in the shade, back a bit, the space in front of the stage filled in nicely. Whole families were up and dancing, joined by wandering stilt-walkers who joined in for a bit.
Listen to a track from this set here.
Bringing a more considered and cerebral approach was Waleed "Kush" Abdulhamid, whose music rises out of his Sudanese roots, but is not narrowly limited to any one musical tradition. The set opened with an interesting number, a slow one with slick, atmospheric keybs and layered guitars that brought to mind Daniel Lanois' soundscapes. Things picked up from there, Abdulhamid leading the with his moody but spry six-string bass playing. His strong, emotive vocals were complemented by the violin, which added an interesting edge to the band's sound.
The best material here featured that striking North African mix of upbeat and melancholy, and this is where the six-piece band (keybs/accordion, guit, violin, percussion, drums) was at its best. Despite some sound problems throughout the set — the violin player couldn't quite get his sound right, or possibly couldn't hear himself in the monitors — it was fine from down in the crowd. As a pan-African tribute to the World Cup, Abdulhamid did a Zulu song, and to close things out, he brought local Sudanese singer Ruth Mathiang to sing on the final number.1 There were a couple of the songs didn't do as much for me, but overall this was an interesting mix — dare we say fusion? — of sounds.
Listen to a track from this set here.
Playing for the first time in Toronto, Montréal's Doody Le Tigre brought a mix of Caribbean and African musical styles. With a female co-vocalist, Doody played the frontman with a five-piece band behind. After establishing a party vibe with his opening track, he changed things up musically, telling the audience, "now we're going to take the plane to Haiti!" — his own homeland — leading off with a snatch of a folksong, accompanied just by guitar before the rhythm section kicked in and took the tempo back up. Walking the stage with his namesake's swagger, Doody did what he could to pump up the crowd, starting some singalongs, even throwing in a little tiger roar after while calling out his name.
The music wasn't all party-minded fun. His single "Ça ne va pas", with stabs of reggae keybs, is a reflection on Québec's still-roiling discussion on "reasonable accommodation". Doody made his own preference for diversity clear with the number of styles his band incorporated into their songs — he threw down some rhymes, hip-hop style, on one and brought a rumba-esque beat after that. The crowd favourite was his own version of "Waka Waka Africa" — an interpretation of the makossa hit "Zangalewa", originally by Golden Sounds, it was revived with Shakira's re-make as an an anthem for this year's World Cup.
After closing out his set with a zouk-flavoured number, host Justine Gogoua — who has such an engagingly commanding personality that I should imagine she is not told "no" very often — asked for a reprise of "Waka Waka", which the band obliged.
And then a near-tragic turn in the day's festive events. Between sets, I'd wandered to the other end of the park to the bustling rows of food vendors, only to return to a chaotic scene back near the main stage. There were police cars and ambulances everywhere, emergency workers cordoning off an area with bright yellow emergency tape. It turns out that several large branches from one of the park's beautiful old oak trees had snapped and come crashing to the ground, nearly falling right onto some of the people sitting below.2 Somehow, there were only minor injuries.
An unusual silence from the stage, with the ubiquitous background music silenced while the emergency workers bustled about. There was a call, of all things, for a Norwegian translator, but not too much information as the crowd waited for the next act.
Finally, the scene was cleared — with a large area around the tree blocked off — and the festival resumed. Dramane Kone, from the musically-rich Wassoulou region of Mali, led a band that was almost all rhythm, with two kamalé ngoni in front of bass, drums and percussion. When this got into a groove, it was utterly funky stuff. For the second song, the band found that sweet spot and just settled in for almost ten minutes, time for the backing vocalist to step up front and dance, spurred on by the hand drum as the music slowly sped up. There were more hypnotic grooves after that, in one song Kone getting the audience to sing along to the refrain of "c'est la vie", and another a fifteen-minute titanic that again built up into a frenzy.
Just a couple minutes into the next song, a glum-faced Michael Stohr, president of Music Africa, stepped onto the stage, gesturing for the band to wrap it up — "it's not good news, I'm afraid," he told the crowd. The city's arbourist had declared that the tree that had lost its branches was rotten right through, and more of it could come down at any time, leading the authorities to shut down the stage for the night. Declaring that it would be better to lose an hour of music than to risk further injuries, Stohr apologized, but had next-best options in hand: the early shut-down would allow city crews to get to work and cut the tree down overnight, meaning Sunday's performances were not in danger, while the last act of the night was being moved to the smaller Baobab Stage, further south in the park. Dramane Kone had gotten most of his set in, so all things considered, it wasn't nearly as bad an outcome as it could have been.
Listen to a track from this set here.
So I moved it on over to the Baobab Stage, where what looked and sounded like a pretty cool DJ set was shut down as stagehands began hurriedly setting things up. It looked like a lot of people were eager to hear the evening's headliner JP Buse — people began to get a bit restive as the clock ticked past the ten o'clock starting time. But with lots of equipment to check on the fly, including quite a few microphones, it took some time to get things going.
With a large backing band including six instrumentalists and three backing vocalists, this was a group that would have been right at home on the big stage. Here, on the smaller side stage, they looked a little awkwardly crammed in as they went through a rudimentary soundcheck. But as the band kicked off with an instrumental, it felt all right. Featuring a tightly-wound two guitar sound — low-slung rhythm parts complementing the glittering leads — this was the sort of thing I'd been waiting all day for. Those guitars, the synth-horn stabs and that skittering drumbeat riding tak-a-tap-tap on the snare. Then, Buse emerged to rile up the crowd, shouting, "are you ready for some soukous?"
Buse, who had established himself musically in the Congo as a member of the seminal Zaiko Langa Langa in the 80's,3 sang with a supple voice and brought a relaxed manner to the stage, playing the role of dignified musical statesman, mostly leaving the flashy moves to the younger bandmembers surrounding him. But he was undoubtedly running the show, expertly employing plenty of frontman tricks to get the crowd worked up.
Like a lot of other dance-friendly African guitar bands, one got the feeling that the instrumental passages of the songs were infinitely scalable and as the band hit the turnarounds I was keeping an eye on the players to see how they knew if they were taking another go 'round or segueing into another song. The band was pretty locked in, but there were a few times where it seemed apparent they couldn't hear each other very well. As could be expected with the last-minute set up there were a few glitches with the sound and it was overall not the greatest mix, but it couldn't cover over how good this band was.
The first burst ran about twenty minutes of three (I think) non-stop songs before the band stopped for breath, Buse eliciting shouts from the crowd as he called out for a cheer from various African countries. he also stopped the next song as the band began to teach the crowd how to sing along. Tearing into another series of mashed-together songs, Buse brought up some members of the crowd to dance on stage as the band played right up to the curfew — "the stage manager tells us we have three more minutes," Buse said, "so enjoy the last three minutes!"
Even though the band probably didn't get to play the set they wanted on the stage they deserved to be on, the talent on the stage ensured this was a really solid set. This is very much a group I'd revisit for future dance-y fun.
Listen to a track from this set here.
1 Abdulhamid is also a member of the Ethio Stars Band, a top-notch all-star crew, and you can hear hints of that Ethiopian flavour in his own music as well.
2 Such is the uneasy cost of coexistence between trees and humans, a looming problem that will require thought and attention as the canopy ages.
3 Zaiko Langa Langa, founded in the 70's, included a who's-who of Congolese musical stars, including Papa Wemba. The band revolutionized the country's musical scene by getting rid of the horn section and cranking up the electric guitars, and many of its members went on to become stars in their own right.
Artist: JP Buse
Song: unknown*
Recorded at Afrofest, Queen's Park, July 10, 2010.
JP Buse - unknownMy notes for this set can be found here.
* Does anyone know the title to this one? It must be called something like "Papélé", but a quick scan around doesn't turn anything up.
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