WORLD MUSIC:Gwen Ansell
ASK Madam and (without Eve to prompt her) she may just have heard of Masekela, or foxtrotted to the African Jazz Pioneers at a banquet. But ask the kids in any Jo’burg suburb and – if they’ve listened to jazz at all – a name they’re likely to come up with is Pops Mohamed.
That kind of recognition has come to him late. He’s old enough to have parented those kids. But it’s a tribute to what he’s become over the last decade: the breathing embodiment of cross-cultural music. That “cross” stretches wide; he’s as likely to describe splicing a Pedi song into an ambient track as to discuss blending instrumental sounds from across the African continent.
Getting him to talk about before is difficult. He started guitar studies at Fuba in the 1960s at age 14. His idols were The Shadows. But much more influential were the trips he took with his dad to the now- desolate East Rand township they called Kalamazoo. “I first saw traditional instruments being played there in the shebeens. You’d get a jazzman like Kippie (altoist Morolong Moeketsi) coming in, and some miner maybe, with his accordion. And although they didn’t know one another, such people would sit and chat, drink, and eventually jam. That kind of fusion is as old as urban South Africa.”
It was in the 1980s that Mohamed started noticing the way American sounds were pushing traditional music off the airwaves. He began buying up folk instruments (“Do you realise at that time you couldn’t find a single mbira in Johannesburg?”), researching and learning to play them. Along the way he made contact with ethnomusicologist Andrew Tracey. Three years ago, at Arts Alive, he discovered the West African court instrument, the kora, and added it to his repertoire. Since then, there has been a range of projects, including the Timeless collaboration with trumpet and EVI player Bruce Cassidy (just out on CD) and myriad outings with other artists in the B&W stable.
This Friday night he plays in the Human Rights concert at Mega Music. On Saturday, he flies to London to start European promotion for his album Ancestral Healing, and to finish work on an ambient project he began with London producer Greg Hunter late last year.
“We’re layering traditional instruments and techno/jungle programming. There’s wordless vocal improvisation from Gloria Bosman, singing from traditional healer Susan Hendricks and one track of traditional ramkie (three-string oilcan fiddle) playing from the Kalahari. But the way we’ve mixed it, each track wipes down at the end to a clean traditional line that loops and flows like water.” Hunter has added extra elements, including Egyptian music, and Mohamed is impatient to hear the new mix.
There are, he says, many points of contact between modern dance music and traditional sounds. “I’ve just listened to an old LP of Zulu music, with fast rapping and high- tempo beats on a hand drum – faster than you’d find in techno. Traditional sounds also often loop around cyclically. All that lends itself to modern dance music; it’s a more interesting sound than an electronic pulse.”
The ambient album is just one current project. Others include developing his own Kalamazoo label (which has just put out the CD Society Vibes). “The label is a platform for any artist who wants to keep alive or revisit the music of the 1950s to 1970s period – traditional and jazz. If you like, it’s the “pure” form of the music I’m developing in electronic directions with B&W.”
Mohamed is also preparing a show for the Grahamstown Festival, which will involve modern players including pianist Paul Hanmer and traditional Xhosa throat (split- tone) singers. Next, he wants to begin a touring workshop series.
These seemingly diverse activities are united by one purpose. “It saddens me that we can’t get the same huge audiences for South African music that I saw when I took the South African Music Village project to Europe. But I’m optimistic about the future. By playing, I can draw young people back into the culture. A lot of educated children now may go to white schools, but they are becoming very aware of who they are.”
Mohamed doesn’t see the injection of electronics, or the addition of other world musics as damaging cultural integrity.
“You can do anything with the music to keep it alive and growing, so long as you leave some trademarks that define it as from here. When you hold an mbira in your hands, you know – in a very spiritual sense – who you are as an African.”