Following his own beat

The late, great Jethro Shasha used to complain that, when people were describing the make-up of a band, they would say things like: ‘Oh, there are four musicians and a drummer.”

He had reason to be pissed off. He was a drummer himself. He felt like he would be expected to sit on the sidelines while people spoke over his head to the other members of the band — as if the drummer was not also a musician.

Drummers have special characteristics. If you can hear them, they’re playing too loud. If the band can’t hear them, they’re not driving the beat.

Paco Sery is one of the good ones. His set at Johannesburg’s soon- to-close Bassline last weekend, although it left much to be desired for a choosy Jo’burg crowd looking for fireworks on a Friday night, nevertheless demonstrated his prowess as a masterful beater of the drum kit, who also happens to be a musician. (And to respond post- humously to Shasha’s complaint, one has to say that the two do not automatically go together all of the time.)

Joe Zawinul is quoted as calling Sery ‘the greatest drummer I played with anywhere, anytime”. And when those words spring from the mouth of Zawinul, who himself has to be one of the greatest musicians of all genres to emerge anywhere, anytime, it’s wise to sit up and take notice.

Sery seems to have been born with a set of silver drumsticks in his mouth. At the age of nine he was already playing with all the best bands in the West African music Mecca of Abidjan in his native Côte d’Ivoire.

You had to be there if you were going to go anywhere in the African music world. The city was known as the Paris of Africa — stylish, chic, and full of the best fashion stores and nightclubs. Miriam Makeba spent many years singing there during her double exile from South Africa and the United States. Salif Keita moved there from Mali and was the voice and public face of the legendary Rail Band before using that springboard to leap into the heart of Paris itself, and into the world of superstardom.

Sery played with both of them during their Abidjan days. His genius, particularly as a jazz drummer, was picked up on by the best of the best. There was little doubt that he, too, would eventually show up in Paris and carve out an unassailable reputation.

He arrived there in 1979 — a 22-year-old with a lot of promise, and a lot of history already behind him.

The French used to boast: ‘Qui n’a pas été a Paris, n’ira pas au paradis [If you haven’t been to Paris, you’ll never get to heaven].” It’s all part of the historic rivalry between those two great European capitals, London and Paris, captured in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.

And then there’s upstart New York, immortalised in a long stream of paeans to Broadway and, of course, Frank Sinatra’s hymn to the city: ‘If you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.”

Maybe so. But Paris holds a special place in the to-ing and fro-ing of African stars in the making for one very important reason — colour isn’t half the problem in the show business world there that it is in the city’s English-speaking rivals. Josephine Baker and a string of African-American musicians and intellectuals, including the novelists Richard Wright and James Baldwin, found refuge from American racism there, in spite of the linguistic differences. In spite of its colonial history, Paris just didn’t seem to have such a big racial hang-up as the Anglophone world.

Sery also found relative freedom there — freedom to arrive at his creative best, as so many others had done before him.

So look at the who’s who of who showed up in Paris at one time or another for all those same reasons, and with whom he ended up playing.

Apart from Zawinul, there was the wild and wilful bass player Jaco Pastorius, who was later to meet a grisly end at the hands of a bunch of bouncers outside a club in Miami. There was the regal and unreliable Nina Simone, who for all her failings knew exactly what she wanted out of the musicians she worked with. She definitely didn’t want duds.

There was Michael Jackson, and even Prince in the years before he became a somebody. (Both weird guys, Sery comments.)

And there was Marvin Gaye. Sery backed Marvin for much of the two years that he was based in Paris during his own self-imposed exile from America. He recalls the legendary Voice from Motown as ‘a good, generous guy”. A sentiment echoed by most of those who worked with him — which makes his bizarre and untimely killing at the hands of his priestly father all the more tragic.

So Paris puts you in a position to work with a lot of brilliant and interesting people, if you’re any good. But mostly Sery has built up his own bands, who show great loyalty to their bandleader.

In fact it goes beyond loyalty. He describes the guys he’s been playing with for the past four years as his ‘real family”. They dream together, hang out together, travel and make music together.

Sery refuses to say that he’s great, or even famous. In true French fashion he prefers to refer to himself as ‘notorious”. Judging by the string of characters he’s worked with, notoriety is no great obstacle to getting ahead — as long as you survive.

He visits his native Côte d’Ivoire every year. ‘The future lies in Africa,” he says, loving the energy, the spirit, the root that it allows him to return to.

After all, Africa is the origin of all things — referred to in a wonderful moment at the beginning of his second set when he wanders through the audience playing a solo on the electric mbira — showing that he is, after all, not just a mechanical noise in the background, but a musician in his own right.

Jethro Shasha would definitely have approved.