Gastón: What type of texts did you read when you were at school?
Souleymane: At school I learned from teachers who knew African and European literature. There was not really a separation. For example, I learned whole fragments of Le Cid by Corneille. We learned it the African way, which means that it was a spoken text with a rhythm. In Africa we say: “When something is good I make it my own with my heart.” For example, if you give me a text by a Colombian poet or a Latin American story, we will take it but we will do it the African way. This is how we worked on many stories written in the West. Africa is a mixture of many cultures and has endured many encounters throughout history; some violent or forced like slavery and others that were friendlier cultural exchanges. For example, the Portuguese brought the guitar to Africa, not the Spaniards. Africans took the guitar and tuned it in accordance with African music and voice. It is a learned cultural skill. It is our way of studying, doing research, and producing new culture: appropriation.
Gastón: When you play the guitar do you change the tuning according to the music you are playing?
Souleymane: Exactly. I change the chords because it is not just a matter of tuning but also the fact that we do not have semitones in the African range. We have the pentatonic and the heptatonic range. For example, the guitar in the West is tuned in E, A, D, G, B, E. We switch from E to F in order to avoid the semitone, and that is a problem when playing chords because the position of the fingers also changes. This has been the African way of appropriating the guitar. When the Portuguese brought the guitar we played it with the kora and the balaphone, which are pentatonic instruments. Since it did not sound good with the balaphone we rubbed down the wood until it did, and this is how we can play these instruments together. It is a contribution from Portugal and this is the way in which we have incorporated it into our culture. And everybody came: the Spaniards, the French, the English, the Dutch, and the Germans. We took something from every one of them.
Listen to AUDIO II from interview with Souleymane Mbodj (G. Alzate, 2011).
Gastón: Departing from your musical background, how was your encounter with European musical training when you arrived in France?
Souleymane: When I arrived in France I didn’t know how to read music. It was all by ear, because music in Africa is learned that way, not through the eyes. We say: “what the heart says is understood by the ear.” When I got to France I had already been a percussionist for the Traditional Ballet of Senegal, and I thought I was a musician. When I started at the conservatory I discovered the metronome and music reading. I had been playing much more complicated things for fifteen years but I had to study and comprehend the Western musical structure. So for five years I studied classical percussion, timbales, vibraphone, and jazz guitar. I established many comparisons between the European and the African musical worlds. For example, when I read dotted half notes, I used to see the African plain because this is how the horse-antelope runs, slowly, and also more complicated things. For example when I wrote the 6/8 measure I used to see the djansa, the dance of seduction, which is danced by many women in Senegal. To put it differently, when I see six eight-notes in a measure I immediately see this dance. This is the way I found to join together both musical traditions. The most difficult thing was counterpoint because we don’t have this type of theory in Africa but I forced myself to study it in order to speak the same [musical] language as somebody who does not speak the African languages. I am not the best reader but I can speak the Western musical language. The way in which African musicians learn from an early age onwards allows them to have an excellent ear but they cannot read music. They can play anything but must hear it first. When I play with African musicians we have no score. Even though there are conservatories in Africa, music is played by way of the ear, not via the eye. These are two different ways of understanding music. Thanks to my musical education in France, I can play with American jazz players or French musicians.
Gastón: When you play contemporary music do you use a score?
Souleymane: It depends. Once, I was invited to play contemporary music with the Radio France Philharmonic. I played with the leading percussionist and was forced to read from beginning to end. However, in every section I had the same vision I have always had with written music. I read the music, the measures, and at the same time I was imagining an African story. Because contemporary music produces sounds that are quite similar to the sounds of the African jungle, plains, and the forest. When I read or play contemporary music I always think of Africa. I was invited because the composer knew me, and he wanted an African percussionist in his piece. He asked me to play the djembe2. He wanted me to tune it for pentatonic music, the African way.
Souleymane Mbodj playing in the performance “Giving Birth” by Nicolás Buenaventura, Barcelona 2011. Photo by G. Alzate.
Gastón: And when you play jazz or classical music, how does it become interwoven with your African background?
Souleymane: It is easy in jazz because the rhythm and the percussion are almost the same. In blues, it is even easier because it has the same rhythmic base. In classical music, it is harder. However, three years ago, I recorded a CD with my group, Trio Rhea. It was named Bach to Beirut. It is Bach’s second prelude in C minor. I played it with Wassim Soubra, who is a Lebanese pianist, and Vasken Solakian, an Armenian musician who plays saz3. I played five African percussion instruments. The pianist would play the original score while the Armenian and I entered and exited the piece. We took it to the Beirut International Festival (Festival de Francophonie). We performed a concert and the technicians who recorded the performance told us we should make an album. We didn’t think it was a good idea because Bach connoisseurs were going to call us blasphemous and disrespectful. So we went back to Paris and played it again at a church and were told again we should record it but we were still afraid. The third time we played at a jazz club and a professor, a Bach specialist who had attended incognito because we didn’t know he would be there, told us he would be very happy to listen to this kind of music. He said Bach’s music didn’t belong in a museum. It was the same African idea of taking what is good and changing what does not work. So we decided it was a homage to Mr. Bach. In a modest way, of course, but, nonetheless, we were paying him homage.
Gastón: How did it feel working on that? What did you do with Bach’s prelude?
Souleymane: I studied the score and realized that the rhythm is not completely precise, it is in 4/4 meter but there are also many rhythmic subtleties. I then listened to it and let myself be carried away with my drumsticks to enter the composition. This mixture of Western culture starting from the African perspective is my thing. If I had been born in Europe I wouldn’t be able to do it. Because I may not know where I am going but I know very well where I come from. Africa has allowed me to understand other cultures, to appreciate Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, to enjoy Mahler’s Lieder, as well as contemporary music, and all of this because I had already walked a path in African culture.