Week of August 6, 2009, Issue #720
MUSIC
Edmonton Folk Music Festival: Issa Bagayogo
(Mali)
Mary Christa O'Keefe / marychrista@vueweekly.com
"Techno-Issa," as he is to fans in West Africa, connects past and futuristic, crafting music from the sounds of the ages-old regional string instrument kamele n’goni and electronic elements and drum beats. His idiosyncratic mélange of traditional music, funk, groove, rock and Afrobeat meets modern cut-up culture on the 2009 release Issa Remixed.
VW: How would you describe your music to people who have never heard you?
ISSA BAGAYOGO: Issa music is the meeting between two types of music diametrically opposite: music traditional and electro. In fact for me trad and electro are on the same way. Yves [Wernert, sound engineer] say I use the the trade groove like an "engine" for build electro arrangement.
VW: What brought you to music?
IB: The music bring to me many thing: I can transmit my culture to many people, I can travel for dicover the world and feedback to my country.
VW: What is the role of music in your life?
IB: The music enables me to progress intellectually, to better know other cultures and to share this knowledge with my close relations and my family.
VW: What is the role of music in your culture?
IB: At the origin the music in Mali is used to transmit the history of the ancestors to the future generations, as a book of history. Today that remains true, but it is also used to make known the rest of the world with the Malian who cannot travel.
VW: Is your music in the mainstream musical tradition of your culture?
IB: Since a few years music evolved in Mali, (rap, electro, jazz, reggae) without claim, today still the music that I make with Yves Wernert undoubtedly remains with the avant-garde because it mixes all these currents at the same time.
VW: What themes dominate your music?
IB: Death (fear of the suffering, the sorrow of the family, fear of the unknown, fear of the last judgement), love (joy and the courage which the love gets), money and work (today one cannot live any more without money and to earn money a good work should be found, which is not easy elsewhere in Mali), treason and marriage (the marriage is a mark of respect which treason or adultery often comes to break), all the subjects which relate to the population Malian.
VW: Do you feel any pressure to be a “cultural ambassador” when you play to people outside your culture?
IB: To be a “cultural ambassador” is a pleasure but also a load because I must work to make the music which opens the gates of the other cultures to me, and at the same time I must understand other cultures to make known them with people of my country.
VW: Is it a different experience to play to an audience that shares your culture than to one that does not?
IB: The difference exists on the level of the vocabulary. ... When I play abroad, people are touched by the music and thus he dances much, after the concert they come to see me to speak about the direction from my texts, some are surprised to realize that they danced on a serious subject like death or the disease. this contrast is sometimes amusing.
VW: What do you think sharing music between cultures can accomplish?
IB: I hope that the listeners understand my culture better, in general when the men of various cultures understand myself they become more tolerant and I believe that the world needs tolerance.
Thu, Aug 6 – Sun, Aug 9
Edmonton Folk Music Festival
Gallagher Park
Complete schedule at efmf.ab.ca
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