Venue:
Croation Catholic Centre, Sunshine West, Melbourne
Date: 28/10/2016
Back in the 90’s I saw Kanda Bongo Man at the Melbourne Town Hall with the Soul Brothers and other great acts. I’ve seen him at a pub and at Womadelaide. And now, 30 years later, a la Jackson Browne’s Pretender, we are in the shade of the freeway out in the boondocks to see him perform amidst the big round white linen tables of a function room, to a modest crowd of say 150 Africans, principally from Central Africa and a few whiteys like me.
The 80’s and 90s were indeed different times. Island had Sunny Ade, Virgin was doing those east African releases Earthworks, World Circuit and a host of minor labels were thriving. Heck the Bhundu Boys were awarded best live act in NME, I think -and not best World Music act- best act full stop.
But the novelty appears to have worn off, instead of seeping further in to the mainstream, it appears African music has diverted to an exotic eddy.
Sure there continue to be some big names touring regularly, but the days of good solid classic African guitar bands touring down under at least, seems to be a thing of the past. I have had regular discussions with the hirers at Womadelaide about some great Zimbabwean bands really keen to play and cheap! Jah Prayzah or Alick Macheso but no, instead we get some mediocre Malawi Mouse Band? Why? Coz they’ve been on the bill at other Womads or they have international management. Typically, we get the usual suspects, usually backed by a bunch of French musos in black t-shirts and pony tails. Angelique Kidjo anyone? Had her recently….oh ..I know, let’s get her playing with a symphony orchestra FFS.
So the smaller bands never tour, or if they do, they are promoted by music fans from their own community. I’ve been involved in tours by artists as well known as Oliver Mtukudzi and Thomas Mapfumo and it was Zim promoters, people with day jobs who brought them out. Not Womad. But these people dont have much money, so they can’t /dont promote the acts extensively. Instead they have to largely rely on word of mouth in their own community. So, typically there are a few hundred people there, at best. And remember, Africans, in the main, aren’t fans of African music -they are fans of music from their region. It’s understandable. It’s Westerners who tend to have broader tastes in African music and to reach them you need to promote the shows and this costs money.Even the (rather good) local guitarist in the soukous band supporting Kanda Bongo did not know Mapfumo had toured and he is in the scene!
So onto the gig and it is as I expected. Somewhat chaotic, underattended and chronically late.
6pm til 1am the promoter assured my by text. I got their at 8.30pm to see the first support band setting up and, say, 10 people there A trio playing Stimela, Ernest Ranglin type stuff were pleasant enough. A very attractive young lady, but no voice projection whatsoever, assures us that “Kanda will be on very soon and are we ready for him?” The numbers have swelled to around thirty and her question went unanswered.Next comes King Bell – a local soukous act. Bell is from the Congo, I think, and they are pretty good. Pity their last gig was 7 months ago.
As people drift in, some garbedin lovely African cloth, the atmosphere improves but not the temperatute as it is a big room ,a cool night and no fucking heating! The “announcer” keeps coming on-stage providing glasses of water to the band members at the start of songs, mid song, end of song it doesn’t matter, so long as she can be on stage.
So off they go and more announcements of “are you ready for Kanda Bongo Man, he can”t wait to play for you”. By now it is after 11 and the vocal lady in front of me, who had smuggled a bottle of red in, has passed out. By the time the band wander on stage no-one seems to even notice such has been the dissipation of anticipation. But wait -Kanda is not on. Instead the support singers/ dancers will strut their stuff. A cheesey version of Malaika – ‘orrible, followed by a better song, sounded like Mbilia Bel.The male support vocalist gets a go too. Then, more announcements for Kanda and at 11.45 ,just before we turned into pumpkins the man arrives. Speaking of pumpkins, he hasn’t got any slimmer and he ain’t going to get any slimmer dancing. While the others are vigorously doing their moves Kanda is a model of economy, a twitch, a shrug ,a half hip thrust, all perfectly in time mind you, giving more of a guideline to what the dance move should be rahter than actually doing it.
I am actually front and centre up against the stage -surrpounded by a sea of mobile phones,. They’re everywhere – I think there were 5 people on stage recordinhg and that doesnt count the film crew.
The music is classic soukous. Before soukous rhumba involved quite long vocal lead-ins from say 2,3 or 4 singers eventually building up to brass chorus and then the seben, a really catchy guitar motif that would be returned to again and again in a 10 ,15 , 20 minute track. Soukous hots it all up by going straight into the seben, playing faster overall and riding that riff all the way through. Kanda was an early exponent of soukous calling his own style kwassa kwassa. He has kept the same bass player and lead guitarist with a lovely black Les Paul and this has held his sound together. I just love that light shimmering soukous guitar, but the trade-off in leaving out the more elaborate construction of rhumba is that it can get a bit samey.
After a while I decided to head back into the crowd and to my surprise, there was hardly anyone left. Maybe 50 people and not much dancing.It was 1.20 am and time to take my leave. I’m glad I went, I love these odd haphazard African gigs but I’m sure Kanda would have put more effort in and the crowd would have gone off in a smaller hot club instead of the cavernous and cold function room at the Croation Catholic Centre,
The audience:
as above
It made me think..
as above
Junior Wells says
Sorry about the picture being upside down .Tried to edit to rectify but wont work. Maybe @Admin can help?. Otherwise invert your device.
rich says
@junior-wells – s/b ok now
Junior Wells says
Thanks Rich
Kid Dynamite says
He might have been late because he was knackered – he was playing here in Bristol a few days beforehand. I would loved to have gone, but it was part of a festival line up, and I didn’t have the time or desire to see most of the other acts. I do like a bit of soukous.
Junior Wells says
They’d done a sound check earlier on, so not just off the plane. Yes, it is great dance music.
Kaisfatdad says
Very enjoyable and informative review.
Your point about Africans going to music from their country rather than an “African” gig was right on the money. But I can understand that. If I was living in China, I wouldn’t necessarily go along to see a Greek band because they are from Europe. (Actually I probably would go!).
Good point too about how a lot of bands who don’t have international management, don’t get achance to tour or a slice of the Womad cake.
Junior Wells says
never mind china v greece KFD. Even adjoining countries in Europe.
Kaisfatdad says
That narrow,eh? Then they really need the non-Aficans for bums on seats.
My cousin saw Sailif Keita at the Sidney Opera Houe a few years back. I guess there mostly Aussies in the audience. And that it started on time!
Mike_H says
Public-sector venues of that sort nearly always start performances bang on time. They tend to have directly-employed staff on overtime rates and are very tightly-budgeted.
If only rock venue and club gigs started when advertised.
The performers tend to wait around in the dressing room until the place has filled up a bit, to be fair, and a lot of it is down to the tardy arrival of the punters, who usually don’t show up until about 9pm.
Alias says
It’s not the first time I’ve said it but, the “world music” label for a non-existent genre was never a great idea and only successful for a short period of time. King Sunny Ade managed to get on the front page of the NME in the early 80s before it was coined. And fans of jazz, funk and soul didn’t need a separate compartment to find records by Manu Dibango, Fela Kuti, Tito Puente, Sivuca, Irakere or Tania Maria.
The idea of lumping together such a diverse array of music, be it from Bulgaria, Senegal, Colombia, Thailand , the Dominican Republic or any other country which wasn’t the U.K. or the U.S.A. (excluding Cajun or Zydeco) and calling it the same thing was obviously flawed. The worst thing about it was that it enabled potential consumers to dismiss all “world music” out of hand on the basis of actually hearing very little.
Today the likes of Kanda Bongo Man are paying the price for it and any young non English speaking bands steer well clear of the label.
On a more positive note, thanks anyway for reminding me of what a great live band the Soul Brothers were. I will take this opportunity to mention a young Zimbabwean band who did tour this year, Mokoombo. I saw them at the 100 Club and they were really good.
Kaisfatdad says
Is the photograph of the gig upside down as a gentle reminder that the gig was in Australia……
I will get my coat!
Mike_H says
Should have typed upside down too.
Kaisfatdad says
Completely agree with you Alias about the ridiculous World Music category, despite liking a lot of the music that gets lumped under it. Other than not being in English, what, for example, do yoiking from Lapland and bossa nova have in common? Sod all!
Makes me wonder where those records ended up previously?
Folk, jazz, pop or easy listening perhaps?
Mike_H says
Mostly they didn’t end up on the shelves at all.
It’s a rather ham-fisted marketing ploy, but also an entry point for the dissatisfied rock/pop/r ‘n’ b punter and the would-be-hipster.
It’s a massive millstone on the music too.
Mike_H says
As regards “World Music”.
Son House’s “Death Letter”, to average English ears, is just as much WM as Kanda Bongo Man is. And Julie Fowlis’ Shetland Gaelic singing and Kathryn Tickell’s Northumbrian piping is WM to the average American.
It’s an extremely relative categorisation.
Junior Wells says
There. Is online somewhere minutes of a meeting in London of purveyors of let’s.callvit international music. The problem was record stores etc didn’t know where to put these burgeoning releases and the old ethnic box didn’t fit as this stuff was hippper then before.
For better or for worse the world music label was agreed on.
Will try to track down the link.
Junior Wells says
@rich can you please invert that photo for me and spare us all KFDs jokes 😉
rich says
@junior-wells … done .. 🙂
Vulpes Vulpes says
Re: the “World Music” catch-all. I can vividly remember wincing when I first heard the phrase, thinking to myself that every time someone said to me “what the heck is ‘world music’?” I’d feel obliged to give a fulsome explanation of it’s intended meaning, and it’s hopelessly catch-all nature, hoping that they’d take the opportunity to explore rather than to dismiss. At the same time I knew that many would use it as a lazy way of batting aside anything that spoke in a language other than English, a dismissal I knew to be both their own loss and that of the artists.
When a small band of enthusiasts was ensconced at the top of about nineteen sets of stairs in an attic at the top of Park Street in Bristol, establishing what would become WOMAD, there was no initial record company hegemony; they were partially funded by Peter Gabriel at the time, but they booked anything and everything from the Burundi Drums of Makebuko (hypnotic, chest-pounding brilliance) via the Sasona Mulyo Indonesian gamelan players to a Chinese state-sponsored bunch called Tian Jin (almost unlistenable to my hopelessly Western ears I’m afraid) for the first festival. They called the festival that they organised ‘A World Of Music, Arts And Dance’, subtitled ‘The W-O-M-A-D Festival’ and when it lost money they called the benefit album (funded by WEA) ‘Music And Rhythm’, and the subtitle was ‘A Benefit Double LP for A World Of Music, Arts And Dance’. They had established the word ‘World’ as a signifier for the broad church of delights they offered either in a field in Somerset or on four sides of vinyl. It was no surprise, when figuring out how to stock the individual albums that the industry hoped buyers would seek out in the wake of all this activity, that they settled on the inevitably reductionist label, “World Music”.
It’s been a two-edged sword, but I can’t imagine that anyone from say, Mali, Mauretania or Malaya has sold fewer albums from the shelves of HMV or FOPP branches in the West over the intervening years than if the term had never been coined.
Junior Wells says
Thanks Foxy. Similarly the term African music is somewhat imprecise for just one continent…European music anyone ?
Kaisfatdad says
Completely agree that the term African music is a nonsense. If one just listens to the variety of styles and instrumentation on our recent two African threads, that becomes very apparent. But it served its purpose in getting several people to contribute.
I am banishing myself to the Naughty Corner for making schoolboy jokes about your photo. Sorry about that!
Thanks for the background story to World Music, Vulpes. Ridiculous through the term is, it has probably done more good than harm.
Junior Wells says
all good mate.