Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance

Tchekisse: Neba Solo’s Senufo Counterpoint in Action

262 Ingrid Monson Tchekisse Neba Solo’s Senufo Counterpoint in Action Notoriously difficult to capture and communicate, the experience of performance has always eluded the conventions of the scholarly article. Charles Seeger despaired of this situation by declaring that at the heart of musicological study lies the linguocentric predicament: the incommensurability between “music knowledge and feeling in music” and “speech knowledge of and feeling in music”1 which results in a strange dilemma. To talk about music we have to use the full armament of verbiage . . . and much more, replete with universals and particulars, concepts and percepts, abstractness and concreteness, feeling and imagination , and so forth; yet to know that there is no evidence whatever that the music compositional process, whether precomposed or composed in the act of singing or of playing an instrument, operates in any such terms.2 Some thirty years after Seeger’s musings, advances in multi-media computer and internet-based technology offer rich possibilities for lessening— although not eliminating—the gap between the analysis of music and its sensory experience. In this essay, I experiment with internet-based media examples (video, audio, image) as a means to explicate and analyze the performance of Neba Solo’s Tchekisse, in what I hope is a musically compelling way. Although the divide between text and sensory experience remains, the use of performance material to explain and interpret other performance material is at the heart of the endeavor. I first introduce Neba Solo, who is Tchekisse • 263 a phenomenal bala3 (wooden xylophone) player and composer from southeastern Mali. I continue with an explanation of his composition Tchekisse, drawn from several video-recorded performances gathered during my ethnographic work in Mali, primarily in 2005. Media examples are viewable at http://nebasolo.com/ingridmonson/Senufo_Counterpoint.html, and they are essential to the narrative of the essay. I follow the performance with a broader cultural context for Neba Solo’s work and conclude with some thoughts on musical scholarship in a more accessibly multi-media age. Neba Solo Souleymane Traoré, whose professional name is Neba Solo, was born in Nebadougou, Mali, in 1969, and is one of the most celebrated musicians in Mali. In 1995 he won the first prize in the bala competition at the Dundunba Top festival held in Koutiala, Mali (figure 1). Since then he has become a major star in Mali and performed internationally in France, the United States, and Korea. The overwhelming success of his recording Can 2002 (2001) led to his being named Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mali in 2002, and in August 2009 he was named an Officier de l’Ordre National du Mali, an even greater honor. He has several other albums, including Kenedougou Foly (1997), Kene Balafons (2000), a collaboration with an Iranian Trio Chemirani entitled Falak (2003), and more recently, Neba Kady (2008).4 To provide an analogy from an American perspective, he’s something like the Charlie Parker and Charles Mingus of the Senufo bala. Like Parker he is virtuosic and a true original, whom all the younger bala players strive to emulate. Like Mingus he’s a composer who invents all the instrumental parts and aurally transmits them to his band. His song lyrics comment on contemporary social and public health issues such as vaccination, AIDS, female excision, protecting the environment, and political corruption. He views part of his mission as sensitizing people to important ethical and political issues of the day, as well as alerting them to what they can do to keep themselves healthy.5 Souleymane Traoré was raised in the village of Nebadougou, twentyfive miles northeast of Sikasso, at the southern tip of Mali (figure 2). Sikasso is Mali’s second largest city. The Kenedougou region, as the area around Sikasso is known, is one of Mali’s richest agricultural areas (known for cotton, rice, millet, corn, vegetables, and fruit) and has the country’s highest annual rainfall (55 inches per year). Sikasso—historically a trad- 264 • taking it to the bridge ing crossroads inhabited by both Jula merchants and Senufo people—was also the seat of the Kenedougou Kingdom, a late nineteenth-century state known for its resistance to the Samory Touré, and later the French. As a child, Neba Solo herded cattle and learned to be a farmer as well as a musician. He did not attend school but became literate as an adult through taking a course on how to...