Grammy nominee Awa Sangho, the Mali blues singer, will be one of several performers at this year's Pan African Concert at Queen's Park Savannah this Friday night, at 8 pm, organised by the Emancipation Support Committee as part of Emancipation festivities. Other performers include Jamaican reggae singers Everton Blender, Ventrice "Queen Ifrica" Morgan and Duane Stephenson, and TT singers Kushite and Shadow. The concert is called Liberation–Songs of Freedom. Here we feature a recent interview related to a concert at which Sangho performed a few weeks ago in Montreal, Canada.
Awa Sangho takes her inspiration where she can find it, whether it's in Dir� in northern Mali, where she grew up, or in the musical hub of Abidjan in Ivory Coast, where she moved at the age of 12.Nowadays some of that inspiration comes from New York City, where the Mali-born singer has lived for the past five years.
"I love it," Sangho said in a phone interview with the Montreal Gazette from her home in Harlem.Sangho performed at Club Balattou in Montreal on July 15 as part of the Festival International Nuits d'Afrique."I call New York the boiling town," she said. "Everything is going on here. Instead of the Big Apple, I call it the boiling town. There's so much energy and so many good things happening. It's the mix of people living here."
Earlier in life, the inspiration came from Abidjan."I learned a lot in Ivory Coast," said Sangho. "It's similar to New York for West Africa. A bunch of people, a bunch of cultures. You name them. Salif Keita went through Abidjan. Stayed for a little while. Manu Dibango. I worked with them all. ory Kant�. They all went through Abidjan first. Abidjan was like a platform. Everybody had to stop by there. Just like New York. I worked a lot with Salif, who is my brother-in-law."
The energy and mix of cultures that she loves in those two cities rubbed off on Sangho's debut solo album, Ala Ta, a collection of songs that blends Afro rhythms with acoustic instrumentation and her unique voice. It was released last year. The album was recorded in New York, California, Dakar and Bamako, mostly in 2013.
"If I had to describe the album, I'd say it's an album I chose to do very acoustically," said Sangho.For Sangho, one of the key things on the album, and in all her music, is to use the songs to talk about social issues.
"Like, say, Denko, which is about problems with children, about the education of children. For me, that's the future of the entire world. The best thing you can do for a child is give them education. That gives them freedom for their entire life. I say: Help me to educate my child. That's the only way we can help ourselves. That's the best way artists or singers can participate. To give some musical notes, to give some opinions about building a new, better world.
"I give voice to the voiceless. But it's not about preaching. You can be Buddhist. You can be Christian. You can be vegetarian. You can stand up for yourself. You can make what you dream about happen. Make your dream come true. And be thankful. You can walk. You can run. Be grateful for life. Be happy."
It was in Ivory Coast that Sangho began her singing career, working with L'Ensemble Kot�ba d'Abidjan, a noted theatre, dance and music group. She then hooked up with two other female singers and formed Les Go du Kot�ba, which existed for close to 20 years. They recorded five albums, with much of the material sung and penned by Sangho.
Sangho has also performed with some of Africa's top artists, notably Keita, Amadou & Mariam, Dibango and Habib Koit�.She says it was a great experience to be in an all-female group."We were very motivated by what we were doing and we loved what we were doing," said Sangho.
"Everything started there. Standing up for ourselves and showing to our family and friends that singing and dancing is a job. You can express yourself. Artists have this possibility to stand up for certain things that we think are not just. To be able to give your opinion. And people will listen because they love your voice or your music. We've been singing against war a long time before there was war in Ivory Coast, a long time before there was war in Mali. We've been singing for peace."
And she's so happy to see that African artists continue to have resonance all over the world."African music is doing pretty well. People maybe don't understand the language (in the songs), but for me you don't need to speak the language to feel it from the bottom of your heart, to feel goosebumps. That's why people love the musicians."
(Brendan Kelly, Montreal Gazette, http://montrealgazette.com)
�2 More info: Awa Sangho's Web site: http://awasangho.com/index.html.
SIDE BAR
Awa was born in 1972 in Bamako, the capital of Mali, but she spent her childhood in Dire, in the Timbuktu region of the north. She is a descendent of two great empires, The Songhai of Dire, and the Mande, or Malinke, of Kayes. Awa's family name, Sangho, indicates that she comes from the Mabo, griots–musical historians–of the Songhai. Griots are charged with honoring the histories of families in their region.
Awa's mother is a Kouyate–a Mande griot–and her earliest memories include watching her mother sing at weddings and naming ceremonies. As a child, Awa sang everything she heard–children's songs, Songhai, Mande, and Bambara numbers that were played on the radio, even blues, which has a special resonance in northern Mali, as evidenced by the career of one of her great musical mentors, Grammy-winning guitar maestro Ali Farka Toure.
Awa established herself in Abidjan, the capital of music production in the region in the 1980s. There, she sang, danced, acted, and began to travel the world with the legendary Ensemble Koteba, and the women-led band she co-founded in 1993, Les Go de Koteba. All this was preamble to Awa's move to New York City in 2011. Her first solo album is Ala Ta, released 2014. (http://awasangho.com)
'The truthbelongs to God'
What stands out most here (in the album Ala Ta–which means: "the truth belongs to God") is Sangho's voice. She sings from a deep place, and often channels the melancholy that comes with a life of displacement. Music is her salvation, and both pain and an elated sense of rescue come across in her elegant vocal performances.
Sangho sings about motherhood on "Ne ba ne n'fa/My Mother and Father" and on "Bamounan," about the cloth that ties a child to its mother's back, and how that tie evolves through life to the point where the child must care for the mother. Children are a huge concern in these songs, and fate, as in the title track Ala ta ye Tougnaye/The Truth Belongs to God.
Sangho's voice has terrific range, from the gentle griot-like cooing of Denko/The Problems of Children to the explosive, full-throated vocal fireworks of Bamounan. This is a big voice, informed by a number of West African traditions but not beholden to any.
The production is unusual, and a welcome departure from West African singer/songwriter formulas. There are rich layers of percussion, but no trap drums. The result is an open, airy atmosphere that lets detail come forward. (Excerpt of review by Banning Eyre/Afropop,
www.afropop.org)