Lucy Duran

Birds of Wasulu: Freedom of expression and expressions of freedom in the popular music of Southern Mali

Wassoulou is a type of semi‐acoustic music that has been popular in Mali since the 1970s. This paper, an ethnography of wassoulou, traces its roots to the music of masquerade and the hunters’ traditions of the Wasulu region in the south, and explores the ways in which the cultural worlds of these traditions are evoked through the music. Wassoulou performers are called birds (kono) and occupy a social r61e that allows them to comment on social issues with impunity, with gender playing an important part

Music Production as a Tool of Research, and Impact

For many years, my professional life has straddled two worlds: that of academia, as Lecturer in African music at the School of Oriental and African Studies; and that of the music industry, as radio presenter and music producer. From this experience, it has been clear that there is often a deep gulf between the two, and that this has not contributed to optimising the exchange of knowledge between them. Academics are often suspicious of what they see as commercially driven, non-rigorous work; music consumers find academic writing hard to read and difficult to access. Yet music academics and those involved in the music industry have many shared interests; and so I view the call for impact and knowledge exchange as timely, since we need to make a greater effort to find ways of learning from each other and getting our work out to wider audiences. An academic like myself who produces non-print output such as an audio music production, soon discovers that text-based publication remains the medium that is most privileged in research evaluation, even in the field of music and ethnomusicology. Albums that are produced in a studio are frequently regarded as commercially driven synthetic ethnopop, or as exploitative of indigenous cultures (see Cottrell 2010:14 6), or in any case are not peer-reviewed, nor demonstrably based on research. Yet my experience has shown that a CD, produced with sensitivity to a musical culture nurtured by long research, has the potential to have a far greater impact than a publication in a scholarly journal. In this brief contribution to the roundtable, I focus on my work as producer of West African artists. Music production can mean different things to different people,

POYI! Bamana jeli music, Mali and the blues

The search for the African roots of the blues has long been a subject of fascination to writers, scholars and musicians, with Mali taking an increasingly central role in the popular imagination as the missing link in the blues’ DNA. Many Malian artists have found their music being labelled by journalists and record companies with such tags as ‘Mali Blues’, ‘Desert Blues’ and ‘Bambara Blues’, in recognition of the strong stylistic similarities with the Delta Blues in particular. But which way around did the influences travel? A crucial piece to the puzzle is a Bamana jeli (griot) song called ‘Poyi’, which, according to oral tradition, may have been the last tune that war captives of the empire of Segu (1712–1861) heard, before being taken into slavery. This article explores the complex trajectory of the trans-Atlantic conversations between the blues and Mali, by focusing on one musical tradition that has so far been ignored in scholarly studies of both blues and Mande music – that of the Bamana (‘Bambara’) griots from Segu in the middle Niger valley, with their trademark lute, the ngóniba. Drawing both on extensive academic research carried out on Mande music, and on long practical experience of working as music producer of Mande artists, it argues that Bamana music could well be a strong contender for the ‘roots of the blues’.

Growing into Music

This chapter is in the form of an interview between Lucy Duran and Helen Penn. Lucy Duran is a well-known ethnomusicologist who has made a series of films, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Council in the UK—Beyond Text, in the project called Growing into Music (Growing into Music films: http://www.growingintomusic.co.uk/), for which she was the principal investigator. The films document how children from specialist musical families of great oral traditions acquire musical skills and knowledge, with films made by a team of four ethnomusicologists working in five countries: India, Azerbaijan, Mali, Cuba and Venezuela. In addition to the documentaries directed and filmed in Mali, which is Duran’s regional expertise, she also provides a commentary to the comparative film that covers footage from all five countries, making some interesting and important connections, with wider implications for music education.