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Digitising the audio reels
ll the musical instruments, amplifiers and equipment were purchased by the Guinean government, who also paid the musicians a salary. The musicians were encouraged to return to Guinea’s musical roots for inspiration, and to incorporate traditional melodies into their compositions by transposing them to modern instru- mentation. Thus, as the chimurenga musicians of Zimbabwe imi- tate the plucking sound of the mbira on their electric guitars, so Guinean musicians copied the sounds of traditional instruments like the balafon and kora in their arrangements for the brass sec- tions or guitars.
A
There is a lot of regional variation in Guinean music, with the orchestras from Guinea’s forest regions, for example, using drum patterns and rhythms from the local Guerzé music, while tradition- al singers from the northern regions of Guinea sang alongside urban cool jazz hipsters and their improvised sax. Miriam Makeba adopted Guinean music as her own, and performed in the role of a griotte, a traditional singer-historian. She sang praise songs to President Touré in the local dialect and the President assigned her some of the best musicians to form her own group.
The result of this direct government involvement was a spec- tacular blossoming of creativity in the arts. With Syliphone pump- ing out the good news via the government’s massive radio trans- mitter, Guinean music dominated the whole region. President Touré also sent regular cultural delegations throughout Africa, consisting of dance performances (by national companies such as Les Ballets Africains) and orchestra concerts. Guinean music thus had a huge impact on the development of modern African music in the 1960s and 1970s. One musician aptly described it: “Guinean music was like the lighthouse to music in Africa”, and he later told me how he had taught Malian musicians to transpose their music to an orchestra setting.
The songs of the RTG sound archive trace the entire develop- ment of Guinean music from its birth. President Touré began his forays into Guinean culture just a few weeks after independence in 1958 when he formed the Syli Orchestre National. With only basic recording equipment (Nagra IIIs) and no recording studio, the early audio reels of recordings focused on acoustic music and solo per- formers. The earliest recordings I archived featured the Malinké griots Mory and Madina Kouyaté and Ismaila Diabaté. The first recordings by orchestras were from February 1963. At this time the Voix de la Révolution recording studios were still a few years away from construction, but these early recordings of Balla Et Ses Bal- ladins, Keletigui Et Ses Tambourinis, the Syli Orchestre National, Kébendo Jazz, and the Orchestre De La Garde Républicaine reveal the emerging styles which would later define Guinean music.
The influence of Cuban music was strong throughout the 1960s, and renditions of mambos and rumbas, sung in barely pass- able Spanish, can be found by many groups. In the late 1960s, fol- lowing Guinea’s cultural revolution, Guinean music was at its cre- ative height. Though musicians retained their jazz and Cuban influences, they wove these into new styles of music which reflect- ed their ethnic origins while also appealing to a wide audience.
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