31 f T
he band find too that their shared language goes beyond words. Kouyaté says: “I’ve never played the dhol but sometimes I say to Johnny I have a rhythm and then he just plays it straight away. It’s very important.”
Emmerson says “We’re creating some- thing unique. Everyone suggests ideas to each other and they play ideas on their own instruments, creating new twists on tradi- tions. But it’s really important that we are always rooted and know where we’ve come from. Otherwise you end up in some mad post-modernist schizophrenia.”
The group don’t just consider their own roots, but think about where the music springs from. Kalsi says “In my culture, when you’re given a talent, they call it ‘gun’. Gun is blessed upon you, it’s given to you to see what you do with it, but it’s never yours, you have to give it back, then it’s given to you again. Zakir Hussain, the famous tabla player, said: ‘Whatever I know on this beautiful instrument is a drop in the ocean,’ so people like me think, ‘Wow if that’s a drop in the ocean, I’m not a speck in that drop.’ He also says it takes more than one lifetime to learn an instrument like that. I never used to believe it until I saw this incredible four-year-old play the most amazing tabla I’ve ever heard in my life, when adults have taken months to get one note out of it. We believe music comes from above. From the universe.”
“For me,” says Kouyaté, “the music comes from the spirit, through the expres- sion of emotion in the moment when you are in synchronisation with your instrument and you share that with your audience.”
“I think it comes from the earth,” says
Emmerson. “I used to think it came from the spirit and I don’t think Afro Celts would have happened if I hadn’t been living in Hackney at the time and immersed in that whole urban scene. But when I moved out I got so inspired. Living in the countryside in Dorset, I go out and walk every day and the birds sing to me and the trees talk to me and this stuff comes out of the Earth. Like a light, it fills me up and gives me hope and those places I go in nature, that’s my church. And that’s when it comes [the music] and that’s kind of what Baaba Maal showed me. I sat on a hill and felt the light coming out of the Earth, I didn’t talk about it, but then Davy Spillane came into the stu- dio and he said ‘you’ve got to come to the west coast of Ireland because the earth is full of light’. And that’s when I thought ‘What’s going on here? What do these peo- ple know that I don’t?’ And that’s when I became a druid. End of.”
Griogair too talks of “Very ancient spir- its, of folk tales, songs and ancestry tied into land, to the place,” and of the human con- nection with the soil. “We named the mountains, we named the rocks after our ancestors, after our heroes and they play a part of who we are and the stories help shape who we are and who we’re becoming and the music springs from that connection.”
He believes it possible to pick up on this inherent spirituality in The Source, at least on a subliminal level. “If I listen to the album start to finish, I feel elated and some sense of spirituality, purely on a level with rap.”
The Source was named for Emmerson’s Blues Brothers-like search to get back to the
original spirit of Afro Celt Sound System, and tracking down the original musicians. The talk between him, Kalsi and Kouyaté turns fondly to Joe Bruce whom they mourn, the original keyboard/electronica genie who died suddenly in 1997, aged 29, of an asthma attack during the recording of their second album.
Their achievement in getting all the people involved in creating The Source is great and not just for the mad logistics it required. The vocals, the raps, the pipes, the drums, Shooglenifty, the Kick Horns, Les Gri- ottes (the female West African choir), musi- cians of all ages and both sexes, from the young singer Lucy Doogan making her recording debut duetting with Griogair, to the band’s elder Moussa Sissokho, all creat- ed what Colin Irwin describes in his fRoots review last month as “a delirious mix of pri- mal intensity, spiritual beauty and explosive rhythms… a colossus of an album.”
It’s a mature, sophisticated album. Emmerson turned 60 in March. He says “I’m just getting over my teenage existential
doubt. I don’t really need to doubt why I exist in the world, what is the meaning in life, its challenges, now I can handle it. I’m having a lot more fun, doing stuff not to prove myself but because I want to do it. It’s a very creative time – a good time to have found freedom in my creativity.”
It shows. They might have been going for 21 years but Afro Celt Sound System, though mature, is still fresh, relevant and inspiring: not least because, as Kalsi says, “You can empower yourself and your culture through collaboration.” Whilst celebrating diversity The Source presents us with unity. It’s a joyous invocation of our common humanity – the deep interconnection that underlies the band’s strong individual narra- tives is implicit in the music. And like the tales told in the Tory press, it packs an emo- tional punch. How good would it be if its story became the common one that we all believed. The Source feeds us a narrative of safety, of inclusion, of belonging and of hope. It is music for our time.
www.afroceltsoundsystem.org.uk F
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
