Afro Blue

I washed my laundry by hand today, and hung it up to dry on my window blinds. This was an interesting exercise. In what, I haven't figured out yet. I was supposed to go see the Gangbe rehearse thsi morning, but they rescheduled for tomorrow. Another trombonist and I tried to connect, but missed each other by minutes. So it was a quiet day for practicing and visiting bookstores and trying to read in French. I don't want to leave town quite yet, because the Gangbe go on tour on Wednesday. Soon I will go check out Ouidah and Porto Novo.

But first, let me tell you about this amazing weekend. Thursday night we went down to Bacchus, which is this crawy oasis down the street from my place that is air-conditioned and has good French food and wine and sweet ambiance. I was so happy to see what looked like civilization that I ordered food, which I never do when I go out to play. The band was incredibly tight and clean and played standards but without getting bored at all. Didier, my friend, plays some serious piano, and then I met this guitarist Gobi who is a mixed race Frenchman and can burn through bebop and funk and African 6/8 and everything. We had a great time - and played Horace Sliver's "The Preacher" with a South African kind of rhythmic joy and lots of other tunes I knew well. We ended with "Afro Blue" in 12/8, which I initially couldn't play anything on, because the rhythm gave me too much to think about, but then I tried again and finally felt it.

At one point, Didier was taking a particularly incredible solo, and this guy came up behind him and put his hand on his back as he was playing, like he was praying over him, feeling some spirit that was inside him. Then he threw a 1000 CFA (local currency) bill onto the keyboard, as an offering to the spirit, it seemed, and danced around the room. The same thing happened to me at a club on Saturday night (where we'd heard a jump blues screamer the night before), when I played a really hot solo and this guy came up and put a bill on my head and let it fall onto my horn. I think I was anointed or something.

Everybody here wants to know my story. Am I Canadian? How do I speak French so well? Am I on vacation? Do I have African blood in me? I had a long conversation with Gobi about this. He's convinced that I have come back to my roots. I don't know about this, but it seems to make him want to play with me more, so ok. But most of the time I would rather talk about them and about vodoun. Didie says he's determined not to imitate American jazz, and he's always looking for ways to incorporate vodoun melodies into his solos. Friday night we played a traditional Beninois tune that is based on an odd pentatonic scale, and if you depart from those notes it's very seriously frowned upon.

This is what draws me to Benin, I think, is the connection between music and spirituality. Benin is strange, in a way, because there are a lot of very rich French people here who change the audience and really reinforce the European influence. Then the African influence is still there, kind of chilling out and mediating all the different forces that are coming through its territory, picking and choosing and playing as it pleases.