Nigeria

One of the major frustrations of traveling in West Africa as a Watson Fellow, especially as a musician, has been the State Department warning in Nigeria. On Tuesday Ali brought me to a rehearsal with a group of Afro-jazz musicians from Nigeria, led by composer-keyboardist Funsho Ogundipe, who came to Accra to make a recording with one of Ghana's leading recording engineers, a man named Panje whose skin is the color of creamed coffee and went to university in Cairo and is always answering his cell phone in different languages. I realized as soon as they started playing that this was a kind of music I could understand, play, and communicate with, and that I had unintentionally stumbled across one of the chief forces that drew me to this region. I couldn't go to Nigeria, but Nigeria has been able to come to me, I told myself. This realization gave me a heady rush, and charged every minute with importance. Initially I was extremely intimidated by Funsho, who is a Nigerian expat working as a lawyer in London, is probably seven feet tall, and gets quietly pissed off when people don't play his music right.

He is using a mixture of Ghanaian, Nigerian, and Cameroonian musicians on this recording – bass, drums, congas, and a big horn section – two trumpets, two trombones, and tenor sax. Funsho taught us our parts by ear from the keyboard, and I was surprised at how quickly I picked things up. I think all of the sitting in I have been doing has required my ears to sharpen. Funsho's tunes are really exciting – funky and full of horn lines and back and forth, with this kind of ambiguous use of the dorian mode that I've read about in Afro music. He has a song already recorded called “Our Man is Gone” which he wrote for Fela Kuti. A lot of people across West Africa have been very influenced by Fela's music, and the Nigerian trumpeter Mooiye in the band played with Fela, and so did our Ghanaian set drummer. There is a serious connection here. We started getting our own individual parts worked out; Funsho wants each person to have a part that fits their own sound. He has a whole-tone tune that is really wild, and he keeps pushing me to solo on it and we take things kind of far out.

We rehearsed every day last week in Panje's back yard under a palm tree canopy, preparing about five songs for the recording on Saturday. Sometimes we had to wait several hours for equipment to arrive, or sometimes it would start raining and we would have to pack up and go in, or the power would go out. One day I had to take Ali to the hospital because he was coming down with malaria; they gave him an injection and he got better that day. Each time something of this sort would happen, people would stop playing, look at each other, sigh and say, “Ai, Africa.” I got to know the horn players really well, and we sound really tight together. Thursday night we went out to a jam and played a kind of short set of the tunes we'd been rehearsing. It was good just to hang out with people and talk. Funsho says his idol is Miles Davis and thinks that is where he wants to start with his music, and take it further. He also likes Thelonious Monk a lot, which you can definitely hear in his playing. He says he is tired of bebop licks and hates it when people play them in their solos - he wants more of a sparse, note choice kind of approach - studiously random. Funsho is intense is a kind of frightening way; he is so confident in himself and in his music – and is determined to make art out of it. We had a discussion about what it means to find out who you are and what happens when you do. He says you never go back – like the Road to Damascus.

Panje said something interesting to me about the influence of Afro-American music here – that early highlife was very jazz influenced, but there is an even stronger influence of Afro-Carribbean music here, because conditions were better for slaves in the Carribbean, so the music is closer to the African tradition, more recognizable, and made the return journey much earlier than jazz, which went through a long and convoluted transition before it came back home. He also said that he thinks Africans recognize the African elements in the diaspora musics, which is what draws them to it and tends to be what they take from it. It is a little like looking in the mirror, and highlights the definitive qualities and brings them out. It occurred to me, too, that it also creates an environment for other musical influences to mix with each other, i.e. the Afro-Caribbean and the Afro-American – the calypso and the blues. Yesterday morning, Panje also gave me an African history lesson, about the dispersion of the twelve tribes of Israel, and the migration of people over the African continent, into Ghana, which (because there is no C in the native languages here) is an approximation of Cana or Canaan, meaning “the land of the spiritual people.”

Yesterday was the first day of recording, but they spent most of the day setting up, so we sat around and practiced and talked. Mooiye says his father is a priest and hated having jazz music in the house, so he had to do all of his musical study without the support of his parents, but he wanted to do it so bad, he was playing with Fela when he was 19. By the end of the day, we got two takes of one song recorded, and by then everyone was so tired that we decided to wait until today to do any more.

The more time I spend here, the more I realize what a powerful musical force is residing in Nigeria – in the Yoruba people and in their complications and conflicts and turbulent lifestyle – in their spirituality and in the sheer population of the place. I will have to go there at some point in my life. Not now. But someday.

Plus the Nigerian U-17 soccer team just won the world championships.

Challenges: When to leave for Benin. Things are going well here and are comfortable. And in Benin I have to start over and probably be lonely and alienated for a while. I was really lucky to meet Ali here. We look out for each other. But I have to go. I know that.