The palm wine drinkard

Aunt MK says I should write about the boring stuff that happens here, too, not just the exciting parts. I think part of my coping mechanism here has been making an effort to weave my experiences into some kind of cohesive narrative, in part just to make it make sense to myself. These are the stories we tell ourselves. If I connect the dots from one high point to the next, I can make some sense out of my journey. But down in the valleys in between, the landscape has a tendency to disappear from sight.

A lot of this past week felt like I was facing Robin Williams' fate in Jumanji: "In the jungle you must wait, until the dice read five or eight." I was waiting for Didie or one of his brothers to come and take me out to Porto Novo, but this took the better part of three days to arrange. So I spent a fair amout of time in my hotel room intermittently practicing, watching the fan blow hot air at me, wishing for some relief from the heat, and answering the phone to hear one engagement canceled after the other. It is so frustrating sometimes to be just learning my way around and to be so reliant on others in order for my day to be outwardly productive.

Friday, though, Didie's trombonist brother Aaron came to Cotonou to take me to Porto Novo. What an amazing family. Eight brothers, all musicians, and mostly trumpet and trombone players. They all have different interests. Some are in the Gangbe brass band, like the trombonist Martial, and left on Wednesday for a European tour. Another has a home recording studio, and one, Christien, is a gospel singer and sociologist. Another brother, Rock, has studied vodoun culture extensively, along with the story of African music in the diaspora. It's so incredible to hear a Beninois musician talk at such length about the influence of the music from the Dahomean region on music in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and New Orleans. That is an old and spiritual story, and Rock is fully cognizant of Benin and Nigeria's place at the root of it all. Aaron and Didie are very wary of the vodoun system, but Rock sees it, for better or for worse, as the original source of most traditional rhythms. The thing is that now, those rhythms are being taken out of the cult context and appearing in church services and popular music. The brothers have a brass band together and they record their own compositions incorporating jazz and traditional vodoun rhythms. I asked Didie if anyone else has done anything like this before, and he said, "No. We are the revolutionaries."

Everyone is adamant that I get out of Cotonou to experience Beninois culture as it really is. I have to agree. So Friday Rock took me on a motorcycle tour of Porto Novo and we found a cheap apartment for me to rent, with three huge rooms and a kitchen. I can borrow some furniture from Rock's family while I am here. I will move there today. It will be nice to be living close to friends and to be away from the pollution and noise of Cotonou for a while. We also stopped to talk to this old man who wanted me to try palm wine, which is famous for its mystical qualities. I tried a little and really didn't like it; it is really dry and makes your whole mouth feel like it is going to evaporate. So I slyly passed it to Rock to drink, not wanting to offend the gentleman. He turned back to see the empty glass in my hand, and I made a face like I had drunk the whole thing. He laughed and laughed. He knew exactly what had happened. I think I met a trickster, the crossroads kind. We didn't really get into it.

There was an summit of African leaders going on in Washington, D.C. this week and the president of Zimbabwe (ironically, himself a dictator) spoke out against Bush's regime, and specifically his lack of attention to Africa. People in Benin are saying that the U.S. doesn't want to help them because they are francophone, and would rather help a former British colony like Ghana. So I try not to tell people I am American, or make it very clear that I am not a Bush supporter. Besides being true, I hope this will save me from some ill will.

Yesterday, we played at Didie's church, an "evangelical" one with a roof and no walls. This lady stood up to PREACH (in English) and tore the HOUSE down. She said, "If I am offending you by preaching as a woman, then I profoundly apologize," and raising her voice to a full-throated cry, "but I am on my way to the promised land." I found out she is an American expat married to a Togolese man and she has been living in Africa for the past 30 odd years. She has a prep school in Cotonou and is looking for teachers. She wants me to go and teach English and/or music there someday. So she was the guest preacher. The leader of this church is called "The Prophet" and he has the gift of foresight, which some people call prophecy. I have to say I was initially extremely skeptical, but then they had a reception at his house and he started speaking in tongues and talking about seeing children learning and being fed and well-taken care of and maybe there is something to that kind of vision. I don't know. It offends my Western rationalism, that's for sure. I have believed so long without seeing that to see and believe makes me uneasy.

Then last night I went to the Centre Culturel Francais for a concert by a Beninois-Burkinabe-Ghanaian-Parisien bassist, Patrick, who I met at the Tramway Saturday night. This was a fantastic show, with many different musics and peoples and cultures represented. The wood-flutist from Burkina Faso played crazy pentatonic lines in different rhythms and screamed immediately after each phrase and sometimes while he was playing. I could only think of Roland Kirk. The percussionist Camarou is Beninois and played for some dancers who came up on stage and put money on his head to appease the spirit. A little girl came on stage and put money on Patrick's head. Set drummer Jean-Baptiste is Togolais-Parisien and keeps a seriously fat beat and is always messing with where 1 is. The dancers love this, and follow right along. The guitarist and saxophonist are French and seem to be having a great time in Benin. Another guitarist and sound engineer is Vietnamese-Parisien... World music. There's a lot of great stuff going on at the Centre Culturel this month, and I met some radio journalists there who are kindred spirits. Not a bad showing. This was a high point, from which I can make connections into other times and places. Now I go back down into the valley and start climbing the next mountain.

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.

Ghanaba, Cotonou

My malaria symptoms started to disappear quickly, and I was soon well enough to make one last trip out to Kofi Ghanaba's house in Midie. His house is on the edge of the village, at the very end of a dirt road with a sign that says "Kofi Ghanaba/NYU Archive Project," and American and Ghanaian flags. He heard me coming and came out to greet me. We had spoken on the phone, and agreed that the eccentric drummer would allow me to browse his collection of photos and records for 20 dollars, and take a lesson for 100 dollars more. We talked for about an hour about his experience in the States playing with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk and Max Roach. He says his goal was to infuse American jazz with an awareness of its African roots, but he was ahead of his time. Nobody was ready for that kind of thing in the '40s. But it started something; Art Blakey came to Nigeria, and then the '60s brought more Afro-centrism with Coltrane and Roland Kirk and especially some free musicians. That's Ghanaba's world, and I was welcomed into it. He's a packrat, and now in his 80s, has kept photos and articles from his entire career. He took me to see his library, full of books on African music, American jazz, Kwame Nkrumah, and other African countries. He worked as a journalist in Ghana for several years before going to the States.

Finally, as the sun set outside, we began to play. He plays a self-invented set of six fontomfrom drums, like a jazz drumset, but the drums are huge and resonant and fill the whole room. We played some free improvisations, playing off each other's rhythms and colors, and then we played C-Jam Blues in 6/8 and Autumn Leaves out of time - which I thought was the best. When we finished, Ghanaba kissed each drum as if putting a child to sleep, and came over and gave me a big hug. I realized it was the first time I'd been hugged in a while, and it just seemed appropriate. There is a connection there.

Then spent a few days packing and goodby-ing, which was hard. Everyone wants me to come back. But we move on.

Arrived in Cotonou late Tuesday night. The flight was one hour from Accra, really beautiful to see these cities lit up at night from the sky. But in between, very dark a lot of the time. After changing some money into CFAs, I trusted myself to take a taxi from the airport to my hotel. My room is on the second floor and overlooks the busy street below. There is no hot water, and the electricity goes out everyday at some point.

Yesterday I went out and found some food (French bread, where have you been all my life?) and took moto-taxis everywhere, which is crazy. These little motorcycles with their drivers in yellow jerseys whiz everyone around town. There is hardly any other traffic, because most people don't own cars.

Then I met up with my pianist contact ( Ali's friend) and it turns out his older brother is the trombonist in the Gangbe brass band! So we went to see him last night and sat around and listened to trombone groups and talked about George Lewis and Roswell Rudd and watched French league soccer on TV. A kind of heaven for me. Tonight we will all go down to the Repaire de Bacchus and jam. Also met another trombonist today who just got back from Belgium, where he was giving master classes on drumming and trombone and Beninese culture. So many brass players in Benin...

I no fi shout

We recorded Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Sunday was a late night and I slept in a hotel – missing a dose on my anti-malarial. We were determined to finish on Monday. We arrived at the studio at 6 p.m., and the power was off. So we sat around and slept and applied mosquito repellent and annoyed each other and waited for the lights to come back on, which they did, at 10. We got down some of the best takes of the weekend – good solos and everything. I'm really proud of what we did. I'm starting to pick up the sound of Nigerian pidgin English, which I find really interesting. The joke of the weekend was the repeated, grinning utterance of “I no fi shout,” which translated is “I (or you) don't have to shout,” or “I understand you, I feel what you are saying.” Another way of saying the same thing is “I no fi go kill myself,” or “I (you) don't have to go and kill my (your)self,” or “Don't hurt yourself. I hear what you're saying.”

Photo credits go to Guillaume Ananda, this French singer who I let play around with my camera.

So we finished the recording late, like 3 a.m. But then we still had to do overdubs, against which I protested by curling up on the floor with some blanket-like materials over me. I woke up at 6 to see everyone leaving, so I got up to go and felt my brain move inside my head and my body complain about the conditions of employment... Long John, one of the trumpeters, looked at me and said, “Musician's life like soldier. No sleep.” So I went home by tro-tro across town and collapsed into my bed to catch up on sleep.

I woke up with a fever and a cold, and thought it was just fatigue. Yesterday the cold went away but the fever stayed stubbornly on, and started to feel kind of ominous. So this morning I went in to the hospital, run by a church down the street, a truly marvelous, though crowded place that has so much compassion they have to rent storage space for it. My favorite part of this adventure was that, when I first got there, I accidentally waited for about an hour in the room for pregnant women. After clearing that up, and waiting for another few hours in the right waiting room, they did a blood test, and surprise, surprise, I have malaria. So now I am medicated and feeling a little bit better, though not completely myself. I had to cancel an appointment with master drummer Kofi Ghanaba this afternoon, which was frustrating. But resting is ok. I've been listening to all of the jazz and soul I have on my computer, which makes me feel both more and less homesick. So many things would be easier in the States, I realize; like filling a prescription, or eating a healthy diet, or getting or giving information, or taking care of babies.

I think I am mentally just about ready to leave Ghana now. I'm going to miss a lot of these folks, especially the musicians I've become close to. But most of the things that have gone well here are things that I stumbled across and pursued, so it could easily happen again. And again.

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.

Kumasi

I have added pictures to the Ghana album.

I am riding high. Back from a journey, I am surrounded by love and safety, though soon I must venture out again...

Friday was the first night in a while when I allowed myself to be swept up into the night-heart of Accra and took off on an adventure. I left the house around dinner time (forgetting to eat) and went to the bar of a beach hotel, where I knew from weeks past there was a highlife band playing that had some jazz sympathies. So I drank my first bottle of Star Beer (a point of local pride) and sat in with the band. We played a highlife number and then “Autumn Leaves,” for my benefit, I think.

Then it was off to meet Ali for a jam session he'd invited me to. He had to wait a long time though, because the acquaintance I was with was unfortunately stubborn and bad with directions. But we arrived nonetheless and walked through the winding roads of Osu to a glittering club with a very funky highlife band playing inside. This is Accra's trendiest neighborhood – and the clientele was upper-echelon – educated, curious – a listening crowd. The band was led by the guitarist, who seemed to invent highlife licks and riffs with no effort at all... After eye contact with the drummer and keyboardist, and encouragement from Ali, I got out my horn and played a solo, and then another, and another. It was a jam band, really, but they were so tight that it was very easy to play with them. I would put the bass player in the category of funky mofo.

All in all a very good night, though we ended late and it rained on the walking bit of the trip home, which is what I think led to THE COLD. Saturday I rested and practiced and exercised – and sniffled. Sunday I had promised to sit in with the church choir, but was feeling so awful by the morning that I thought about not going. But I was convinced to go and sneezed through the entire service – which may have been the best thing, as that choir did not really need any horn accompaniment. They were carrying their own sound right on up to the heavenly sensibilities.

The service was outside and a huge celebration for a newly ordained priest from the parish. People came from every region of Ghana to congratulate him and be blessed by him. It was pretty amazing – kind of like a meeting of nations, like all the different peoples in Star Wars coming together for an intergalactic council, or all of the pirate lords in Pirates of the Caribbean convening for a debate over “the code.” My favorite were the people from northern Ghana, who played a combination of small, hand-held copper-pieces, which clanged together in syncopated rhythm; long, tapered, sideways bamboo flutes, whose pitch was changed by putting one's fingers over the end or its various holes; and some more recorder-like, high-pitched, wooden instruments. And they danced – high-stepping and grinning the whole time. They made me feel a little bit better about having to sneeze through a Catholic mass in the hot sun.

In the end, I was glad I went, but I started to get really sick that afternoon and had to take some serious rest. There is nothing that will make you more homesick, I've found, than being sick in that kind of helpless way and not having people to take care of you in the way you are used to. I wanted to send my mom to buy ginger ale at Big Y in Holden, Massachusetts and watch the Lord of the Rings on our leather couch in our living room on Bullard Street. But instead I slept fitfully in my room in southern Ghana, and wondered melodramatically if I would live to tell the world of my strange tropical disease.

Monday my host brother was going back to school at Kumasi, and I'd planned to go along to see another part of the country, and to get out of Accra for a while. I was surprised that when I woke up in the morning, I felt well enough to go. We took a five hour bus ride up to Ghana's second largest city – on “luxury” state transport, meaning, essentially, that the bus is air conditioned. When we arrived in Kumasi, the bus parked on the side of the road, jammed up against a dirt embankment, and proceeded to unload the cargo bay in the most chaotic manner possible, with much angry yelling and pushing as taxi drivers joined the fray, trying to pick up customers – all in a tightly squeezed passageway between bus and red dirt. Having no luggage, I removed myself from the situation by climbing the embankment, and waited for my brother. Several others took my lead, only to be pushed back by police, indicating they were not cross over. Those people yelled that they had let an obroni (white person) over so why should they not be allowed. Hearing this, I disappeared quietly over the other side of the hill. I met my brother on the other side and we caught a taxi.

I called the guitarist Koonimo, to whom John Collins had referred me, and he very kindly sent someone down to bring me to his office. I would later know this person as George, who teaches music technology and recording at the university. He is a guitarist himself, and has a lot to say about the fusion of jazz and African musical forms. Koonimo, who at 70 is retired but still lectures for the university, received me and asked me to explain my project. His first reaction: he kind of smiled and said, “I am an old man.” He explained that he is a preservationist and has chosen to resist the influence of most Western music, devoting his life to playing traditional palmwine music. When I talked to him the next day, he admitted to loving jazz and having studied it at one point in his life, but maintains that palmwine music is tied to his identity and finds his calling in continuing the tradition and passing it on.

So I spent Tuesday morning interviewing Koonimo and talking to George and some of Koonimo's guitar students. This was the first place in Ghana where I have found such incredible positive energy surrounding this music. They have a jazz night every Friday and they put together small combos and play for each other. Amazingly, most of the musicians are majors in science and math, but then spend all of their free time practicing guitar and listening to highlife and jazz. They could sit around the piano laboratory for days, watching videos of American and European guitarists. They are hooked. And they were totally interested in my project, in life as a jazz musician in the States, in current trends on the scene. We talked about Dave Holland and Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock and the whole front edge of that movement; and about elitism in academic music and preservation and innovation and fusion and recombination. (David told me today that I am in the middle of what the postmodernists (he called them pocos... a reference that escaped me) like to call an environment of hybridity – but no one here would think to call it that. They just live it.)

George showed me a song he recorded with Oshame Kwame, a leading Ghanaian hip-life artist; the song is called “Kwame Ghana,” and the chorus translates as “Mother Ghana, help me, I am dying” and then the verses talk about all of the different things that are going on in Ghana – crime and materialism and disorganization and everything – and asking what is happening to our country.. This album is due out soon, but there is a copyright battle going on over who will release it first. The style is easy, acoustic highlife for most of the song, and the rap works in smoothly with no bass and no hip-hop beat for almost four minutes; it is not until the very end of the song that the hip-life groove kicks in. “This is what the youth understand,” said George. “And will help us to reach that audience.” The song strikes me as a perfect example of how Ghana's different musical styles – traditional, highlife, popular, contemporary – can combine to express something about what is going on in the country today – and to uplift people who are in the midst of trials.

There is a traditional symbol in Ghanaian culture which is a figure with one leg pointed backward and one forward, representing the ways in which a person must learn about the lessons of the past, deeply feel the present moment, and use these two things to cast a shadow onto the future, taking the best of what has come before along into the next phase. One student suggested to me that this is a good model for the progression of Ghanaian music, that they must take the best of the traditional music, and the best of the outside influences coming through their culture, and use these things to strengthen their performance practice and the power of their music to reach the people. The analogy can be extended to many transitions, I realize.

I have been receiving constant encouragement from family and friends and even the Watson folks, all of which has been wonderful, and keeps me going when things get tough. I feel like there are times when I want to say, “Really, guys; you can't be serious. Look at me. Are you sure this is all part of the plan? Because right now it seems like I am disorganized and lovesick and a little bit helpless. Whose idea was this again?” But then I end up in somewhere like Kumasi where the weather is cool and the trees are green and the people are beautiful and that all disappears.

Forward motion

Things have been picking up rapidly this week. If I go two places in a day, I am exhausted by the end, because getting around town involves catching shared minivans called tro-tros and sitting in hot traffic for about an hour between destinations. It's worth it, but I have to make a conscious decision to rest occasionally.

Things I like about Accra (that need explaining):

Reggae music on a packed tro-tro = delapidated minivan seating as many people as possible; the cheapest, if not the fastest, way around town – tro-tros often bear the saying “No Condition is Permanent” - a nice reminder when you are sitting in hours of traffic

Fanmilk = creamy frozen yogurt shrink-wrapped and sold on the street for 50 pesewas; comes in chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry

The Arts Center = section of market stalls where kente cloth, African clothing, artifacts, jewelry are sold for touristy prices; people will actually grab your arm and pull you into their shop, insisting, “Looking is for free.”

I spent Tuesday morning shedding with Ali, a Ghanaian trombonist I sat in with at a club last weekend. Trombonists look out for each other, and I have been so blessed to be able to spend some time with Ali. We shared warm-ups and exercises and played some blues, walking bass lines for each other. Later in the week, I would sit in with Ali's brass band and meet his wife – a trumpet player!

I rehearsed with Bibie Bruhe's Ghanaian soul band – quite a trip. We learned Curtis Mayfield's “Move On Up” off the record, horn lines and all, and then Africanized it. We also played some Stevie Wonder tunes - “Have a Talk With God” etc. They definitely have their own thing and are rehearsing for live shows in Ghana and a European tour.

Wednesday I met up with Professor John Collins, a Brit who has been living in Ghana since the 1970s, and is a published expert on highlife music. The fact that I could talk to a British academic about popular music in Ghana was kind of awesome on its own. He has some very interesting theories about the ways that music travels from one place to another, across the Atlantic ocean and back, how people take one thing, copy it for a while, and then gradually fuse it with their own music and start to innovate.

This weekend I went to my first jazz jam and met the owner of the club, who is from Georgia, U.S.A.; a sharp Ghanaian pianist named Victor (playing both keys and bass), who goes to Berklee in Boston; Victor's taxi driver friend Mohammed who is from Burkina Faso; and WATSON FELLOW SIGHTING #1 – a singer from Colorado doing a project on jazz in different places across the world. We didn't even know that we were both Fellows when we started playing together – but then we started to explain in that slightly tired way: “I just graduated. I'm doing a year of independent study...” And then the look of recognition, as if to say, “You too, endure this madness?” What a thrill to hear about others out there who are also taking on the world...

Today I went to the beach and felt like a tourist again. I have been slowly getting used to Ghanaian food. I like fried plaintains (I don't know anybody who doesn't) and red beans and spicy kebabs and papaya (which they call paw-paw, pronounced “po-po”) and red snapper and all the other things that come out of the ocean.

Some things are starting to fall into place; some folks have contacted me with homestays in my next destinations, but there is still a lot left to be figured out when I get there. Some musicians here know people in Benin, so I will have some contacts to start with when I get there. I am feeling good about my time here; I have stopped worrying if I should be here, and now I just am here – ups, downs, and all.

A note on religion in Ghana: it seems that every person you meet is some variety of Christian – Catholic, Pentecostal, Presbyterian... The names of small business have names like “Divine Providence,” “He is Risen,” “Good Shepherd.” There is a shop down the street that is simply called “Well Done Jesus.” I think this sums it up nicely.