[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Francis Bebey: “Akwaaba (Welcome)”
From the album Akwaaba: Music for Sanza (1985)
Born in Cameroon in 1929, Francis Bebey was a brilliant musician and public intellectual, and a powerful advocate for African music in the wake of the decolonialization of the mid-20th century. A cosmopolitan who lived for a time in France and the United States, Bebey was an important figure in the global music scene from his first albums in the 1960s until his death in 2001.
Before settling into his career as a globetrotting ambassador of “world music” fusion, Bebey wore a variety of professional hats. During the 60s and 70s he was a radio journalist in France and worked for the information service of UNESCO. Bebey was also an active writer, producing a number of highly successful novels, as well as collections of essays and poems. In 1969 he published an important musicological study entitled Musique d’Afrique.
Bebey’s compositions fused traditional central African elements with aspects of American popular music and, occasionally, European classical music, such as “Kasilane” for the crossover-happy Kronos Quartet. His primary instrument was the guitar, but the sound on many of his records is dominated by the sanza, a plucked idiophone popular throughout Africa, where it is has many different names and variations. It is commonly known in English as the “thumb piano.”
“One day God, dying of boredom in a world where He so far had created nothing, built a sanza according to the counsels of Imagination. When He began to play it, He found that each note created something around Him: the sun, the moon, good weather and bad, the forest, the savannah, the desert, the village; then man, followed by woman, and by hundreds of millions of children of all colors.” (Francis Bebey)
Played 161 time(s).
October 01, 2011, 11:22am
