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      Every afternoon Toumani  would appear in his Lexus with a steaming tub of rice and meat and vegetables, and we would all sit in the courtyard and eat together from it with our fingers. Then he and his entourage  would go into a special room and pray, clearing out whatever  impure thoughts and deeds might have arisen since the last time they prayed, a few hours before. The prayers sounded like the chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks. It was a beautiful scene. Rarely in my travels have I been welcomed with such warmth and hospitality. “Toumani opens his doors to everyone, and Allah opens his doors to him,” one of the elders  told me.   

       Toumani had no trouble getting into “Candy Man,” “Death Don’t Have No Mercy,” or “Twelve Gates to the City”--  the Gary Davis tunes that I  picked for him. “We speak the same language,” he said.

        But the precise transcultural process that produced the blues is impossible to reconstruct, because there is a two-hundred-year gap between the emergence of the genre in the American South cut and the arrival of the first slaves, and because the blues has returned to Africa  and cross-fertilized with the indigenous music repeatedly, along with other music from the diaspora like Cuba rumba and son, Jamaican calypso and reggae, and Brazilian samba. But the echoes are unmistakable, and they are in the pentatonic scale (the black keys of the piano), which blues and much of Mali’s music are in, and in 12/8 shuffle-hiphop rhythm or the five-beat African clave (the ”Bo Diddley” or “shave-and-a haircut—two bits”) beat.

      One night I went to the Matignon, a funkylocal dive with couples  writhing slowly  in the darkness and a torrential rain pouring through holes in the roof, and heard Jimi Jakob and his band, Afuni, whose members came from three countries, infusing  r & b and soul classics like Stevie Wonder’s  “I just called to say I love you,” and Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing,” with their own West African  soulfulness. Another night I went to a very pleasant and presentable restaurant called El Torre to hear a group from the Ivory Coast called the Go girls, who had been rehearsing at Toumani’s. They sang lustily in five languages and ethnic styles : in bete and ziglibiti rhythm, from the Ivory Coast;  Malenke, wolof from Senegal;  sorai from northern Mali,  around Timbuctu;  sousou from Guinea. 

       Another night I went to the Jembe Club to hear Lobi Traoré, who plays what sounds like straight, hard-driving, proto-Howlin’ Wolf blues but is actually Bambara music from Segou, the capital of old Bamana empire, five hours north of Bamako, which is where Lobi is from. Most of Lobi’s songs are not about a broken heart but are devotional songs to Allah. So this is an important point : the pentatonic is not inherently bluesy. In a particular cultural and emotional context, it becomes the blues. There is eighth-century Taoist zither music from China that is meditation music, although it sounds a lot like delta blues.

       I had met Ali Farka Touré, Mali’s most famous artist,  at Mali Cassette, which he is part owner of. Sixty-six now, he spends most of his time  on his farm in Nyafunke, up  near Timbuktu. Touré was really duded out, in a blue suit with a blue hat and a blue-and-yellow flowered  shirt, like a Malian  John Lee Hooker, with whom he  toured  on the European world in the Sixties. But he took exception to his music being called blues. A lot of  good-time Malian dance music is in the pentatonic.   “We don’t have the blues,” he told me. “We aren’t sick. This word blues is for doctors of musicology—and nurses. The word blues doesn’t exist in Africa. The translation is African music. Our music  has been modernized with European instruments and there has been some Western influence. But the big influence is our tradition.” 

       Toumani’s  fantastic guitarist, Fantamady Kouyaté, and I recorded a gospel-highlife fusion song of mine called “One Morning Soon” that is posted on my Web site, DispatchesFromTheVanishingWorld.com.  Fantamady’s inspired gleaming electric-guitar runs, which  give the major rumba chord progression a moody, bluesy, Malian feel, were simply his response to the feelings he got from my singing and playing. He didn’t understand the English lyrics, yet he commented on them with exquisite sensitivity and passion. Toumani invited me to come back next winter and make a record with him. “But I’m not anywhere as good a  musician as you are,” I said. “What’s important is that the music comes from the heart,” he told me. 

      “You always know you have a family here,” he said as we embraced and I got in the cab. 

            On the plane home, returning with my musical horizons expanded in ways that I’ll be working on for years to come, the Muse came over me and gave me these lines:
 
 If you’ve never been to Bamako,
Maybe it’s about time for you to go.
You’ll never know what’s in store 
For  you in Bamako
If you don’t show
You’ll be glad you did
 and heavy-hearted  when it’s time to go.
 

      Back in Montreal, Kate McGarrigle, one of the legendary McGarrigle sisters, and Borza Gomeshi, who has a studio in the Laurentians, have digitally remastered my low-fidelity recording of Fantamady’s soaring solos into a coherent and beautiful bed-track, and I have laid down the vocals of “One Morning Soon.” Now we need some percussion and a bass and other instruments. It will be some day, inshallah, part of a cd with my music and songs called “Suitcase on the Loose.” (Sample lyrics : “I’m a stateless suitcase/ a weightless suitcase/a loveless and a hateless suitcase/ I’m a suitcase on the loose/ that’s seen a lot of use/ flying by the seat of my pants, catch as catch catch/I’m just trying to keep one town ahead of the re’po man.”) 

  Allen Evans, who has put out a recording of choice Gary Davis performances on his own recherché label, World Arbiter, sent me another of his cd’s, of  the above-mentioned eight-century Taoist meditation music played on a zither tuned to the pentatonic. It sounds uncannily like Blind Willie Johnson, although emotionally neutral, completely cerebral [maybe, as an outsider, you can’t resonate emotionally the way a native listener would]. Allen speculated that the pentatonic originated in China and made its way west to the Ottoman Empire and from there with the slave trade to North Africa, where the New World slave trade disseminated throughout the Americas. But after seeing the extraordinary documentary on the wanderings of the gypsies, and how their music adapted to each country they reached, “Latcho Drom,”  I think it is more likely that it originated in Rajasthan, India, with the people who became the gypsies and took it west across the Middle East and Europe to Spain, where it became flamenco and from there fused with the Moorish/Arabic music of North Africa, producing the proto-blues of Mali. The westward migration of the pentatonic is something I would like to write a book on some day. 

      But Jody argues that the pentatonic is everywhere. This is true. It is in pre-Colombian pan-pipes in the Andes, where it appears to have arisen independently, without diffusion, unless as some think it crossed the Pacific from Polynesia. The reason it is everywhere, he maintains, is because of acoustics, the physics of music.  The octave breaks up into five harmonic steps which every ear, regardless of what culture it is in, hears. Maybe he is right. And this scale, in its many variations, sometimes produces and is the expression of a melancholy state of mind. [True of some pentatonic modes but not others.] The same or a similar sequence of notes produces analagous emotions in every culture. [A big claim to make …] That is why Toumani feels a complete affinity with the huaynos of the Peruvian Andes, the most famous of which is El Condor Passa. Music is truly the universal language, as Pythagoras and countless people after him have pointed out. But this doesn’t rule out the possibility that there is an ancient connection between the music of Rajasthan and that of Mali, via the gypsies, that the origin of the blues is really in India, if you take it back far enough. [Some hypotheses of cognitive evolution see music as a precursor to language. So maybe the origins of the blues are with early African hominins… It’s purely speculative and no one will ever know.]

      The guitar is thought to have evolved from the stringed instruments of North Africa, but the most unquestionably bona fide African instrument in North America is the banjo. And yet it is almost only played by whites. (Gary Davis played a six-string banjo tuned like a guitar that he called a “gitjo.” I have one of his custom-made gitjos. And Taj Majal plays very rootsy southern country bluesy banjo, but there aren’t many others). The explanation for this is that the banjo was played in the minstrel shows on the plantations of the old South that the slaves put on for the masters, and the minstrel show was later appropriated by white musicians in black-face, and the banjo became not cool for blacks to play and a virtuoso instrument for white country musicians like Earl Scruggs. The Grand Old Opry is an Anglo-American metamorphosis of the minstrel show, and in bluegrass, too, you can also pick up distant echoes of Mali. 
     
 
 A distilled version of this ran in the December, 2004 issue of Travel & Leisure.         
 

Postscript : 
    I sent this to Jody and he e-mailed me back : “I’m not crazy about ‘the universal language’ cliché. I don’t think music is very like language.  Music is a human ‘universal.’  But the experience of a piece of music by a cultural insider versus a cultural outsider will never be the same. You and I will never experience Malian music quite the way a Malian does. What is universal is that music always evokes by entraining parts of brain and body. The wonder is how this entrainment evokes such a powerful emotional response. I don’t believe it’s a mystery, but I do think it’s wonderful.” 

      A few days later, we went together to McGill to hear a talk called “The Cognitive Nature of Music,” by a professor at Tufts named Jamahed Bharucha. Montreal is a mecca for the study of music as a major brain function, Dr. Bharuca said. Everybody likes music. The question is why ? How much of  the response is from learning, how much is innate ?
 
     I am aware that I have cognitive limitations when it comes to music, particularly to performing it. I don’t keep the beat and I don’t have a natural sense of pitch and sometimes sing off-key. My performance depends entirely on my energy level and state of mind. I am not a good listener. Listening skills are not one of my endowments.  Perhaps I am a little deaf. I am like the glukhar, a bird that my grandfather hunted in Old Russia, as recounted in Russian Blood (posted in Past Dispatches). This bird had the unfortunate trait of becoming deaf when it was singing, so you could sneak up on it and blow it away. 

     My father’s hearing was the first of his senses to go. He had to wear a hearing aid at the end. So perhaps this is hereditary. But Pa was an accomplished classical pianist. So I wonder if I had had some formal training in music and played with more people over the years, would I still have these limitations ? A lot of it is a matter of practice, just playing something over and over until it becomes unconscious.  

     Dr. Bharuca talked about the pioneering work of D.O. Hebb on what is now called Hebbian learning, the sort that takes places in the brain. There are two layers of neurological networks. The second recognizes combinations of units in the first. Hebbian learning is the strengthening of connections between active-input units. “Winning units” are pattern or feature cluster detectors.

     The domain of music is very constrained. Most pop music has only three chords. Through cultural lenses we recognize chords as part of the training regimen. We activate recognition of similar chords, tones not heard but expected. A probe tone is defined by how well it fits into a context. When the subjects of Dr. Bharuca’s test report a probe tone, they are reporting activation of the automatic computational neural process. The reaction time is one way to test expectation. The context primes or activates the most expected tones. These are consonant tones, as opposed to dissonant tones.  

      The D chord is more often associated with the C chord in Western cultures because there are a lot of shared frequencies, shared notes. How much is expectation based on spectral similarity and how much on cultural norm ? The speed of Westerners’ reaction time from C to D  is a cultural norm, and from C to E is a spectral similarity. Reaction speed is affected by contextual identity, the distance between notes, and asymmetry, the replacing of one chord with another that is out of key. Schematic activation takes place when people embedded in a culture are navigating a musical environmental and hear things that are normal. When  a dissonance, an asymmetry, occurs, they activate special resources, like attention. There are schematic versus veridical expectations. You can’t violate an expectation if you don’t have one. This produces what is known as a deceptive cadence. Even if you know a culturally suprising event is coming, it is still surprising and cognitively impenetrable. 

     Is there neural evidence of schematic knowledge of key relationships ? [i.e. is the pentatonic scale inscribed in the brain, the way Chomsky says the dative case is ] 
When there is a change of key, does the brain have this implicit knowledge ? We all have activation in the prefrontal cortex, the orbitofrontal gyrus where schematic learning is going on. There are tone-sensitive surfaces called voczals (if I got this correct) where pitch invariants are represented. Absolute or “perfect” pitch without a reference pitch very few can activate, but we all have relative pitch, pitch invariance which is comparable to visual invariance (we all see what is out there in more or less the same way, although we may process it differently, due to cultural and psychological, physiological and cognitive differences). Different cells respond to translational invariance. The major and minor modes are pitch invariant, as are the ancient Greek modes, and the modes of Indian thats and ragas. In the key of C, if you hear F# instead of F,  there is an ambiguity whether it is in the key of G or a tritone. F# will be heard as dissonant or unexpected at first, but over time it will effect a key change.  There is cross-cultural learning. In the West only major and minor modes exist. But the ancient Greeks’ music was in other modes, and in India you have thats, ragas, kari, todi, bairar, flatted seconds. On the sitar, you can’t change key, but you can change mode. (the same with the kora. or sort of. Though Toumani is tuned to C Major he plays many, or most,  songs in F Major but it’s a funny Malian-sounding F major because of the B natural – ie, F Lydian). Can we simulate the ancient Greek or the Indian brain ?  (Here the recent study of birdsong at Berkeley seems relevant : the calls are genetic, but the songs are learned). 

The gestalt perception of music is that in most musical scenarios we hear the tone as a unified object, but there are multiple levels of representation and attention levels. We can consciously select (or unconsciously) because of our limited capacity for attention. Some abstract patterns are perceived as fused. The tonal centers have a mapping function, translating from absolute to relative. 
      
      

     Over coffee, Jody explains that the circle of fifths is everywhere, because it has to do with the physics of sound (the standard work on this, Science and Music by British physicist Sir James  Jeans, written 1938 and still in print), of the frequencies of sound that a column of air makes as it moves through a tube. 

      Let’s take the note A 220 (cycles per second or Hertz) – A below Middle C - as our starting pitch, or fundamental. Doubling the frequency is the same as fretting a string dead center. 440 cycles per second is perceived as an A an octave above our starting note. Tripling our original frequency to 660 cycles per second (like fretting a string a third of the way along and plucking the short bit) results in the note E a fifth above our second pitch. Thus just as a frequency ratio of 2:1 always produces an octave, a frequency ratio of 3:2 (in this case 660:440) always produces an interval of a fifth. That’s all you need to make a pentatonic scale. Four intervals of a fifth produces the 5 notes of the pentatonic scale. A  E  B  F#  C#; or when transposed to a single octave, A B C#  E F# :  1 2 3  5 6 of a major scale.]

   The pentatonic scale is derived from the first few notes in the harmonic series, so it, too, is everywhere. The octave is divided into five unequal parts : tone, tone, tone and a half, tone and a half. For instance, the inangha, or zither of Rwanda and Burundi, has seven strings tuned to G major pentatonic, G E D B A G E. The fifths over several octaves are compressed into one. One tune keeps repeating, as the ostinato, A G E, just like delta blues. What makes it blues is not the notes, but the temperament in which they are played. The feeling is not in the notes. To say that major is happy and minor is sad is simplistic. It’s all in the inflection and the context.
  

    Not only the performer, but the listener determines the effect of a piece of music. I realized that part of why I keep hearing the same or similar sequence of notes producing the same or similar emotions in whatever culture I am going to is because I am looking for this. I am looking for and projecting familiar referents that may not be there, or exaggerating their existence, as part of easing myself into an unfamiliar setting. “Why, this is just like…” Just an anthropologist projects the thesis he brings with him into the field on to the people he is studying, unconsciously selecting the traits that support it and ignoring the ones that contradict it. Jody explained that  “patterns we know are well worn neural structures. In unfamiliar music we perceive familiar patterns. They may or may not correspond to patterns the native listener perceives. They need not evoke similar emotion. I tend to hear rhythmic units of bars in nearly all music whether or not the original performer thinks the same way. Is it analysis or perception? All perception subsumes unconscious analysis. The results of some of that analysis presents as emotion.”

      So  what is universal about music is that the notes are basically the same. The differences are in the mode and mood in which they are played. Some of the differences are cultural, others individual.  Is this it then ? We’d love to hear from readers-- producers and consumers of music.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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