“How to evoke the brilliant insight and empathy of Steven Feld’s acoustemological memoir of music and musicians in Accra? To start, imagine E. T. Mensah, Shirley Temple, John Coltrane, and Ludwig van Beethoven riding (quasi-legally) in the back of a vividly motto-festooned Ghanaian trotro truck, cool-running a memory-drenched, complexly overlapping soundscape of highlife evergreens, Afriphonic jazz hollers, hallelujah choruses, ratcheting sewer toads, and honking India-rubber bulb horns. Centered on the voices, stories, and ambitions of a compelling cast of characters—Ghanaian musicians whose diversely linked experiences chart the layered, contradictory flows and deep reefs of globalization—Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra is a fundamental and stimulating contribution to the literature on musical cosmopolitanism and the study of contemporary urban culture in Africa.”—Christopher Waterman, Dean, UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture

“Steven Feld has written an astonishing book: at once a sweetly told adventure story, biographies of some very important but virtually unknown African musicians, a shrewd look at the world we live in and think we know, and hidden within it all, a sly critique of the history of jazz.”—John F. Szwed, Director, Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University

“The chapters in which Feld listens and retells the stories of these mercurial musicians are compelling, and throw up original and profound material. . . . Feld is brilliant at articulating the multiple overlapping narratives and experiences that both obfuscate and animate diasporic dialogues, and in that process his book attains its own world-historical significance.” — Tony Herrington ― The Wire

“This fascinating book opens up jazz from the African perspective. Whether he’s discussing with Nortey the Africanization of his saxophone and his absolute dedication to the music of John Coltrane or explaining Ghanaba’s musical relationship with Max Roach, Feld brings a full picture to the broadening cultural aspects of Africans playing their own type of jazz.” — Jon Ross ― DownBeat

“[A] vital statement about the infinitely nuanced nature of cultural exchange between Africa and America, and how our fullest understanding of jazz history might be furthered by enquiries like this.” — Kevin Le Gendre ― Jazzwise

“In addition to his effective usage of the storytelling mode, Feld provides an exemplary illustration of the seamless integration of multiple roles as a documentary filmmaker, musician, anthropologist, historian, and tour promoter. . . . Feld realizes that not all Ghanaians would view these musicians as cosmopolitans, but that fact seems to actually reinforce his discussion of the discourse on cosmopolitanism and its relationship to race, class, and other structures of power. Indeed, he opens many doors for his readers and tells us stories of why these types of music making are important beyond Ghana. He leads us to a more refined understanding of cosmopolitanism, not to provide a series of answers, but to provoke in each of us more thoughtful questions about our music, our research, and ourselves.” — Dave Wilson ― Ethnomusicology Review

“A successful fusion of anthropology and aesthetics that illuminates the musical and cultural links—and differences—between African and American jazz, this is also a fascinating memoir of one person’s attempt to understand the urban culture of Ghana in an age of globalization.” ― Publishers Weekly

“Feld reveals the high degree of cosmopolitanism in jazz-pop related musics and the huge role that race and class play in constraining the players. Deciphering the intertextuality of African American life and music requires an expert like Steven Feld. He has done a masterful job.” — Philip K. Bock ― Journal of Anthropological Research

“With rich and diverse examples, Feld demonstrates the pervasiveness of cosmopolitan outlooks among jazz musicians in Accra, whether mobile or immobile, socially powerful or powerless, rich or poor… Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra is an important theoretical intervention in ‘cosmopolitanism from below’ and a powerful narrative about jazz as an African diasporic art form from the standpoint of musicians in Accra.” — Stephen Hager ― Notes

“Jazz Cosmopolitanism is a lively and important book, one that uses the vehicles of dialogue and sound to unearth the complex cultural and political dynamics that connect a group of urban Africans to the diaspora and wider world. It is a fun, invigorating, and worthwhile read. . . . Jazz Cosmopolitanism is a book that continues to resonate when finally put down. I highly recommend picking it up.” — Nate Plageman ― Journal of African History

“A thoroughly humane and endearing narrative account of Feld’s attempt in Ghana, encumbered by the title ‘prof,’ recording and photographic equipment, a car, and many of the resources one expects from a citizen of the wealthiest nation on earth,to try and engage with and understand Accra’s musical landscape and especially those aspects of it which relate to jazz. It’s a joy to read. . . .” ― African Jazz

“Feld’s brilliant work should have a broad impact and appeal, offering significant contributions and interventions to interdisciplinary discourses on jazz, Ghanaian music, cosmopolitanism, as well as (urban) Africa and its diaspora.” — Paul Schauert ― African Music

“An absolute delight. . . . Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra will not only become one of the most important studies in jazz scholarship; it will also provide a provocative indication of where and how culturally oriented music studies might develop.” — Ronald Radano ― Journal of Popular Music Studies

“A text to listen to… Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra is a prime example of substantial academic research presented in an accessible way…. With his combination of academic depth, collaborative approach, and aesthetic sensibility in this book, as in his other work, Steven Feld is a guiding light for us all: musicians, filmmakers, anthropologists in Ghana and further afield.” — Helena Wulff ― Visual Anthropology Review

JAZZ COSMOPOLITANISM IN ACCRA

Five Musical Years in Ghana By STEVEN FELD

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5148-1

Contents

OPUS……………………………………………………………………………………………………..xiFOUR-BAR INTRO “The Shape of Jazz to Come”…………………………………………………………………..1VAMP IN, HEAD Acoustemology in Accra: On Jazz Cosmopolitanism………………………………………………….11FIRST CHORUS, WITH TRANSPOSITION Guy Warren/Ghanaba: From Afro-Jazz to Handel via Max Roach……………………….51SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE Nii Noi Nortey: From Pan-Africanism to Afrifones via John Coltrane……………………….87THIRD CHORUS, BACK INSIDE Nii Otoo Annan: From Toads to Polyrhythm via Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali…………………119FOURTH CHORUS, SHOUT TO THE GROOVE Por Por: From Honk Horns to Jazz Funerals via New Orleans………………………159HEAD AGAIN, VAMP OUT Beyond Diasporic Intimacy……………………………………………………………….199″DEDICATED TO YOU”…………………………………………………………………………………………245HORN BACKGROUNDS, RIFFS UNDERNEATH…………………………………………………………………………..249THEMES, PLAYERS……………………………………………………………………………………………299

Chapter One

FOUR-BAR INTRO

“The Shape of Jazz to Come”

I’m here to tell stories about encounters with jazz cosmopolitanism in Accra. While luminous and vexing to me, I don’t expect them to be as memorable or unsettling to you. But I do hope they will be productive of surprise and critical reflection, certainly about the shape of jazz as diasporic dialogue in an African urban modernity, and even more about jazz cosmopolitanism as musical intimacy.

This was hardly what I had in mind when I first visited Accra in October 2004. Not at all. The idea was just a two-week look and listen. Ruti Talmor, then an anthropology graduate student at New York University, invited me to come as she was finishing her fieldwork about Accra’s National Arts Centre and the local contemporary art world. I’d help her out with some video work, and she’d introduce me to some musicians and artists.

I was at the time (and still am) at work on a project about how village, church, animal, and carnival bells have created senses of space and time over ten centuries of European pastoral history. I liked the idea of finding out something about an even older yet very contemporary world of forged iron hand bells played as timekeepers in West African musical ensembles. But I wasn’t thinking that Accra would become more than a short musical detour before heading back to Europe and bells, and then home to the last months of the generous Guggenheim support that had me on leave from teaching.

Ruti had been in Accra for more than a year and knew the city well. René Gerrets, another NYU anthropology graduate student, and on his way to begin fieldwork in Tanzania, was at the time visiting her too. We met diverse people connected with Ruti’s research and cruised the city in her banana-colored sedan on days it cooperated. This brief scan made me aware of a kind of fieldwork unlike any other I had experienced, certainly distant from my work in a remote rainforest in Papua New Guinea, or from pastoral villages or towns in Europe. It was the possibility of art world fieldwork in a large and globally layered city, simultaneously engaged with multiple sites, locations, niches, scenes, and styles of production. And it was the challenge, within those multiplicities, to grasp something about the intertwined yet markedly race- and class-differentiated realities of artists, patrons, and institutions with their array of local to global connections.

Things happened quickly. On my first night we dined with Virginia Ryan, a visual artist working with the Italian Embassy in Accra and busy establishing the Foundation for Contemporary Art-Ghana. A few nights later we dined again with Virginia and her FCA cofounder and codirector, Joe Nkrumah, a polymath art conservator, cultural historian, and “Uncle Joe” or “Prof” to everyone doing research in Accra. And just a few days later those two conversations led to meeting one of Joe’s Accra art world friends, the sculptor, instrument inventor, and musician Nii Noi Nortey.

That crucial encounter streamed into others, an initial dialogue with Nii Noi about John Coltrane overflowing into what became five years of converging conversations, performances, collaborations, and recording and video projects about the feedback swirls situating Accra’s jazz cosmopolitanism in the transnational diasporic currents Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic and Caryl Phillips calls the Atlantic sound.

Thinking back, those first two weeks in Accra were extraordinary. Never before in a life of much travel had I experienced such an immediate ease of attachment with place, people, scenes; which must have been why it was so easy to say yes when Nii Noi asked if I would consider coming back to Accra to work with him. He said it was “divined” by our first meeting, speaking of the moment I asked if he would like a recording of the rehearsal that Joe, Ruti, and I walked in on when we first arrived at his home.

If Nii Noi’s word of choice was “divined,” mine for that fateful encounter was “captivated.” That was my instant feeling about the recorded material, so much so that on my return to the United States I immediately edited the tapes and sent the CD back to Nii Noi for review. He responded that we were hearing the music’s contours the same way. “I’m telling you, man, it’s the shape of jazz to come,” he said on the phone, seductively quoting the title of a famous Ornette Coleman LP from 1959, one that really did herald a number of 1960s major jazz developments. With that, I enlisted Ruti’s help to arrange the rental of an acoustically bright loft designed and built by the architect Alero Olympio. And that’s how I returned to Accra to set up a recording studio for a month in 2005 to record Nii Noi and Nii Otoo Annan’s Tribute to A Love Supreme, in recognition of John Coltrane’s classic LP.

For many years before all this I had lived two simultaneous professional lives, one as a musician consumed by jazz, one as an anthropologist consumed by cultural poetics and politics. Of course music had long found its way into my anthropology, and anthropology into my music. But it wasn’t until I went to Accra, met Nii Noi and Nii Otoo, and agreed to return that a new synthesis emerged, my lives as musican and scholar more deeply fusing in the possibility to explore how the performance of jazz in Africa, and Africa in jazz, could relate to the anthropology of globalism and cosmopolitanism.

What happened was that I began the Love Supreme tribute project working as a producer and as a recordist together with Nii Noi’s regular sound engineer, Agazi. But the course of events changed wildly when I fell in love with one of Nii Noi and Nii Otoo’s instruments, a bass mbira box, and took it away with me to continue and deepen the affair.

Things also changed wildly in that dense month when Nii Noi introduced me to other musicians in his immediate circle, the “divine drummer” Ghanaba (formerly Guy Warren), the country’s leading experimentalist, and then the La Drivers Union Por Por Group, a union of minibus and truck drivers who invented a jazzy honking music for antique squeeze-bulb vehicle horns. Central to both introductions was meeting one of Nii Noi’s close friends who had been working both with Ghanaba and the La Por Por Group for many years, the photographer Nii Yemo Nunu.

That month of work in 2005 led to spending up to six months in Accra during each of the following five years, exploring the African legacy of John Coltrane and playing in Nii Noi and Nii Otoo’s Accra Trane Station band; following the intersections of African, European classical, and African American musical idioms in conversation with Ghanaba; tracing routes of music and transport, and of honk horn funerals with the La Drivers Union Por Por Group.

During those longer visits from 2006 through 2010, I lived in the neighborhood of Nima, remarkable for its blended overlays of village and cosmopolitan features. Each day I encountered a bustling mix of artists, politicians, business people, drivers, street sellers, tailors, carpenters, school children, local workers, and consummate hustlers. Down the road was the compound of the politically ever-present Akufo-Addo family (“as close to aristocracy as it gets here,” in the words of someone who knows), as well as a longtime favorite restaurant haunt of international and local elites. All around was a class-mixed cross-section of Ghanaian neighbors, with a few Nigerian, Moroccan, Syrian, Lebanese, Ukranian, Thai, Serbian, Indian, Dutch, Swiss, and German in the mix. And in the blocks just beyond, a multilayered world of everything from “fitters” and “panel beaters” (mechanics and automobile body repairers) to computer dealers, dry goods sellers, and drug dealers, all their words, worlds, and works framed by the resonant soundmark surround of kids taking over the streets as fufu was pounded and local mosques (the area has a major Muslim history in Accra) and Pentecostal churches vigorously broadcast their faith. Among other things, life in Nima taught me a great deal about everyday listening to sonic stratigraphy.

Over these years Nii Noi and Nii Otoo also visited me at home in New Mexico, and we’ve taught, toured, and performed together in Ghana, Europe, and the United States. Accra Trane Station CDs were issued year by year to document the work: Meditations for John Coltrane for 2006, Another Blue Train for 2007, and then, in 2008, Nii Otoo’s Bufo Variations and Topographies of the Dark, a quintet collaboration with the American jazz artists Alex Coke and Jefferson Voorhees.

Along with Accra Trane Station, the La Drivers Union Por Por Group was featured on Musical Bells of Accra, coproduced with Nii Noi in 2005-6, followed by their own debut CD, Por Por: Honk Horn Music of Ghana in 2007, and then Klebo! Honk Horn Music from Ghana in 2009. Nii Yemo Nunu became my collaborating photographer, coresearcher, and Ga translator in these projects, also playing a critical production role in the three hour-long video documentaries that accompany this book, one each about Ghanaba’s Hallelujah!, Nii Noi and Nii Otoo’s Accra Trane Station, and A Por Por Funeral for Ashirifie, released as the Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra DVD trilogy.

This body of work overtook my European bell project and much else over the last six years, but for most of that time, with the exception of copious diaries, I didn’t write a word about the Accra jazz world. Why? Well, first, it felt more natural to let photographs, recordings, video, and performances express the sensuous substance and spirit of my inquiry as an artist among artists. Both as a matter of credibility and engagement, I wanted to make everything immediately accessible in Ghana, to make sound and image the centerpiece of our collective musical exchanges. Besides, I didn’t set out to gather material to write another scholarly book. And as it all got going, I bluntly asked Nii Noi, and then the others, “What do you want out of working with me?” Their priorities were unanimous and pointed: first, to have their creative work well documented and to get paid for it, and second, through the prestige of that documentation, to get more gigs, income, and resources useful for the continuation of their work.

The time to write and the space for it arrived in a grand way, through a generous invitation to give the Bloch Lectures in Music at the University of California, Berkeley, in the winter–spring semester of 2009. Grand because January 2009 marked thirty years since my first setting foot in Berkeley, grand because once again I arrived with an intense writing project. The first time around I had returned from research in rainforest Papua New Guinea to sit down and write a dissertation. During that writing, Bonnie Wade invited me to her ethnomusicology seminar to give the first presentation of that sound-and-sentiment research. Thirty years later it was Bonnie, as chair of Berkeley’s Music Department, who was facilitating a return to Berkeley to pour jazz cosmopolitanism onto the page, the pleasure enhanced by the opportunity to present six illustrated lectures and screenings of the three films.

The Bloch talks were academically hybrid, an attempt to present jazz cosmopolitanism through encounter stories and their global pre- and after-lives. My concern was first and foremost to convey some glimpse of the musical intimacy I gained in my Accra encounters, to voice the complexity of knowing African musicians with complicated lives, people whose unique practices and contributions were valorized neither in jazz, art, or experimental music discourses, nor in those of ethno/musicology. I wanted to tell stories about how my life as a musician and researcher became critically entangled in other searching musical lives, lives whose detail, nuance, and difficult positioning mattered to me far beyond academic intrigue. I wanted to focus on the poetics of irony in the making of musical cosmopolitanism.

But I also wanted to focus on the politics of con/disjunctions, and specifically to signpost an awareness of how telling stories and representing my encounters in the global city of Accra involved at least three overlapping genealogies of power: how jazz any-and-everywhere is about the place of race in musical history; how studying African music is always about spirituality and politics; how cosmopolitanism, mine, others’, is embodied, lived, uneven, complicated, and not just some heady abstraction floating in the banalizing academic ink pool alongside “globalization” or “identity.”

How then to write about musical cosmopolitanism? How to inquire into the substance of unanticipated global entanglements in contemporary musical life-worlds? How to render the entanglements of ethnographic precision and personal empathy? The kind of intervention I offer you means to clear space to talk about cosmopolitanism from below, to reimagine cosmopolitanism from the standpoint of the seriously uneven intersections, and the seriously off-the-radar lives of people who, whatever is to be said about their global connections, nonetheless live quite remotely to the theorists and settings that usually dominate cosmopolitanism conversations in academia.

My attention to subjectivity and voice thus comes out of work that disaggregates multiple and proliferating vernacular cosmopolitanisms from elite multiculturalisms, like the seminal work on “discrepant cosmopolitanism” by James Clifford in his Routes. But it is equally a matter of ethnographic commitment to revealing how histories of global entanglement are shaping contemporary African musical life-worlds. Listening to histories of listening is my way to shift attention to acoustemology, to sound as a way of knowing such worlds, and particularly to the presence of intervocality, to intersubjective vocal copresence, to the everyday immediacy and power of stories. These are my means to represent the politics and poetics of cosmopolitan dialogues with my Accra interlocutors.

During the months of writing and lecturing in Berkeley, I was very much caught up in the complexities of finding this kind of storytelling voice for the work. And I understood that to be why I often encountered quizzical looks and comments from listeners when the talks were presented. Yes, I knew, many expected something more conventional: more conventional theory, more conventional analysis, more conventional critical distance, more of the familiar locus classicus—the music in its sociocultural context. A gentle edge was there in the reactions, a sort of “that was very interesting, but you didn’t really analyze ‘the music’ or tell us what it means.” While people indulged me in my storytelling, I could tell that some were anxiously waiting for me to get to the bottom of it all, to perform an analytic authority.

(Continues…)

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