Interview by Meg Murphy and Megan Margulies
Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, has played the trumpet since she was ten years old. She found her way to jazz after observing that there was much less time spent counting bars of rest in jazz than in an orchestra. The former chair of Harvard's Department of Music, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow of Harvard University, Monson specializes in jazz, African American music, and music of the African diaspora. Monson is an accomplished author—her book, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, won the Sonneck Society Irving Lowens Award for the best book published on American music in 1996.
Monson's interest in improvisation also led her to music in Africa—more specifically music in Mali, where she has worked with balafonist and composer Neba Solo since 2002. On leave for the 2016–2017 academic year, Monson will be finishing a book called The Voice of Kenedougou, which situates Neba Solo within political, economic, cultural, and religious issues in contemporary Mali.
Centerpiece sat down with Monson to discuss her new book and her longstanding interest in the hybrid nature of music.
CENTERPIECE: What made you decide to focus on Malian music? How does it compare to American Jazz?
MONSON: I’ve been long interested in music from Mali. I went there in 2002 to study some music. I didn’t really have the intention of doing a project, but I had such an amazingly positive experience with Neba Solo that I went back to do extended fieldwork in 2005. I’m now trying to finish a book about him and his work, the Sikasso region where he lives, and the historical contexts informing his musical practices.
One of the reasons that Mali was particularly interesting to me is that the music has a lot of instrumental improvisation in it—in balafons, string instruments, and singing. If you like jazz, or instrumental and vocal improvisation, it is not hard to embrace Malian music. There are some historical reasons for this—the banjo, for example, has its origins in an instrument called the ngoni that is from historical Mali.
Among the first Africans to arrive in New Orleans during the slave trade were people from the Senegambian region—this is what was called Senegambia, which today includes the countries of Senegal, Mali, and Guinea. Stringed instruments, xylophones, and one-string violins were common instruments in Senegambia. If you read about nineteenth-century African American musical history, you will notice that a lot of early enslaved musicians were violinists. There are also more recent historical connections between African American music and the African diaspora in West Africa.
CENTERPIECE: Can you tell us a bit more about your forthcoming book?
MONSON: I’ve been working on this for a long time, and I did my fieldwork in 2005, 2007, and 2009—in other words, before the coup d’etat in Mali in 2012. My interest in Neba Solo is that he’s a Senufo musician, and the Senufo have often been considered as outsiders or marginal to the greater Mande cultural tradition. The Sikasso region, where this music originates, is one of the least-studied regions in Mali. Music from Sikasso (also known as Kenedougou) raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of cultural and social hybridity. The Senufo and Mande have long overlapped in their cultural practices, yet little attention has been paid to the cultural cross-fertilizations that have come from it. I’m interested in tracing Senufo musical tradition and situating it within the broader context of Malian history.
CENTERPIECE: Neba Solo talks about music creating cultural and social change. How have we seen this, particularly with jazz, here in the United States?
MONSON: That is another reason for my interest in the Malian tradition—they have a longstanding tradition of the jeli or the griot, where, in fact, musicians are supposed to comment on history. They exhort people to live up to the deeds of their ancestors. In Mali, a principle concern in popular music is how to be a good person. Lyrics often are about political, social, and cultural questions. You can find songs where artists exhort others to get their children vaccinated or protect themselves from AIDS. There are songs about ecology—about not burning down the trees in the countryside because it causes deforestation and desertification. There have been many critiques—sometimes direct, sometimes indirect—about corruption in the government. Another common theme is exhorting people to work hard to make Mali a better country.
The official national slogan of Mali is “One people, one goal, one faith.” That faith is Islam, which has been historically practiced side-by-side with various indigenous religions. So there is generally an Islamic sensibility about what it is to be a good person.
In this new book, I’m looking very closely at how Senufo, Mande, and Muslim social values intersect. Since the 2012 coup d’etat there has been a growth in Islamic fundamentalism of various types in Mali. The moderate forms of Islam, that historically have been a basis for unity in Mali, have come under attack by people who are espousing a more fundamentalist form of Islam, such the Wahhabism (from Saudi Arabia) and those affiliated with Al-Qaeda and Boko Haram.
The Malian state, led by Ibrahim Boubacar Keita (IBK), is very fragile. Less than a year after his election, most Malians viewed him as corrupt as the government that was overthrown. Increasingly Malians face a choice between a weak and corrupt democratic government—which fails to provide many social services—and religious organizations that increasingly assume state functions such as education, employment, and social support.
I am really trying to place this new book in the context of these political and religious circumstances.
CENTERPIECE: Has the music in Mali been impacted by the coup d'etat?
MONSON: Musicians are feeling like they’re being muzzled right now. The government has declared states of emergencies, during which they ban outdoor public events like musical concerts. During the coup, a lot of music took place in house concerts. In the north, music was banned entirely by Islamic fundamentalists, so many of the northern musicians fled to the capital city of Bamako.
The number of international festivals that used to be the bread and butter for a lot of Malian musicians—including the Festival au Désert in Timbuktu—have not been held in recent years. The few festivals that have been held recently have struggled to attract the international audiences that previously patronized them.
Photo Caption
Ingrid T. Monson is a Faculty Associate of the Weatherhead Center and Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, supported by the Time Warner Endowment, Departments of Music and African and African American Studies, Harvard University. Her research interests include the improvisational process through the lens of social history. Ingrid Monson performs with Neba Solo, Mali's superb balafonist. Photo credit: Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer