At rehearsal with a Ghanaian band for whom it is imperative to have two different drummers side by side. There are three brass horn players and I have counted four different patterns of stenciled colour on the walls. The room is filled with people speaking Ga and Twi and pidgin and the carpet is striped. The hand drummer is unable to play as he keeps having to get up from his seat to dance. The kit drummer gives out commanding shrieks of joy. Brass section is tight. I didn’t want to sing Redemption Song but the bass player said, Tell our story. On the way home, I rewrote it on the back of the bike, saying Oh pirates, yes we rob you. Sell you to the merchant ships.
But your hand was made strong/by the hand of the almighty. We had ridden two hours on a motorbike in catastrophic traffic to get here, scattering streetlight vendors selling popcorn and plantain chips and iced water in plump bags and millet milk from zinc pails on top of their heads, finally spinning onto a long rutted red dirt road consumed with dust. Gig is Friday night and it is going to be wonderful.
~ 1st December 2021, a different world
Tag: collaboration
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long-legged rock god
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subway sounds
In New York I came into 34th St subway station to hear a bunch of dudes playing a kind of washboard bluegrass. They weren’t excellent but they had vigour. Called themselves the Ebony Hillbillies: cute. O you’re from Australia & you wanna make a record? Love to!
Later I rang them up. “We’re not lettin you put Our Sound on Your Record for less than $800.”
I said, baffled, ‘But… it’s only one song.’
“You know, we getten called the best black banjo band in America.”
Sound engineer said to me, “Why are you crying? That shouldn’t hurt your feelings.” And he is right. But it does. It’s the lack of music, the tower of ego I cannot climb. The hand-to-hand combat whereby everybody has to constantly outdo everybody and every interaction is a kind of business deal. Where you have to self-promote and be the best this, the best that. It exhausts me. It chills my soul with its coldness and shrivels me. I’m not asking people to play for free but I want them to be interested, to love the originality of my project and to love the music enough to play as though they would do it for love.
Once I played one of my songs – a homemade sample off my first website – to a man of some stature when the website was new. This was during my year-long journey to build courage to do this thing. He said, in my opinion, you are going to be one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced. I burst into tears with relief. But later I looked over his website. It was all, the greatest this, the most highly qualified that. It was a minefield of pyramids. I don’t live in that field & it doesn’t seem real to me. That’s not how life works. I live in the jungle where every tree has its flower in the elbow, every bird has its arrow-glistening feather. Where there are a multitude of voices. Somehow they make a kind of complex harmony. Sometimes it is mayhem & a shattering din. More often it is sweet & overwhelming, it seduces me.