Chapter 3

Ethics and Aesthetics

Warming Up

Applause from the audience fades. The artist bows his head; his eyes closed. He is alone on the stage. His hands return to his instrument and his thumbs strike a pair of strings. A low drone swells in the darkened theater space, an annex to the French Cultural Center along the Boulevard de l’Indépendence in downtown Bamako. The crowd is silent. Raising his head, illuminated by thesoft hues of convergent spotlights, the player explores the low register of his kora, executing rapid runs as his thumbs strike alternately up and down the instrument’s two planes of strings. Without pause, he pulls his thumbs away from the thick-gauged nylon strings and continues his improvisation with staccato strikes from the long and thick nails of his index fingers. Reaching outward, he glances a few of the thin treble strings before descending, in haste, again with his thumbs, to the lower tones and the thick, deep, and resonant tonal center. Then, in a stepwise ascent spanning three octaves, he strikes the instrument’s highest pitch. It produces a piercing dissonance. Moving his hands from the strings to the tuning rings on the neck above, he presses downward on the woven leather band at the bottom of the neck, flattening the pitch ever so slightly and tuning the string. Returninghis hands to the strings, he plays with the instrument’s higher register for a moment, summoning a shrill consonance in a cascade of notes. The final descent is more methodical, slower and purposeful, emphasizing the perfectly executed technique of his intervallic play. His thumbs repeat an ascending cadential phrase, elaborated a third time to bring this prefatory performance to a close.

It is a cool evening in February 2001, and I am recording a rare solo performance with the world-renowned kora virtuoso, Toumani Diabaté. We are midway through the concert and have just heard the opening section of the maestro’s fourth piece. A highly stylized prelude to instrumental performance, this improvisatory and loosely structured sequence serves to introduce the audience to a fixed set of pitches, in this case a diatonic scale corresponding to the Western Lydian mode known in the Mande world as Sawuta (likely derived from the Arabic sawt, meaning “voice”). Kora players refer to this introductory segment as ɲininkali to signify a musical “question.” Before beginning a new piece, a player “asks” for the instrument’s consent to play further by tuning it (Smith 2011). It is also a time for a player to warm up (chauffer, in French; ka wuli, or “rise” in Bamana), literally in terms of running through rhythmic and melodic patterns with the thumbs and forefingers and figuratively as a time during which a piece slowly heats up, like a kettle of cool water placed on hot coals. At this time, a player may even decide which piece to play next. We are one minute into this interrogative warm-up and the audience listens intently for the opening gestures of the new piece, as yet unidentified. The theater seats about three hundred people, and it is a full house this evening. All eyes are on the lone performer who has enchanted us for half an hour with spells cast of twenty-one resounding strings. Before the show, Toumani explained to me that he would perform pieces arranged for a new solo recording. This would be his first single-handed effort since his breakthrough debut, Kaira (1988),1 an album named for a piece popularized by his father, the late Sidiki Diabaté, known throughout West Africa as “the king of the kora.” On stage, Toumani looks upon his audience and intones the telltale patterns of the new piece’s bass line, signaling to all present his family’s signature song, a sonic emblem of Diabaté’s fasiya, his cultural patrimony (literally, in Bamana, “father’s lineage”): Kayira (a Mande term meaning “Peace” and “Joy”).

In this chapter, I observe expressions of collective identity and individual subjectivity in musical performance and perception among Bamako artists and their audiences. I am interested in the ways in which morality and ethics are heard and felt through the “humanly organized sound” (Blacking 1973) of instrument and voice in the music culture of contemporary Bamako. In a pair of musical settings—a concert hall and rehearsal space—I listen in to the sonic architecture and effects of staged and informal music making, acoustically manifest, in both cases, in “hot” and “cool” exchanges of textural density and minimalism and shifts between dynamic intensity and moderation in instrument and voice. This culturally modeled and locally salient sound structure audibly signifies, I argue, a dialectic social structure of collectively oriented morality and individually motivated ethics. There is, in other words, an iconic relationship between an instrumental and vocal aesthetics and ethico-moral personhood (mɔgɔya) in the Bamako art world (see Feld 1984; 1994b; Turino 1999). I approach this sociomusical space as a “perceived space,” in which performance of, attention to, and discourse about music produce a common and coherent aesthetic of sound and sentiment. Moving back and forth between modes of perception and personhood, my argument is that acts of making, feeling, listening to, and talking about music constitute a privileged site of aesthetic mediation between the prescribed social positions and intentional self-aspirations of Afropolitans in Bamako today.

In my analysis, perceived space refers to an embodied and expository, intersensorial and interpretive experience of being-in-the-world. Rendered in Lefebvrian terms as “spatial practices,” perceived space is the active engagement of culturally honed senses with the disciplinary structures and dispositional practices of human social life, structures and practices that Henri Lefebvre describes as “conceived” and “lived” space respectively (Lefebvre 1991, 38–40). As a phenomenology of perception, perceived space encompasses the visible, tactile, olfactory, aural, and semiotic dimensions of the cultural world in which bodies encounter, engage with, and comprehend their conceived and lived surroundings (see also Merleau-Ponty [1962] 2002). Further, as the active modality of sociospatial experience—Lefebvre’s spatial practices—perceived space describes the emergent sights, forms, scents, sounds, and symbols that continually reproduce the human artifice—Lefebvre’s social space. With an emphasis on musical expression, the perceived spaces (re)produced among Bamako artists and their audiences find expression in metaphors of bodily form and shared feeling. Through everyday speech about music—whether prescriptive, descriptive, or interpretive—the perceived space of the Bamako art world manifests in a cultivated and coherent aesthetics (Feld 1994a) that renders musical form, vocal expression, compositional texture, and acoustic intensity in terms of bodily function and physical sensation.

I begin with a close listening of Toumani Diabaté’s February 2001 performance. As his rendition of the piece “Kayira” unfolds, I describe some general principles in the structuring of Mande music—and kora music in particular—expressed through metaphors of embodied form and agency. Reflecting on “the body” of Diabaté’s music making, I consider the extramusical associations that invest this structure and practice with moral and ethical significance. I then turn to the question of sociomusical experience, observing the way social practices of musical expression, audition, and interpretation produce a perceived space of value-inflected affective states; that is, I reflect on what it feels like to embody a moral and ethical aesthetics in the course of musical performance. My analysis emerges from a band rehearsal in which palpable group tensions, devolving into open argument, threaten not only the practice session but also the popular dance band’s professional integrity. An improvised intervention from the group’s principal female vocalist exhorts the moral coherence of her fellow members, revealing the iconicity of sounds and sociability that are “good,” from which a discussion of the affective dimensions of musical performance practice develops. I conclude by considering the ways in which musical structure, practice, and affect shape—and are shaped by—the multiple moralities and existential projects of artistic personhood (artistiya), contributing to an ethical sense of Afropolitan being-in-the-world among men and women in the Bamako art world. My contention is that an Afropolitan ethics manifests in the playful resonance of a musical aesthetics, grounded in a strong sense of tradition and employed, through instrument and voice, to address a variable matrix of social positions and existential projects in the social space of a modern African city.

The Morality of “Meeting at the Head”

On stage at the French Cultural Center, Toumani’s “Kayira” begins simply, with two thumbs playing on seven strings in the bass register of the kora (Figure 13). On the right hand, a pendular pulse, moving evenly between the third and fifth intervals of an F Lydian mode. There is a metronomic feel to this bass pattern. It runs continuously, like clockwork, throughout the piece. On the left hand, a swinging four-note sequence, beginning a fourth below the tonal center, rising up a fifth, back down, up a third, and back down again. The two thumb patterns individually maintain distinctive rhythms, individual “musical feet” (fɔlisenw) that, together, produce a complementary, polyrhythmic whole. This whole forms a continuous underlying pattern, or ostinato, that serves as a temporal and tonal reference for the piece’s subsequent musical (melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic) elaboration.2 In Mande musical thought, this is the kunbɛn of a piece, meaning, literally, a “meeting” (bɛn) at the “head” (kun). Kunbɛn is a term rich in sociomusical significance (see Charry 2000a, 313–28). In warfare, it signifies the gathering of forces on the battlefield prior to an assault.3 In music, it refers to both a periodic accompaniment (as with the polyrhythmic ostinato described above) and a particular tuning, used to describe the scale or mode in which a given piece is played (in this case, the kunbɛn is F Lydian, or Sawuta). On the battlefield, it is soldiers and their arms that are assembled in anticipation of attack; in musical performance, it is the convergence of rhythms and tones that fortifies a piece.

This patterned sonic fortification is the musical embodiment of morality in Mande aesthetics. The kun (head) is a focal point and a point of orientation, the seat of authority and reason. It is the leader who extols his soldiers to commit their lives to a common cause, and it is the principle of order and concordance that makes that cause (whether it be a battle or a performance) seem right. There is historical depth to this sense of the common good. The head is the locus of tradition and heritage, the embodiment of what the Mande call fasiya, the lineage of one’s father, who is also the head of one’s family. The conjoined term bɛn (meeting) adds senses of intimacy and harmony to the concordant reason of the kun. Bɛn is the active expression of co-presence, of coming together in the spirit of conviviality that the Mande call badenya. As a sign of togetherness, bɛn signifies comfort and familiarity. It is the feeling of returning home, being among one’s kith and kin, hearing the songs that everyone knows, and singing along. In tandem, and in the context of musical performance, kunbɛn evokes the convergent and consonant sounds of familiar and traditional rhythmic and melodic patterns; it is the “musical morality” of being in sync and in tune, of periodicity and consonance (see Skinner 2008, 294).

As Toumani introduces the polyrhythmic and contrapuntal kunbɛn of “Kayira,” anticipation turns to attention among the audience. This is an assembly of intimates, a group of friends, family, and fans gathered in Diabaté’s hometown at one of Bamako’s premier music venues. Having witnessed Toumani’s career develop over the years, we feel a sense of deep familiarity with this piece and Toumani’s performance of it. At the time of the concert, Diabaté had recently released two versions of “Kayira,” drawing attention to the varied sociomusical roots and routes that inform his ongoing interpretation of the piece, in and out of the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993). One of them, called “Atlanta Kaira,” pairs Toumani Diabaté with blues master Taj Mahal, exploring Mande resonances in African American blues (Diabaté and Mahal 1999). The other, “Kita Kaira,” performed with Toumani’s longtime neighbor and fellow kora virtuoso, Ballaké Sissoko (Diabaté and Sissoko 1998), references a place where the concept of kayira—social and musical—took on new significance: Kita. This railway town, 110 miles west of Bamako, is where Ballaké’s musical mentor and Toumani’s father, Sidiki Diabaté, sojourned after departing his native Gambia in the mid-1940s (Durán 1998); it is also where the elder Diabaté brought his kora, an instrument with origins along the Senegambian coast, and helped establish the twenty-one-string harp in the Mande heartland of south-central Mali.4 In mid-century Kita, Sidiki Diabaté helped found a popular youth association known as the Kayiratɔn, a club (tɔn) dedicated to kayira (joy and peace). To understand the embedded morality and emergent ethics of Toumani Diabaté’s performance of “Kayira” a half-century later, it is worth reflecting on this facet of his fasiya, or paternal heritage.

Formed in the waning years of World War II, the Kayiratɔn captured the spirit of a particular time and place. Those who experienced the Kayiratɔn’s brief florescence remember clearly the joie de vivre it inspired through musical performance. Many spoke of the group’s ability to bring community members together for collective work and public celebration. One participant described the Kayiratɔn as nothing short of a cultural revolution! The group’s music—performed at weddings, baptisms, in the fields, and at informal gatherings—came to prominence as reforms in the French Empire offered new civic freedoms to African communities and gave rise to new language of political claims making (see Cooper 1996). As a local forum for social criticism, the Kayiratɔn called into question the exigencies of Mande traditional society, especially forced marriage, and drew attention to the excesses of French colonial rule, such as forced labor.5 Thus, in many versions of the song “Kayira,” the lyric, “Rooster, don’t cry / The early morning sunrise is hard on me,” referred to the onerous reality of forosɛ baara (forced labor), involving construction and maintenance work to serve the French colonial economy. Such labor, performed from sun-up to sundown, was popularly known as diyagoyabaara, or “whether-you-like-it-or-not-work.” Another interpretation of this line echoed the self-determined conjugal relationships promoted by Kayiratɔn members. Waking up at dawn meant, in this case, furtively and reluctantly leaving one’s lover after an evening’s tryst.6

A musical modernist of his time, Sidiki Diabaté came of age within and helped define this postwar zeitgeist of peaceful celebration, political protest, and cultural revolution (kayira). Still, most Malians today remember Sidiki Diabaté, whose death in 1996 marked a moment of national mourning, as a great traditionalist. “One of the last authentic griots,” Bakary Soumano, the former chef de griots in Bamako (who passed away in 2004), told me during my first stay with the Diabaté family in 1998.7 Diabaté helped to establish Mali’s Ensemble Instrumental National in the early 1960s, arranging pieces from the jeli repertoire that praised and celebrated his adopted nation-state (as described in chapter 2). Sidiki is also remembered as a masterful virtuoso, a reputation he established as a member of the Kayiratɔn in Kita, where he and fellow kora player Batourou Sékou Kouyaté, a lifelong friend and rival kora player, dazzled local audiences with their rapid and intricate improvisations.8 (I discuss the importance of such musical “rivalry” to Mande aesthetics later in the chapter.) This instrumental virtuosity can be heard on the Diabaté’s and Kouyaté’s recording of “Kayra” on an album titled Cordes Anciennes (French, Ancient Strings) (Diabaté et al. 1970). It was in honor of and response to this classic recording, “the first album ever released of instrumental kora music” (Durán 1998), that Toumani Diabaté and Ballaké Sissoko (whose friendship and musical rivalry parallels that of their elders in many ways) recorded New Ancient Strings, featuring the track “Kita Kaira,” three decades later.

When Toumani is referred to, as he often is in the company of elders, as Sidikiden, or “son of Sidiki,” it is to invoke this heritage of musical tradition, civic service, and instrumental virtuosity. In this sense, Toumani is less an individual, an autonomous subject possessed of a distinct identity, than he is a member of a notable clan of griots: the Diabaté family, his jamu, the surname of a lineage of kora players going back (as the family claims) to the first kora players in the late eighteenth century (Charry 2000a, 115–21). When Toumani performs or records the piece “Kayira,” he represents a tune for which his family is well known, re-sounding an oeuvre established by his father in Kita in the late 1940s. For those who know this history, much of it part of the collective memory of contemporary Malians, all one needs to hear is the simple, contrapuntal, and polyrhythmic bass line—the kunbɛn of “Kayira”—to perceive this patrimony. This is the sonic expression of a social position; the musical embodiment of a mode of being; the “meeting at the head” of a cultural morality. “A good musical arrangement begins with the head,” Toumani once told me. “It is from the head that all else follows, melody, harmony, improvisation.”

When playing the kora, musical exposition requires a strong foundation, or, in Mande terms, “a good head.” Yet, as Toumani reminded me, the head on one’s shoulders is not divorced from the appendages below; it stimulates and orients them. Thus, when Toumani intones a classic kunbɛn, like the rocking rhythm of “Kayira,” one hears the stimulus of a deep sense of tradition and, with the particular history of this piece in mind, an orientation toward musical virtuosity and innovation coupled with social change and renewal. As ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán writes in the liner notes to Diabaté’s and Sissoko’s New Ancient Strings:

A similar line could be written of Sidiki Diabaté’s reworking of tradition within the Kayiratɔn in 1940s Kita. Social and musical innovation is, in this sense, a family affair. Yet, there is much in Toumani’s performance that stresses the distinctiveness of his music and his individuality as a performer. To address these modes of distinction, I turn from the moral wellsprings of the form of his instrumental music to its ethical manifestation in performance, actively embodied in the voice, feet, and hands.

The Ethics of Embodied Performance

Toumani begins with the unadorned kunbɛn of “Kayira,” lingering on the swinging bass line to let it sink in. Then, on top of this pattern, we hear a lilting antiphonal melody, rising and falling through two pairs of calls and responses, followed by a cadential phrase that lands on the tonal center in the upper register. This he plays twice, drawing attention to the polyphony created by the bass ostinato, played with the thumbs, and the melodic counterpoint, played with the forefingers. In quiet dialogue with the low kunbɛn, Toumani “sings” with his kora through these paired treble phrases. This is what Mande musicians call fɔlikan, the voice (kan) of musical performance (fɔli); in this case, an instrumental melody that resembles vocal song (dɔnkili). The idea of voicing nonvocal music is an important feature of instrumental aesthetics in the Mande world. To play an instrument, such as the kora, is “to speak it” (k’a fɔ), as in the phrase ka kora fɔ (“to play/speak the kora”). One plays an instrument as one speaks a language. As an aesthetic concept, the word fɔli encodes this close relationship between music and language. Fɔli literally signifies “the act of speaking,” with the verbal suffix -li (“the act of”) modifying the verb ka fɔ (“to speak”). In language, fɔli bears the specific meaning of “heightened speech” in the form of a public greeting or declamation. As a general term for “music,” fɔli describes the “musical speech” of instrumental performance (see Maxwell 2008, 29).

The word kan refers to the throat and the voice, from which speech and song resound. It also means, more abstractly, “language,” of which speech and song are composed. The voice of the kora lies in its twenty-one strings, from which its particular language resounds through the patterned movements of thumbs and forefingers. In this way, the kora publicly speaks through its corded voice to create a singing melody—an instrumental “song” that is, however, distinct from vocal song, or dɔnkili (figuratively “the essence of knowledge and the dance,” a musical concept I elaborate later). The musical voice is active and expressive, with the term fɔlikan also defined as a musical transmission (fɔlici) to communicate meaning (kɔrɔfɔ) (Konè 1995). Some of this meaning is generic. On stage, as Toumani speaks with his kora, one hears his performance of “Kayira” within the broader musical language of jeliya. Some of this meaning is stylistic. The melodies Toumani pairs with the piece’s kunbɛn may reference phrases from other players and musical traditions, or develop his own compositions of melodic themes. As a generic and stylistic gestalt of musical communication, fɔlikan remains susceptible to multiple variations and creative interpretations, formally modeled as improvisation, similar to the elaboration of melodic themes in jazz.

At the concert, we have settled into Toumani’s delicate polyphonic play when the piece suddenly “heats up” (bɛ kalanya) in a flurry of rapid and punctuated off-beat phrasing, short staccato phrases that fill the gaps of the pendular rhythm established by the right thumb, periodically displacing or suspending the regular pulse by half a beat. Heard as a quickening of musical time, by doubling the tempo, and a thickening of musical texture, through bursts of noncoincident accents, off-beat phrasing represents a key feature of what the late ethnomusicologist Richard Waterman calls “hot music” in Africa and its diasporas (1948, 25) in which “melodic tones, and particularly accented ones, occur between the sounded or implied beats of the measure with great frequency” ([1952] 1973, 88). In Bamako, when “music is hot” (fɔli ka kalan), it resounds a sonic ideal of textural density—an abundance of notes played in a rich polyphony—and rhythmic syncopation—a variously accented and accelerating metrical pulse—that engenders movement. This is, as Waterman says, “music for the dance” (87). As such, hot sounds in Mande music draw attention to the rhythm, or, in Mande terms, fɔlisenw—literally, “musical feet”—of performance. Like water brought to a boil in a kettle, hot music makes bodies “rise up” and move; it brings you to your musical feet. (The Bamana verb wuli can refer variously to the boiling of water, the rising of bodies, and the warming up of musical performance, among other related meanings; see Bailleul 2000 and Konè 1995.) Constrained to the seats of the theater space, the audience at Toumani’s performance is no less mobile. Feet tap, fingers snap, torsos sway, and heads bob. At a certain point, halfway through the piece, the heat of the musical moment raises our hands and voices in claps and cheers, adding the public’s own percussive and dynamic heat to the already hot performance.

It is these three embodied musical elements—the “head” of the bass ostinato, the “voice” of the contrapuntal melody, and the “feet” of the hot rhythms—that Toumani uses, alternately and in tandem, to structure the first two-thirds of his performance of “Kayira.” In the final third, roughly six minutes into the piece, one final corporeal feature comes forward in the mix: the “running by hand” (bolomanboli) of improvised solos up and down the two planes of strings on the kora. Temporally, these ascending and (most frequently) descending melodic runs interrupt the metrical flow of a piece, creating new (poly)rhythmic currents in concert with the established meter or, at times, abandoning the meter altogether as notes swell and swirl in bursts of virtuosity (the image, here, is of a kettle of water boiling over). Melodically, bolomanboli can act as a vehicle for composition, allowing the performer to adapt and embellish the principal melody or “musical voice” of a piece (fɔlikan) to create an endless variety of new melodic phrases. Here, as well, the player may interpolate melodies from other pieces into his performance. As a lead-in to a passage of improvisation in the final minutes of Toumani’s “Kayira,” we hear one of his favorite musical citations, usually employed as an introduction to one of his many versions of the piece “Jarabi” (“Beloved”): Ennio Morricone’s ricocheting signature phrase from the film The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

In kora performance, running hands, musical feet, and instrumental voices produce an ethical aesthetics of sociomusical distinction. Such an ethics may be contrasted with what I described as the moral art of the kunbɛn. This patterned musical foundation—or meeting at the head—resounds a sense of collectivity, of a cultural heritage passed on from one generation to another, a patrimony nominally represented by one’s surname, or jamu. To perform on top of this foundation, to mobilize the body beneath the head of a musical arrangement is to claim an identity beyond—though not divorced from—the moral structures of art and society. The artist who improvises a running solo, incites the dance with a syncopated rhythm, and makes his instrument sing with a novel melody asserts his dynamic and creative agency as a performer. He claims his individuality, a distinctive subjectivity symbolized by his first name, or tɔgɔ, and the status and identity of being a tɔgɔtigi: the achieved state of making a name for oneself, of being an owner (tigi) of one’s name (tɔgɔ); as when Diabaté, son of Sidiki, becomes Toumani. There is an existential risk in such acts of musical distinction and innovation. It involves strategic—though not permanent—breaks with patterns of patrimonial performance, with structures of social and musical morality. A spirit of competition motivates such risk, a sense of deep cultural rivalry the Mande call fadenya.

Fadenya, or “father-child-ness,” refers to domestic tensions between children of the same father but different mothers in polygamous families and, most literally, to an assumed rivalry between father and son. More generally it is a sign of social friction, conflict, nonconformity, and creativity in Mande society (see Bird and Kendall 1980; Jansen and Zobel 1995; Keïta 1995a). As such, fadenya represents a highly ambivalent mode of being, with both positive and negative connotations (Keïta 1990; Skinner 2010, 24). Positive fadenya describes forms of competition that inspire innovation. It can be heard in the intergenerational play of Toumani Diabaté’s and Ballaké Sissoko’s New Ancient Strings, reworking the “timeless classical tradition” of their elders to the “contemporary styles” of Bamako’s music culture that they themselves help produce. This positive sense of fadenya is central to the way Diabaté and Sissoko characterize their music as new, contemporary, innovative, even revolutionary. Positive fadenya also operates between Diabaté and Sissoko. Regarded by many as the best kora players of their generation, these two musical “brothers” (unrelated, though lifelong neighbors) have cultivated a friendly, fraternal competition in crafting the respective careers, much as their elders Sidiki Diabaté and Batourou Sékou Kouyaté did a generation prior.

Yet, in order to retain a sense of moral legitimacy, the innovatory practice of positive fadenya must be balanced with an acknowledged respect for one’s cultural patrimony, or fasiya. Thus, Diabaté’s and Sissoko’s strings are both new and ancient. Writing on the way the person (mɔgɔ) in Mande society conceives of this dialectic of heritage and novelty, Chérif Keïta writes:

Such acts of self-conscious rooting and routing strongly characterize Toumani Diabaté’s existential project of “progressive” music making, an ethico-moral performance practice audibly embodied—through the musical head, voice, feet, and hands of the kora—in his interpretation of “Kayira” at the French Cultural Center in February 2001. Toumani’s art is the sonic embodiment of positive fadenya, of a socially positioned existential project, of an ethical aesthetics “acutely aware of its sources and origins.”

The negative definition of fadenya refers to the dissociative nature of competition and conflict that threatens to break down sociability and civility. Toumani’s musical oeuvre actively and consistently resists such enmity. A pioneer in the genre of world music, his career has been broadly defined by intergenerational, intercultural, and interethnic dialogue. There is no question of this modern griot’s strong respect for tradition and the rooted authenticity of his contemporary performance practice. Yet, musical practice does not always rest on such solid moral ground. As I described in chapter 1, Bamako’s urban culture encodes an ethos of profound socioeconomic precarity and provisionality. Further, this unsettled and risky lifeworld is manifest, as discussed in chapter 2, in the shifting and, at times, contentious, subjectivity of the professional artist in Mali’s postcolonial music culture. This art world is rife with competition (fadenya), personal and professional; positive and, as we shall observe, negative. In the following story, I move from a musical context of sympathetic intimacy to one of open animosity, from a convivial concert hall to a hostile rehearsal studio. This shifts my discussion of perceived space in the Bamako art world from the embodiment of sonic structure and practice to the visceral effects of musical performance on uncertain moral terrain. In an outburst of negative fadenya, we observe the ethical urgency to rectify immoral behavior, the risks involved in such acts of social redress, and the specifically musical potential to intervene in social crisis.

“Quiet Your Strings, I’m Going to Sing a Little”

Nana Soumbounou is the lead female singer of an aspiring Bamako dance band, the Triton Stars (whose song “Immigration” we considered in the previous chapter). This band, like many contemporary pop groups in Bamako, calls itself an “orchestra” (French, orchestre), composed of Western instrumentation (electric guitar, bass, drum kit, electric keyboards, and occasionally horns and violin), a few choice traditional elements (in their case, an ngoni lute and a jenbe hand drum), and lead and choral vocals. Their musical arrangements—which favor Afro-Cuban, reggae, and Afropop renditions of local musical themes and styles, such as jeliya—are strongly reminiscent of the modern state-sponsored orchestras of the late 1960s and ’70s (see Counsel 2006; Skinner 2012b). This stylistic resonance with the past reflects the influence of their artistic director, Aliou Traoré, a former member of the Orchestre National du Mali and music instructor at the Institut National des Arts, Mali’s postsecondary arts academy of which all the band members are recent graduates.

I had been following Triton Stars’ rehearsals, concerts, and studio sessions for several weeks when mounting conflicts within the group forced a month-long hiatus. Their work, in anticipation of a new record release, was put on indefinite hold. Prospects for the recording did not look good. In addition to the endemic problem of music piracy, with little promise for returns on record sales (see chapter 5), internal arguments over creative rights and remuneration (for concert performances, rehearsal time, studio work, and eventual royalty allocation) festered among the band members and their management. When, after nearly four weeks, the band regrouped, having replaced a third of their members with new personnel, rehearsals resumed but tensions remained high. It was during their second full rehearsal following the hiatus that I witnessed firsthand the troubles that were afflicting this urban orchestra—a manifestation of personal and professional fadenya, in its negative guise, causing friction within their group and threatening its permanent breakup.

A few days prior to the rehearsal, I spoke with the band’s former bass player, Fassiriman Dembelé. He told me that the group fell apart because of unreasonable expectations from the band’s management. The artists were asked to sign a contract stating that they would not accept recording and tour contracts from other groups. Some signed. Others did not. Fassiriman, who rehearsed and performed with at least two other groups on a regular basis and did not sign, scoffed at the management’s arrogance. “They’re not serious!,” he exclaimed, adding that he had still not been paid for arrangement work at the last recording session. For him, the band was one gig among many, and certainly not worth an absolute commitment. For Nana, who did sign the contract, things were different. She spoke of her band mates as brothers and sisters, her balimamɔgɔw, implying bonds of affinity that go beyond the contractual disputes that Fassiriman decried. Racine Dia, the band’s principal patron, gave Nana her first break while she was a student at INA, asking her to join his artistic troupe on a tour to northern Europe. Nana was also romantically involved with Karounga, the band’s talented lead male vocalist (they are now married). From her point of view, the band was not just another gig; it was family.

As night descended on the band practice, Aliou, the artistic director, brought the rehearsal to an abrupt halt. He was irate. “It’s awful! It’s really awful!,” he screamed. The source of his scorn was his son, Adama, who had recently moved from violin to electric bass following Abdoulaye’s departure. A fine violinist, Adama was, at best, a satisfactory bassist, playing the right notes but hesitantly, often riding slightly behind the beat as he struggled to learn his part. Aliou’s temper was tremendous. For several minutes, he lambasted his son’s performance. The director’s commitment to the group was genuine, but so were his frustrations. Stories of his work with the band almost always began with his studies in Cuba in the early 1960s and the great promise and bitter failure of his stint with the national orchestra in the 1970s (see Skinner 2012b). In his son and in the present group, he clearly saw a chance at redemption, to secure his deserved reputation as one of Mali’s pioneering artists. But, he was a tough artistic director and a demanding father. At a time when the band was attempting to rebuild and move forward, this outburst of pent-up frustration—a literal incarnation of the paternal rivalry that is fadenya—was clearly frustrating. The group erupted into argument. Speaking into her microphone, Nana encouraged the musicians to start again, “Ne ko, anw ka taa ka morceau wɛrɛ ta!” (“Come on, let’s do another song!”). Following her lead, the keyboardist called out “Anw bɛ ‘Kɛmɛ Buruma’ ta!” (“Let’s do ‘Kɛmɛ Buruma’!”), a standard griot praise song. What came next was a remarkable example of ethical artistiya (Figure 14).

The song began slowly, tentatively. At first, only the keyboardist and Nana performed, with others noodling on their instruments or arguing among themselves as Aliou continued to hurl criticisms. Then, the group’s new guitarist joined in. He searched for the right notes with assistance from the keyboardist, who played and sung the melody to him, until he found the piece’s accompaniment pattern: an arching phrase, up and down a minor third, followed by an ascending phrase, leaping to the seventh before falling once more on the fifth. Within a few measures, the band had fallen into a steady groove, with the music loud enough to quiet truculent voices. At this point, Nana, who had been seated, stood up to “call the horses” (ka sow wele). This loud and melismatic vocalization, intended to draw attention to her and what she was about to say in her Maninka-inflected song,9 descended melodically and dynamically as she called on the group to “quiet their strings,” or lower their volume.

With “strings quieted,” Nana’s voice paused before rising in a dramatic crescendo on the line “I’m going to speak a little,” before quieting again, with graceful glissando, through the phrase, “good family relations”—rising and falling vocal dynamics that she repeated in the next two lines, pausing before and after them to let the meaning of the words sink in. With an intake of breath, Nana’s voice gained strength and volume as she remarked, enunciating her words carefully, on the musical groove established by strings and hands, and then added, with a stroke of proverbial wisdom that the solidarity among group members—all human beings, adamadenw, or children of the biblical Adam—“is better than all of this.” Invoking the moral pillars of God (Ala), fellowship (balimaya), and empathy (sinjiya), she addressed her band mates in a rapid, improvised, and nonmetrical recitation that hovered between song and speech.10 This gave her words a stylistic sense of urgency and emotional weight as she vocally drew attention to the familial nature of the group.

Pausing between lyrical segments to let her accompanists “speak,” or respond instrumentally, Nana rhythmically established a give-and-take of instrument and voice to highlight the group’s musical groove and convivial ethos. The band’s accompaniment served as the sonic foundation on which Nana’s lyrical invocation of the themes of empathy and fellowship, that moral space of humanity that is “better than all of this,” could build and accrue sociomusical meaning. Moreover, the accompaniment seemed to sonically embody such ideals, through tempered patterns of interlocking rhythms and polyphony. By this time, Aliou, the once-truculent band director, was seated, frowning, but listening.

As tempers calmed, Nana continued her vocal plea for moral community and group reconciliation, moving in a gradual descent through swells and drops in pitch and volume to the phrase “oh God,” sung softly with a deep, throaty vibrato. Then, bringing her musical oratory to a close, Nana spoke and sang directly to the conflict confronting the group that night, vocally alternating, as before, between rapid lyricism and crescendo and subdued spoken and sung phrases and diminuendo. Her words acknowledged the family discord between Aliou and Adama that was “tossed” among the group, exacerbating tensions within the band management and artists. Returning to the ideal of conviviality, she concluded her commentary on the measured and melodic phrase, “If you have nothing, and you come to the Triton Stars, you will be good.”

While addressed to her bandmates, Nana’s convivial message, articulated on top of a grooving musical accompaniment (to which Adama, Aliou’s son, now contributed intently on bass), seemed to speak (and sing) of a broader purpose: that those who encounter this group of musicians will “come together” and “be good”; that the discord that threatened conviviality at their rehearsal went beyond that space; that artists have an important role to play in confronting such discord in society: to reinforce social solidarity, bring people together, and promote social welfare. To socially achieve such goals requires a self-conscious sensitivity to the expectations and exigencies of moral community, especially when that community falters. To musically address them demands an attuned sense of sonic form, style, and sentiment. To understand this sociomusical habitus we must reflect further on the phenomenology of musical perception in the expressive culture of Bamako artists. In Toumani Diabaté’s concert performance, we observed the gradual and methodical “heating up” of perceived space, elaborated through an embodied aesthetics of instrumental expression. What Nana’s vocal intervention demonstrates is a complementary and no less ethical “aesthetic of the cool” in Bamako popular music, what Robert Farris Thompson (2011) describes, more broadly, as the refined art of moral accomplishment in Afro-diasporic societies.

An Aesthetic of the Cool

There has been a great deal of recent scholarship describing the embodied reception of sound and its impact on social space and cultural practice (see, for example, Feld 2012; Gray 2013; Novak 2013; and Sakakeeny 2013; for a recent review, see Samuels et al. 2010). Inherent to much of this work is the way auditory perception invokes “a complex of culturally and historically honed sensory modalities” (Hirschkind 2001, 638; see also Porcello et al. 2010). As Steven Connor explains, “To understand the working of any of the senses, it is necessary to remain aware of the fertility of the relations between them” (2004, 154). In Bamako, musical perception is intersensorial, articulating the full palette of the senses in practices of listening. Intersensoriality produces particular aesthetic experiences through the psychosocial ebb and flow of the senses, expressed through interpretive “patterns of attending, disattending, foregrounding, or backgrounding” (Feld 1994a, 83). As Feld explains:

In this way, patterns of perception may exhibit sociocultural specificity, articulating a locally distinct and variegated perceived space, as certain senses are privileged (foregrounded, attended to) over others. In this penultimate section, my interest is in the multisensory experience of musical sound in Bamako popular culture.

In Bamako, when sensitive listeners cite the well-known Mande proverb, “It is the meaning, not the drumming or singing, that is good” (“dundun ma ɲi, dɔnkili ma ɲi, a kɔrɔ de ka ɲi”), they suggest that it is not the music itself that carries meaning, but what lies beneath musical sound (with the word kɔrɔ literally meaning “underneath”). Such sound is, as John Blacking famously noted, “humanly organized” (1973). Grounded in human social action, musical meaning can be referential, communicating as language (in the metaphoric sense of fɔlikan or literally through heightened speech and song), and affective, stimulating the body through prosody, dynamics, rhythm, texture, tempo, and timbre. In the aesthetics of Mande music, in other words, there is meaning in the symbolic and the sensual (compare Feld 1982). Previously I discussed the communicative organization and transmission of such meaning through metaphors of the body, giving formal and expressive shape to a moral and ethical aesthetics. Here, I shift my analysis from these meaningful embodiments of form and practice to the equally significant expressions of sensation and sentiment as observed earlier in Nana’s dramatic vocal performance and a broader popular discourse about music. Specifically, I am interested in the interplay between hearing and feeling “hot” and “cool” sounds in Bamako popular music, audible and interpretive manifestations of an intersensorial perceived space that incorporates the gestural, sartorial, and aromatic arts as well.

For performers and audiences of popular music in Bamako, musical sound is most often related to the sense of touch and the sensation of temperature. Thus, good music “touches” a person’s soul (a bɛ se mɔgɔ niyɔrɔ ma) and “deeply penetrates” peoples’ bodies (a bɛ don mɔgɔw la kojugu). When strings are in tune, they meet each other (juruw bɛnnen don). The same expression may also refer to musicians who are “in the groove” (fɔlifɔlaw bɛnnen don). A good musical arrangement is well seated (fɔli sigilen don) and grooves when its disparate parts come together (a bɛnnen don). Further, a groove that is loud, fast paced, intense, and exciting is “on fire” (fɔli ɲagalen don) and must be balanced with complementary sections that are cool, quiet, slowed-down, and subdued (fɔli sumalen don). As such, a theory of aesthetic meaning in Bamako’s music culture would necessarily emphasize these expressions of embodiment and feeling, articulating between hot (loud, fast, intense) and cool (quiet, slow, subdued) sounds and tempos whose melodies and rhythms come together in a well-seated arrangement to produce music that is both touching and penetrating.

When a performer wants to begin or return to a sung refrain or verse, or interject an improvised praise narrative into an extended jam, she may call on the band to cool down (a’ye lasuma) by playing slower and more quietly, as Nana did at the band rehearsal. Instrumental coolness is the sonic basis of verbal expression in Bamako popular music—and Mande music more generally—because the singing and speaking voice is meant to be heard and interpreted without being lost or misunderstood in the cacophony of ambient noise (see Durán 1995a, 202). From an instrumental space of relative calm, “song” (dɔnkili) is heard along a continuum of chorus—“a fixed melody and text which recurs at different intervals of a performance,” often performed as a refrain with standardized thematic content—and recitation—defined in Mande verbal art as an “improvised text, without any metrical scheme, either spoken, or recited to a syllabically set musical line” and typically performed solo with an emphasis on social commentary, evaluation, and praise (Durán 1978, 736; as cited in Hale 1998, 164).11 In Bamako, one may hear the choral “fixed melody” described as kunbɛn, the vocal equivalent of an instrumental accompaniment, and the recitational “improvisation” as tɛrɛmɛli (Durán 2007, 589), a term that implies verbal negotiation and bartering (Bailleul 2000). Here, I note that Nana concluded her impassioned and hot recitation by returning to the cool chorus and text associated with the piece “Kɛmɛ Buruma,” accompanied thereafter by an overall rise in volume and increased polyphonic density of the instrumental accompaniment until the cadenced conclusion of the piece.

It is the tension between the patterned collectivity of the chorus and the improvised individuality of recitation that characterizes verbal art in Mande music. Like the value-inflected aesthetics described in Toumani Diabaté’s kora performance—balancing instrumental music’s well-balanced head with its agile and experimental appendages—the singing-speaking voice is suffused with moral and ethical meaning. Among music aficionados in Bamako, a popular definition of “song” (dɔnkili) is either the “essence” (kili) of the “dance” or “knowledge” (dɔn).12 In the latter sense, song communicates musical meaning through the poetry of language. In the former, it is the source of embodied musical practice. As the proverb goes, “It is the meaning,” symbolic and sensual, “not the drumming or the singing, that is good.” To vocally negotiate the tension between sung themes and spoken commentaries while motivating and encouraging a good instrumental groove are two sides of the same musical coin (heads, epistemology; tails, corporeality). This is the ethico-moral genius of Nana’s vocal intervention at the rehearsal—the essence of her vocal knowledge and dance. Through lyrical eloquence and prosodic passion, Nana artfully and ethically addressed the angry sentiments that divided her band and effected (for a time) a socially and musically good balance of sound and sentiment. Such ethico-aesthetic practice speaks highly of her status and identity as an artist—her artistic personhood (artistiya)—in the contemporary Bamako art world (about which more later in the chapter).

Yet, vocal expression is only a part of the ethics of Bamako artists’ musical aesthetics. The song of the vocalist is incomplete, like a sentence without punctuation, if it lacks a strident instrumental response from the backing musicians. This is when the music heats up (fɔli kalaya)—gets louder, faster, and more energetic—often described by metaphors of “boiling” (fɔli wulila) and “raging fires” (fɔli ɲagalen don). As we observed of Toumani Diabaté’s kora performance, this instrumental excess often takes the form of bolomanboli, the “running by hand” of an improvised solo. Before boiling over, this instrumental hotness is necessarily countered by vocal injunctions to cool down and return to an accompaniment pattern, or kunbɛn, figured around an underlying ostinato. “Quiet your strings,” Nana vocally implores, “I’m going to sing a little.” Thereafter, the song itself heats up, most frequently in the recitational form of vocal praise (fasada). As Nicholas Hopkins has observed, praise song can have a “swelling” effect on audiences, filling them with pride, but also engendering an excess of affect. Praise, he writes, “causes the individual targeted to swell up (‘to swell with pride’ as we say in English), in extreme cases to explode” (1997, 52). Such vocal excess requires a return to a cool aesthetic, as the elder Sidiki Diabaté once noted: “There must be a balance between the kumben [the fixed melody of song] and the tèrèmeli [vocal improvisation in the mode of recitation]. Too much tèrèmeli takes the power out of the music. . . . This is music without any foundations” (as cited in Durán 2007, 589).

Such play between hot and cool voices and instruments embodies the artful and deliberate ethics of aesthetics in live musical performance. This is exemplified in a recent article written by ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán on the subject of ŋaaraya, a term denoting musical excellence and performative prowess in the Mande world (2007). Durán writes that “the power of the instrumentalist over singers is acknowledged in the often-sung phrase ‘Slow/cool down the instruments, or you’ll push me into ngaraya’” (574). Here, ŋaaraya implies not only musical excellence and prowess, but also excess and power. As instrumental performance gets hotter, it may provoke impassioned speech and song from the vocalist and engender an abundance of potentially dangerous “vital energy” (ɲama) emanating from the spoken and sung word (see Hoffman 1995).13 The implication here is that musical excess may have socially disruptive—that is, unethical—effects. To resist such sociomusical excess, Durán observes that the ethics of musical excellence (ŋaaraya) “combines simplicity with force” (590) emphasizing expressive “elegance and economy” (from McNaughton 1988, 109) and subordinating expression and technique to “respect for formal relationships” and “communicative clarity” (from Chernoff 1979, 122).

Similar ethically inflected antiphonal patterns emerge within other structures of musical performance, such as choral call and response (Maxwell 2002, 155–56) and the formal and stylized affirmations of “responsive listeners” (namunamunaw) whose periodic utterances (“Namu!” “Yes!” “Tiɲe don!” “That’s true!”) dialogically delimit and sometimes narratively direct Mande verbal art (see Johnson and Sisòkò 2003). Dance is also structured by musical (often percussive) movements between hotness and coolness, moving bodies on and off dance floors and to and from each other as musical sounds and sentiments heat up and cool down. Beyond the strictly musical, social relationships, too, find expression in this ethico-aesthetic dialectic intersensory discourse. In an article on the mediated reception of popular music in Bamako, Dorothea Schulz discusses the vocal quality of “kuul-ness” among radio show hosts who, in their candid on-air discussion with listeners on intimate topics of marital relations and sexuality, are able to “convey the full complexity of a problem without naming it in too explicit a manner” (2002, 816). This, she writes, “adds a further layer of meaning to the semantics of ‘cool’ . . . which describes a man or a woman who is laid back, careful and deliberate in her or his actions and thus represents the opposite of someone ‘hot’ . . . who ‘heats up’ quickly and, at worst, is temperamental, impatient, and overly ready to engage in (fistful) arguments” (816fn49).

Indeed, though the focus of popular musical aesthetics is generally on the sounds of musical performance, a whole host of social activities contribute to its perceived space, operating through the full range of the senses. When Bamako residents attend a live musical event—whether at a nightclub, a courtyard baptism, or a posh wedding ceremony—they are typically dressed to the nines. Young people may be outfitted with sneakers, tight shirts, and fashionable (if imitation) designer jeans and skirts. Adults may opt for a sport coat or an evening dress. More traditional men might wear a brightly colored and elaborately embroidered dulɔkiba (kaftan, literally “long shirt”). Women may sport skillfully folded headscarves in variety of colors and patterns. Mingling among the clientele at a Bamako club, or walking down the street during a marriage ceremony, one is struck by the wide variety of perfumes and incensed fragrances emanating from peoples’ bodies and clothing, becoming stronger (“hotter”) with proximity and weaker (“cooler”) with distance. As Adame Ba Konaré has described in her recent novel, Quand l’ail se frotte à l’encens (2006), crafting bodily fragrance is treated as an art form in Bamako. Then, there is the flavor of savory sauces, fried fish, and grilled meat, together with the sweetness of bottled soft drinks, hot tea, and the cold bitterness of a local beer. As a result, popular music is seen, smelled, and tasted as much as it is heard in Bamako.

In sum, in the perceived space of Bamako’s music culture, good musicality is also about good sociability. Aesthetics and ethics go hand in hand with intersensuality and intersubjectivity. In Bamako, when people say, “This sounds good,” they are also saying, “This is good” (see Frith 1996, 275). Likewise, when someone says, “This sounds bad,” there is the implication that good sociability has been upset by a breach of assumed ethical behavior. “It’s awful! It’s really awful!,” Aliou screamed at his struggling band. At stake in these judgments of sound and sociability is the status and identity of the artist as an ethico-moral person (mɔgɔ) in Mali today. As observed in the foregoing ethnographic analysis, a locally modeled musical aesthetics—embodied and expressed through instrument and voice—constitutes a privileged means by which urban artists actively cultivate and confirm their artistic personhood, their artistiya. This artful ethics can be heard and felt in the formalism and virtuosity of Toumani’s traditional-yet-modern musicianship and the poetics and effects of Nana’s verbal art. To conclude this chapter, I reflect further on the way music in Bamako creates a locally salient context of values, a social space of multiple moral interest and investment, a structure of feeling that may be described as “Afropolitan.”

Afropolitan Music and Afropolitan Sensibility

In the Bamako art world described in this chapter, good sound—music that stirs bodies, triggers thoughts, and incites emotions—affirms good subjectivity, audibly expressing the persistence of cultural mores and social imperatives in counterpoint with the interests, desires, and aspirations of individuals. Good music, in other words, thoughtfully and feelingfully—that is, meaningfully—resounds moral and ethical personhood (mɔgɔya), coupling custom, tradition, and collectivity with creativity, self-mastery, and intentionality in a common and coherent, embodied and affective perceived space. At the Triton Stars band rehearsal, this musical personhood manifests in a dramatic performance of vocal praise. For Nana, her band mates are her balimamɔgɔw, her (musical) family members. Faced with antagonism boiling over among this artistic kin, Nana steps forward to dispel social tensions, performing a cool vocal aesthetic to confront animosity and promote conviviality. While intended to rebuild and strengthen moral community within the group, this performance is ethical insofar as it exhibits Nana’s social and musical talents as an artist, distinguishing herself among her peers. By calling on her band to “quiet their strings” so that she can “sing a little,” Nana ventures into that uncertain and risky terrain of an individual ethics, where she alone is accountable for the actions she initiates.

For Toumani Diabaté, an artful personhood emerges through a refined and embodied approach to technique, form, and style (of the head, feet, voice, and hands), a deep respect for tradition, especially that of his family, and, perhaps most important, a progressive spirit of rivalry and innovation. This combination of musical method, patrimonial deference, and positive fadenya can be found throughout his professional oeuvre, whether he is performing solo at a formal venue, as in the concert at the French Cultural Center, or with his popular dance band, the Symmetric Orchestra, at a local Bamako nightclub. Echoing the ethico-moral “new ancient strings” aesthetic of his duet with Ballaké Sissoko, Diabaté describes the music of the Symmetric Orchestra (which I discuss further in chapter 4) as a “new sound” for a “new generation.” In Toumani’s words:

To paraphrase, this egalitarian and creative practice of freeing oneself to present tradition in new ways frames innovative and potentially contentious musical agency—beyond the obligations of tradition—as an ethics of artistic personhood, of artistiya. Such innovatory artistic activity must be balanced, however, with an acknowledged respect for one’s cultural patrimony in order to retain a sense of moral legitimacy. As John Miller Chernoff notes, describing a comparable ethico-aesthetic environment, “The formal relationships are vitalized and enhanced in good music, but the musical form is open rather than rigid, set up so that it affords a focus for the expression of individuality that subtly distinguishes an occasion within the context of tradition” (1979, 126). On his kora and with his band—in Bamako, on the continent, and throughout the world—Toumani Diabaté seeks to push boundaries, not abandon foundations.

Yet, though Diabaté represents his music beyond (though not divorced from) tradition, he also locates his artistry beyond (though not to the exclusion of) culture. The new generation of which he speaks reflects “the spirit of Mali’s new democracy since 1992.” He describes a new politics and new modes of leisure and habits of consumption. He represents, in other words, a new economy and society of which his music is an important part. Similarly, Nana’s vocal performance cannot be reduced to an exercise in cultural affirmation and valuation, rooted in a commitment to moral community and routed through an ethics of artistic excellence. No less important is the pragmatic work she accomplishes in bolstering group morale so that her band can carry on with their rehearsal and imagine the possibility of realizing their professional goals. That Nana does this as a woman further casts her call for group solidarity and professional integrity in a broader history of and struggle for women’s socioeconomic mobility in contemporary Mali.

As described in chapter 1, proper subjectivity for women is conceived through expressions of moral fortitude, where womanhood is tied to marriage and childbirth and a lifelong commitment to cultivating conviviality (or badenya, in the literal sense of “mother-child-ness”) in the household (Grosz-Ngaté 1989). As such, a female ethics maintains a tight orbit around the moral world of civil space and may include activities such as selling homegrown produce at the neighborhood marketplace or performing in community life-cycle rituals (see Modic 1996). Men, by contrast, are judged both by their submission to tradition (or fasiya, in the literal sense of paternal heritage) and their ethical agency in the “wild spaces” outside the home or community, symbolically described in Mande cosmology as the wilderness (kungo). Ethical agency for men may include formal or informal work abroad, such as the frequent touring required of professional artists. This poses a problem for young female artists, like Nana, whose profession necessarily takes them out of the household and into the ethical wilds of the local and global music industry, spaces considered by many to be unethical and essentially immoral for women.

Forming a mounting critique of conservative notions of female personhood in the Malian art world, recent studies by Lucy Durán (1995a; 1995b; 2000), Heather Maxwell (2002), and Dorothea Schulz (2002) have emphasized the important role women have played in interrogating normative gender roles through popular music in Mali. The songs of artists like Kandia Kouyaté, Ami Koita, Nahawa Doumbia, Oumou Sangaré, and Rokia Traoré, among many others, critically address issues of cultural subordination, social stigma, and domestic abuse, and include celebrations of women’s lives and works that extend domestic feminine morality to the male-dominated public sphere of ethical distinction. Such forms of what may be called “feminist artistiya,” expressed through the genres of jeliya and wasulu in particular, have been increasingly prominent since the 1980s, when the Malian music industry experienced what has been called a widespread “feminization” (Mamadou Diawara 2003, 197), characterized by the rapid rise and public prominence of female “stars” (French, étoiles). Much like Toumani Diabaté’s sociomusical appeal to new publics, in and out of Africa, these female artists insist on new opportunities to critically and creatively engage and intervene in this emergent African world. While not (yet) a diva (French, vedette), Nana’s performance practice belongs, I believe, to this broader existential project of a progressive musical ethics in contemporary Bamako, creating a “context of values,” in Chernoff’s terms, “where criticism is translated into social action” (1979, 143).

In this book, the name I have given to this urban African context of values is “Afropolitan.” In this chapter, I have elaborated this Afropolitanism from within a particular African art world to represent aesthetics and social action in an Afropolitan music idiom: Mande popular music. Through situated observation and critical inquiry, I have thickly described the sonic and social means by which Bamako artists and audiences “achieve an integration of music and community” (Chernoff 1979, 37), in which community is itself an integrative product of “the various patterns of social, economic, and political life” (35). These Afropolitan sounds and sentiments speak and sing, through instrument and voice, in an African vernacular firmly embedded in the world (compare Feld 2013; Kelley 2012; Muller and Benjamin 2011). Just as kora players make their instruments speak in a musical language as ancient as it is new, Afropolitans give voice to the world through traditions and innovations they claim as their own, “relativizing roots” and “domesticating the unfamiliar,” as Achille Mbembe observes, to produce “an aesthetic and a certain poetics of the world” (2010, 229, 232). John Miller Chernoff, whose sociomusical insights are embedded throughout this chapter, began to elucidate such an Afropolitan sensibility in the 1970s, observing Africa’s “astounding diversity of musical situations and musical activity” across a range of social positions: “nationalistic and tribalistic, Animist and Christian or Muslim, traditional and Westernized” (1979, 35, 156).14

In the following chapters, I extend my inquiry into popular music’s integration into the various patterns of social, economic, and political life in Bamako by inhabiting social spaces in which religion, intellectual property, and national identity are most salient. To the urban lifeworld, artistic personhood, and embodied and affective musical aesthetics elaborated thus far I add the pious voice of Islamic interpellation, the (non)governmental culture of musical ownership, valuation, circulation, and citation, and the performative politics of postcolonial and post-national modes of identification. Together, these social positions of urbanism, profession, aesthetics, piety, economy, and politics create a context of values of a varied and vital Afropolitanism. In the next chapter, I examine how this Afropolitanism dynamically and ethically translates into social action through a locally salient mode of religious identification in urban Africa. Specifically, I consider how the pious voice of Islam resounds as a privileged discursive resource in Bamako popular music. Through poetic invocations of a common faith, artists and audiences repeatedly call their Muslim community in being, reaffirming a moral sense of place in what they perceive to be an increasingly immoral world.