Throw Down Your Heart

By Kohinoor Dasgupta

(Originally published on July 31, 2010, in my weblog Draupadiarjun)

AMERICAN BANJO player Béla Fleck loves jamming with musicians from all over “the acoustic planet”. Sascha Paladino’s documentary Béla Fleck in Throw Down your Heart records Fleck’s visit to Uganda, Tanzania, Senegal, the Gambia and Mali in January-February 2005. The idea was to trace the banjo’s African DNA from a musician’s (rather than a musicologist’s) point of view. The DVD version of the award-winning 2008 documentary, which includes a lively commentary by the brothers Fleck and Paladino, recorded in June 2009, was released in November 2009.

Béla’s trip starts in Jinja village in Uganda, where he meets professional folk musician Walusimbi Nsimbambi Haruna and artistes who auditioned to play with Béla. From the first, the unexpectedness of Africa grips us. Music - and a vow to keep musical traditions alive in the face of all odds - has proved to be stronger than war, hunger and tears. Other traditions are also cherished: Béla lays a stone on the grave of Haruna’s father while Haruna explains that this is a way of showing a continuing kinship with the dead, a way of saying, you went on ahead, but your family, friends and even strangers are bound to you by the same journey.

Young Ruth Akello of Jinja village plays the thumb piano, sings and leads a small band of boys. In Nakiseniyi the ground shakes when a great marimba is played with perfect coordination by several villagers in an atmosphere of palpable excitement. “Shockingly good!” says Béla in his commentary. On the scene we watch him straining to hear his own instrument and trying to fit in.

The scene shifts to Bagamoyo in Tanzania, one of those places on our planet that is branded by our ability to inflict cruelty on our fellow humans. Because of its location across the Indian Ocean from Zanzibar, it was a key point from which Africans, sold or abducted from way inland, were shipped out on Arab dhows to work as slaves in Zanzibar and the Middle East. “Bagamoyo” means “throw down your heart” in Swahili: the captured people had to throw down their hearts here before they were crammed onto the dhows. Here their freedom, and happiness, and ties to family ended. The slave trade from east Africa continued for more than a millennium, starting long before Europeans got into the mix. In the nineteenth century Dr David Livingstone wrote: “The strangest disease I have seen in this country [he was speaking of Manyema, now a province in the Democratic Republic of Congo] seems really to be broken heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves."

Béla wanted to play the pensive title track of the documentary literally dipping his toes in the Indian Ocean and also in the Atlantic Ocean, across Africa. The documentary does show him playing with his feet in the Indian Ocean, but on the west coast the water was far too cold, so he had to be content with the beach.

In Tanzania, Béla meets Anania Ngoliga, whom he’s heard before on Afro-Pop Worldwide, and wanted to meet. Anania is one of the star turns of the documentary, a multi-talented blind vocalist who plays the ilimba to accompany himself. Ananiya’s music is sensitive but has humor and style too. A musical chemistry develops between Béla and Ananiya, and we get a great jam when Ananiya brings in an entire feast of sounds.

Béla had wanted very much to meet the legendary Hukwe Zawose, who used to play a thumb piano with 66 to 72 keys and was a singer, composer and the most famous keeper of Gogo musical traditions for decades. But Hukwe Zawose had passed away in December 2003, so it’s to the Zawose family music group that Béla gets to show the banjo for the first time.

A group of tall, aristocratic-looking Masai teenagers agrees to do their gig. In their attitude and energy they closely resemble teens from anywhere in the world, but they are outfitted in traditional costume and jewelry and seem to be caught in a zone between ancient and uber-cool.

At every outing Bela listens closely to the instruments he hears, he looks for similarities with the banjo in terms of sound and technique, but he is really more player, listener and learner than detective on a mission. He lets us listen, and the documentary is more good music, real people, and experiencing the music than an attempt at path-breaking research.

In the Gambia, Béla meets up with Jil Ekona Jatta, who is from Mlomp in southern Senegal. Jatta is one of the best traditional players of the akonting, the three-stringed instrument which Bela feels must be the precursor of the banjo. Musicians, Béla learns, were the first to be captured by slave traders, because their voices and instruments gave away their location. He also hears that people were more likely to survive the slave-ship voyage if a musician was aboard.

In French-speaking Mali, we meet a galaxy of gifted artistes. Béla modestly tones down his banjo to record with the nightingale of Mali, Oumou Sangare. With redoubtable guitarist Djelimady Tounkara, Béla works hard to string grace notes. He visits ngoni "griot” (keeper of traditions) Basskou Kouyate and his singer wife Ami Sacko at their home, listens to Ami’s wonderful rendition of “Doesn’t everyone have a person who they love?” and jams with Basskou and chats with their shy and serious son, Mustafa.

In Bamako Béla also meets the youthful kamal ngoni player Harouna Samake, a self-taught musician who likes experimenting with the quality of sound that his instrument produces by adding strings and making design modifications of his own. The deep, sweet notes of his instrument inspire one of Béla’s happiest jams on the trip.

A scrupulous honesty and genuine interest in people who make music come through in the documentary, for which we must thank Béla and his professional film crew, led by director Sascha Paladino. The music itself is rousing to thoughtful.