Mellifluisms

Khalifa Ould Eide & Dimi Mint Abba - Moorish Music from Mauritania

I couldn’t think of a better album to inaugurate Mellifluisms: this album from husband and wife Khalifa Ould Eide and Dimi Mint Abba has been blowing my mind since I downloaded it a week ago. Both Eide and Abba are Mauritanian griots, a caste known for being protectors and disseminators of the rich histories and traditions of much of West Africa. This music, like so much other music I love, is the sound of a rich ancient tradition being modified by the complex modern realities of postcoloniality, globalization, and racial politics.

I feel the need to clarify, for myself as much as for anyone reading this, that traditional “folk music” is not some timeless phenomenon emerging from an ancestral ether - every musical tradition, no matter how lithified by custom it seems, can be read to reveal a real, complex material history subject to forces that aren’t much different from those modern realities. Some of the texts which Eide and Abba recite with melismatic flair are constructed from Islamic poetry from centuries past, and I can’t help but feel that if I could understand these verses, they would reveal something of this age-old material history, enunciating the spread of Islam throughout Africa, or mapping the conditions of race and class which formed the griot caste.

The modern forces which shape this music are more recognizable to non-natives like me, readily revealing themselves in the song titles and instrumentation: titles like “Mauritania My Beloved Country” and “Oh Lord Bring Apartheid Crashing Down!” give hints of postcolonial nationalism and progressive, pan-African politics, while the electric guitar you can hear on some tracks is a suitably propulsive aural example of the forces of modernization, globalization, and class (the griots, with their roots in aristocracy, are wealthy enough to afford electric guitars, a privilege in a country where, according to Wikipedia, twenty percent of the population lives on less than $1.25 a day.)

Despite how fulfilling it is to read this complex web of cause and effect in music, I don’t listen to this album (or any music, really) just to pontificate on geopolitics - these are just elements which are unavoidable in approaching African music. More than anything, this album is enjoyable on a primal level far removed from any cerebral analysis. The percussion is immediate and grounded despite its polyrhythmic complexity, and the vocal virtuosity of Eide and Abba is readily apparent regardless of the listener’s familiarity with the Arabic scales they traverse (I know nothing of such things). Most interestingly, the melodies have an uncannily familiar bluesiness to them, at least to these Western ears, as the dips into semi-tones aren’t far off from the blue notes of the American blues tradition (which, in that beautifully circular way, stems from West African music).

As I feared, I may have written too much: don’t let words get in the way of the immediate experience of this beautiful music. Download it and feel it for yourself - click the album cover for the link.