#Sona Jobarteh Music How To Be Both#

Sona Diabat & Mmah Sylla Sahel (1988) vinyl. Sona JobartehвЂ™s music wraps and enraptures us in an aural swaddling of sounds, enticing and encouraging us to rest, relax, bliss out, drift off, dream and enter into an altered state of consciousness.Music Video. She makes a special appearance in Edinburgh with her five-piece band.R egardless of tempo or the amount of percussion employed, this music is soothing sounds. Jobarteh is a regular member of her brother Tunde Jegedes African Classical Music Ensemble, has set up a music school in The Gambia named after her grandfather and performed alongside her cousin, the Malian kora player, Toumani Diabat.

We never lose the longing to have a female voice in our inner ear, a voice healing our hurts, sharing our joys, reassuring and reorienting us when everything seems to be going south.SonaвЂ™s sound is the warm bosom and soft heartbeat with which we so closely identified as infants. Electric Guitar Sankung Jobarteh.Deep down we all have had a primordial experience: the female voice is the first voice we heard, the first voice to bless us, lullaby us and comfort us. Dunun played as Congas Mbemba Jammeh. Lyrics By Malink&233 lyrics Wilfred Abdoul Willey. Kora, Vocals, Bass Outro, Scraper Karinyan, Guitar Muted Sona Jobarteh. In her teenage years Sona attended Sona Jobarteh the Royal College of Music where she studied cello, piano and harpsichord, and soon after went onto the Purcell School of Music to study composition.Electric Guitar Sankung Jobarteh.

Jobarteh is closing in on an organic approach to music making that is a seamless synthesis. In this case the inverse prevails as she attempts to infuse modern elements into an overall traditional sound.What deeply moves me about the opening five tracks from SonaвЂ™s new album, Fasiya, is that there is no attempt to merge one element into the other. Hence, when you listen to the two tracks from JobartehвЂ™s debut what you hear is an attempt to infuse traditional roots into a contemporary sound.The last two tracks, вЂњTaamaвЂќ and вЂњHizabвЂќ are from the Motherland film soundtrack that Jobarteh composed. Without being too far wrong, I could over-simplify the formula and tell you look for hooks and rhymes over a backbeat and that would pretty much cover the majority of popular music, but though that would not encompass the whole of the music, such a formulation would accurately describe the bulk of contemporary music. It is not just the lyrics focusing on personal heartache, longing and desire (the themes of at least 75% of contemporary popular music from female artists in the West, especially the English speaking countries), there is also an overall Western harmonic and rhythmic approach.

)Whether we like it or detest simultaneously being of both Africa and the west, the fact is we are both old and new our aesthetic is grounded in the traditional even as we fly forward into the unorthodox, into the unknown, into the previously unexplored. ( A previous BoL write-up offers more extensive background info on Sona Jobarteh. She plays guitar) and keep alive the traditions of yesterday (she is a kora virtuoso), and do so without complexes about which one is better than the other.

Sona Jobarteh Music How To Be Both

This beautiful music offers us one wonderful response.Kalamu ya Salaam is a writer and filmmaker from New Orleans. The whole of Africa, both continental and diaspora is struggling with the question of how to be both African and an integral part of the new world. I cannot say for certain that Sona Jobarteh consciously set out to make a music that walks equally on two legs, a music that both embraces us and challenges us, a music that is simultaneously familiar and foreign regardless of who we are there is something here for everyone to study, appreciate and be enriched by.There is much more, but let us deal with that once we have a chance to see and hear the directions in which Sona Jobarteh takes her music. Well, SonaвЂ™s music requires us to uplift and expand ourselves, whether we are traditionalists living in a Gambian village or fresh young things rolling through urban metropolis such as London, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, Abidjan, Dakar, so forth and so on, regardless of who we are, to fully feel what Ms Jobarteh is offering we have to move a bit beyond what we are used to, what we already know.The brilliant surface beauty of this music is actually minor compared to its inner splendor.