Hip Deep is Afropop's media project dedicated to the idea that music is a key to understanding everything. Get hip deep into programs on how the music formed and informed cultures in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, plus companion interviews, features, discographies and more.
Jeffrey Callen is an ethnomusicologist whose writing on popular music & culture appears in both popular and scholarly publications. His blog TRANSGRESSIONS: A POP CULTURE BLOG explores the boundaries of genre, gender, culture and race. He is currently completing a book on alternative music in Morocco based on his doctoral dissertation, "French Fries in The Tagine".
As the year wound down, I found myself thinking a lot about my favorite albums of 2009. They’re not falling into an easy categorization but there is a thread that ties them together. They all are based on crossings of musical boundaries. My runaway favorite album of 2009 is Omar Sosa’s Across the Great Divide, a brilliant jazz album that does the usually impossible: tells an engaging story, melds music and spoken voice, and makes a profound musical statement without losing the listener. A wonderful album that ignores boundaries of musical genre as it traverses the Black Atlantic, incorporating a diverse range of musical influences (including the incredible “Northern Roots” singer Tim Eriksen), to capture the musical and spiritual profundity of the Middle Passage. The other album that keeps finding its way to my digital turntable is the debut release of Warsaw Village Band. Brilliantly executed Polish music that crosses musical borders—check out the wonderfully funky “Skip Funk” and “Polska Fran Polska,” an inspired meeting of Swedish and Polish dance musics—but always remains rooted in Warsaw. It has a sense of travel, meeting, and exchange but it’s always rooted in a sense of place, a sense of home. That sense of musical travel, meeting and interchange is what is drawing me to cds this year. Last year’s Snakeskin Violin by Markus James was another effort that worked for me but there are all the misses, mostly World Music endeavors that perpetuate the worst of the North–South colonial heritage under the auspices of intercultural understanding. It’s the forefronting of the “Western” artist or musical reference and a certain rhetorical smugness that stands out. But all of this is just preamble to an album I don’t know what to do with. I should hate it. It’s rootless, “multi-cultural” music produced by “musical nomads.” On the surface, it’s all too precious but it’s got something and, sometimes, it’s got a lot.
Actually, it’s two albums by Marseille-based “World n Bass” ensemble Watcha Clan: Diaspora Hi-Fi: A Mediterranean Journey (released in 2008) and this year’s Diaspora Remixed, which features remixes of about half the tracks on Diaspora Hi-Fi by a notable array of djs, including London collective Transglobal Underground, Balkan breakbeat masters Shazalakazoo, EarthRise SoundSystem of New York City, and DJ Click of Paris. Diaspora Hi-Fi is a nicely structured album that brings together musical influences from throughout the Mediterranean. The album is built on multiple narratives of movement: from tradition to modernity (acoustic instruments are deftly blended with electronic loops), around the Mediterranean (from France to North Africa to the Balkans), from dance tracks to cool down songs. Sonically and lyrically, a narrative of movement is created that is dedicated to the nomadic, the stateless who move without permission and for whom national boundaries are an inconvenient and often costly detail. There are a few weak points—songs I would rather live without, transitions that don’t work—but, overall, it’s a satisfying tale. And a good listen. The remix album, typical of the genre, contains some great takes on songs from Diaspora Hi-Fi but it isn’t a start-to-finish listen—put it on, hit shuffle and go about your business.
Watcha Clan is a band with a mission: to create music that advocates for thoughtful transgressions. My curiosity sparked, I arranged an interview of keyboardist (including laptop and accordion) and songwriter Lado Clem of Watcha Clan.
Jeffrey Callen: I want to ask you a couple of questions about the whole idea of World ‘n’ Bass as a genre and as a label for your music.
Lado Clem (Clement Queysanne): We found this label because we always had a lot of styles in our music. To define our music was always very hard because you could say reggae, traditional, world, African. We had to find one word that explains everything. So world ‘n’ bass means we are inspired by world music from the Mediterranean and bass means that we add all the energy that we can find in electronic music (all the dense parts we can put on it). So it is kind of a joke: drum ‘n’ bass with world music.
J.C.: The publicity people talk a lot about you using phrases like “musical nomads” and the idea of being a band without a home and “homeless”…
L.C.: Exactly. For us, the nomadic culture is very important because it is important for people to be free and to travel, to cross the frontiers. Our second album was called Nomades and on that album we tried to defend the idea of nomadic culture, of freedom to move. For us it’s very important because merchandise, money and things have the right to cross frontiers but people can’t move as they want. So for us to be a nomad is to be free; it is very important to live in that culture. And also it’s very important for us because we enrich our music by traveling so being nomadic is a way to be richer.
J.C.: But at the same time, the record company talks about Marseilles as your home.
L.C.: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Marseilles is a very interesting city because it is very “populaire.” It’s on the Mediterranean so, for two thousand years, people have been passing by Marseilles and making it part of their culture: African culture, North African culture, Spanish culture, Gypsy Balkan culture. You can find everything in Marseilles and for us it is our inspiration town.
J.C.: So is there any tension between having no home and having Marseilles as your home?
L.C.: No, because I think you have to sometimes rest in one place when you travel all the time. It’s very good to come back to Marseilles. You become very calm because it is a very nice city to live in: the weather is great, it is on the sea, it is very sunny, people are very nice. So we need to have a home even if we are nomadic people.
J.C.: Is a part of the band’s mission to present a possible future?
L.C.: Yeah, kind of and we also want to show that there is one culture in the Mediterranean. People often oppose North and South… but we say, no, in Mediterranean culture, you find a lot of common points and it may be more important to show that there is a lot in common for all these people than to show that there are differences. So you have a lot of common things in food, in the way people speak, in the way they make music (in the rhythms, in the melodies) and, even if they don’t speak the same language, they can understand each other. That’s what we want to do with our music.
J.C.: I have a few questions about the songs on Diaspora Hi-Fi. How would you describe your technique of working with traditional songs? I was thinking particularly of “Goumari” (a reinterpretation of an Algerian Gnawa song).
L.C.: Usually, we have an idea of a traditional song that we like, a melody that we want to modernize. We don’t want traditional music to be in a museum; like, this is the past, this is traditional music. No, we want world music to be alive and to show that even the younger generation can dance to “Goumari” which is a very Gnawa, very traditional track. We did it in a house way and it works very well. It also shows that traditional music is very modern in itself and you just have to modernize it to make it alive.
J.C.: I noticed that there are no qaraqebs (hand cymbals which are emblematic of Gnawa music), the mode was changed from a pentatonic to a blues scale and there is a different melody than in the traditional song. You also used bendirs (frame drums), which are not usually used in Gnawa music.
L.C.: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Live, we used to play the song with the traditional melody then do it like we did it on the album, in a very bluesy way with very simple, chords. For us it is very interesting because it is like universal music. It sounds like blues from the desert.
J.C.: Another song is based on a poem by Hafsa Bekri Lamrani (a Moroccan poet)…
L.C.: We met her when we played in Morocco. She saw our show and approached Sista-K and said I have something to give you. It was a text about Hagar, the two wives of Abraham, which is a symbol of Jewish and Arabic people having the same roots and the same culture. And for us, it’s also very important to represent a peace movement. Let’s stop opposing Jewish and Arabic people; they have the same roots, the same culture, the same language and they are more brothers and sisters than enemies. So, for us, this song symbolizes that.
J.C.: And the song “Les hommes libres”
L.C.: This track is very important because it tells of Théodore Monod, a famous anthropologist—a specialist on the Sahara desert—who always defended the rights of nomadic people (illegal immigrants). So we sampled him and the album begins with him saying that nomadic people have always been a problem for the government but we have to defend their culture because it represents freedom.
J.C.: And the song “Traveling Shoes” seems to have roots in Bob Marley’s “Exodus.”
L.C.: Exactly, because this song was brought by Sista K, our singer, and she is very influenced by reggae music but she also wanted to explore the diasporic dimension, that people have had to travel, move from their country for different reasons. Most of the reasons were political or economic. So she brought this text “Traveling Shoes” about people who have to move from their country and bring with them their culture. That is also why we call the album Diaspora Hi-Fi: diaspora is the culture you bring with you when you move from one country to another. You bring this culture and you share it with the people in the other country….
J.C.: “Traveling Shoes” references the Arab world and North Africa with the background vocals, which are very much like a mawwal (an improvised vocal prelude).
L.C.: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that is a Moroccan guy singing that we met in Agadir and worked with. It’s a reggae track with a Berber spirit.
J.C.: I read that you worked with Amarg Fusion (Berber fusion band from Agadir).
L.C.: The singer on “Traveling Shoes” is from Amarg Fusion.
J.C.: I saw them last year in Casablanca at the Boulevard (the Boulevard des jeunes musiciens is an annual festival of alternative music).
L.C.: We played at the Boulevard in 2007 and did a workshop with Amarg Fusion in Agadir where we worked on some songs with them. We worked on “Traveling Shoes”, “Goumari,” and “Ch’ilet La’yani,” which they knew it because it is an Andalusian song. We worked on “Balkan Qoulou.” It was an incredible time with them because they are incredible musicians. You know the r’bab player Foulane, he played with us on stage on “Goumari,” the dance track. It was complete madness with Foulane. You can find some videos of this workshop on the internet (on YouTube and DailyMotion).
J.C.: Do you see your band as part of a musical movement? Who do you look to for inspiration? Who’s doing the same sort of things you are?
L.C.: We were most influenced by bands like Asian Dub Foundation and Transglobal Underground; the U.K. movement of the ‘90s that created a fusion of Pakistani music, drum ‘n’ bass and jungle. This is the style of the fusion music we want to do but with North African culture, Jewish culture.
J.C.: Are there other bands doing the same thing you’re doing?
L.C.:Today, I think it is more like the Balkan gypsy scene. We often play in Germany, in Eastern Europe and there are djs and bands that are mixing electronic and Balkan music. And I think they are doing the real new stuff because it is very powerful, people are smiling when they’re dancing, happy. I think it’s the next big thing: Balkan gypsy electronic music.
J.C.: Those bands are just hitting the states now.
L.C.: Yeah, it’s coming. There are so many good musicians in this part of Europe from Turkey to Greece to Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia.
J.C.: Just to return to the nomadic idea. In a review I read in a Chicago paper, they called your band “culturally ambiguous.” Do you think that is a good description?
L.C.: For us it is not like an ambiguity because we want to show that in the Mediterranean area we have more things in common than differences. We want to show that there is one culture. For example, Sista K’s background: her father is a Jewish Berber from Algeria and her mother is from Lithuania and she was born in Marseilles. So, I think it represents this multi-cultural thing we have in the Mediterranean. So it is not ambiguous. There is a lot of sharing; there is no pure music or pure culture, it is always sharing for us.
J.C.: What was your own path to Watcha Clan?
L.C.: I played in a punk rock band in the ‘90s but moved quickly to electronic music. What is funny is that when we met Asian Dub Foundation in 2000, they saw our show—at that time, we had something like 8 musicians—and they said you should use a sampler and they gave us a little sampler. I studied how to use it and electronic music started to build in our music. And now, Karen (Sista-K) and I compose together. She will have a melody or a traditional song she wants to arrange and we will arrange it with some computer stuff. That’s how it started.
J.C.: Just one question about the remix album. How did you pick the djs you wanted to work with on that?
L.C.: The origin of this album is a tour we did in twenty different countries. We met djs who said I might want to mix this track, I might want to mix this track. So after a year on the road, we had fifteen people who said they wanted to remix some tracks. So we said okay and started this project. I sent out all the tracks and they all came back very quickly. It was very nice because I was surprised by all the remixes. And I’m very proud that people like Transglobal Underground did a great remix for us. I also very much like the Balkan Beat one, the Shazalakazoo one. They all did a great job.
J.C.: What is the market for the remix album? For people at home or for club use?
L.C.: I think it’s both because it’s not really on cd; it’s on mp3 and vinyl. Now most of the djs are deejaying with a laptop and people in the high fidelity audio market are coming back to vinyl. So it’s for two audiences….
J.C.: One final question: where do you see the future for the band? Where are you going?
L.C.: I think we’re going to work again on a Diaspora Hi-Fi project because, at the origin, it was a Mediterranean caravan. We were in Spain, Morocco, Algeria and now we have contacts in Greece, in Istanbul and we want to continue to do workshops in those countries, work on new songs and explore all the Mediterranean Sea area. I think there are a lot of things to do in this fusion.
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The week after Clem and I spoke, I saw Watcha Clan perform at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco. The opening act was a duo of djs, sporting matching beards and wearing the small, sporty hats that are de rigueur for hipster artists hereabouts. The twin djs tended to their laptops assiduously, working much to hard to create the predictable techno tracks that served as background music for a meager crowd that showed little interest in their efforts. At 11 p.m., Watcha Clan took the stage, the five band members bounding onstage with admirable enthusiasm. The crowd was small but the band worked like it was 2 a.m. in a packed disco; they started at full speed and didn’t let up. The narrative arc and pacing that work so well on Diaspora Hi-Fi were missing but so was the crowd interaction that can make a live show electric. Still, it seemed like more than a bad night on tour. Many of the songs that worked so well on the album fell flat; the arrangements seemed lackluster and hackneyed: predictable from start to finish and pale imitations of the recorded tracks. As I write, Watcha Clan is gearing up to head back into the studio in Marseille to work on a new album. I find myself wondering where their mission to celebrate and provide legitimacy for nomadic culture—musical and otherwise—will take them.
Thanks to Timothy Abdellah Fuson for information on the Gnawa song “Goumari.”
