Enregistrés Pour Yehia le Marabout (1994)
2 tracks, 47 minutes
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Super Onze are the masters of takamba music. It’s a style with an interesting history, having originally been associated with the nomadic, Sahara-dwelling Tuaregs, over time, it became popular with Songhai musicians in the north of Mali, who brought in their own influences and made it their own. Now takamba is mostly known as a Songhai style, but one that retains the signature lope and slightly Arabic sound from Tuareg music.
At its heart, takamba music is one rhythm – always the same, it’s the takamba rhythm – played on two calabashes or, less commonly, one calabash and a metal drum (such as a cooking pot or a jerrycan). For those of you who understand TUBS, here is the rhythm as described by Banning Eyre:
|: X.X...X.X... | X...X...X... :|
Here are Super Onze’s percussionists playing the takamba rhythm, and improvising on it:
On top of that rhythm, the melody is provided by at least one kurbu, or as we often call it, an ngoni (Super Onze have two). The kurbu plays a short riff that repeats on as long as you want, often improvising on that riff and providing endless variations. The vocalist uses all this musical information to create an epic improvised sermon of praise – sometimes sung, usually recited – to whoever the patron happens to be, perhaps the bride and groom of the wedding party, the host of the political event, or even the person who commissioned the tape, which is the case on this one, in honour of a wealthy holy man (or marabout) named Yahia.
So that is takamba. But it doesn’t really tell you what’s so electrifying about Super Onze du Gao. For starters, it’s because they are electrified – their kurbus are hooked up to amps and the whole thing is run through bullhorn speakers. Then it sounds like it was direct onto a tape deck, and then transferred from there (probably after quite a few cassette copies) to digital. Distortion is added at every step along that journey, so by the time you’re listening to it, those lutes sound like some of the dirtiest punk blues guitars, and the calabashes sound like cracks of electricity. Their improvisations on just the one short rhythm and super bluesy riff last for the entirety of a two-sided cassette – just over 20 minutes per side – and you’ll fall into a deep desert blues trance if you’re not careful. It’s all so raw that I’m surprised it hasn’t been picked up in other situations: for me, this music is crying out to be looped and sampled, and used for the basis of a hip-hop track. Get on it, producers.
Takamba is huge in the north of Mali, but it’s not really permeated outside of the country to any significant degree. Considering how popular Malian music is in Europe and the Americas, perhaps that won’t be the case for very long. I hope that Super Onze will be the ones to bring this amazing sound to the world.
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