Philip Glass & Foday Musa Suso - Spring Waterfall

Glass and Suso spent the first day on The Screens tuning instruments, working to find a common musical language. “You get down to basic things, like what key you’ll play in and how the pieces go together. Suso had also brought a balafon, but we discovered its tuning system was incompatible with the piano’s. The fourth interval of the scale was a bit higher on the balafon, while the second was a little lower. You can’t re-tune the piano either, so there were technical problems that we were forced to deal with“. Glass speaks of “Spring Waterfall“, the music he and Suso created for Jali Kunda, as a “guided collaboration“. First, Suso laid down a kora track. Then Glass created three tracks, each focusing on a different range of the piano (bass, mid-range, and treble). “The best way to make music with Suso is to talk about it as we play“, says Glass. “His isn’t a tradition that’s strongly analytical. Of course, the training’s extended-when the children are very young they learn hundreds of songs. In the process, the formal history of the music is conveyed“. Still, “it was easy to tell if Suso liked what I was doing“, says Glass, “because he’d give me a big smile“. /////////////////////////////////////// When Nikiprowetzky was writing, the Griot phenomenon was familiar to a mere handful of Americans, most of them highly specialized scholars. Today, students of blues and other African-American musical traditions are aware of the Griots of West Africa to some degree. Blues scholar Samuel Charters in particular has constructed a genealogy for the blues in which Griot music figures prominently. “The African musicians who correspond most closely to blues singers are the griots of the tribes of northwest Africa“, he asserts, “from those areas where many thousands of people were taken as slaves.“ Charters has applied the tools of creative musicology, analysis of slave ship manifests and other historical sources, and an intimate, lifelong familiarity with both blues and West African music and musicians to his studies of African-American musical roots. His data and conclusions are summarized in his book Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues and in his notes to a recent CD anthology of original African and American field recordings, Blues Roots, issued by the Rhino label as Volume Ten in its series Blues Masters: The Essential Blues Collection. Young Griot; Kolda; Senegal (Daniel Lainé)The Griot as understood by blues scholars is essentially a musician who sings and plays traditional West African music, often on a banjo- or fiddle-like stringed instrument. But the number of blues aficionados who have heard about Griots from Charters and others is relatively small.