Hank Jones Meets Cheick-Tidane Seck and the Mandinkas - Sarala
1995

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An essential album every African music lover should have. Once again I OCRed the text so you can read the information in the liner notes and the context for this project. Enjoy!

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A family reunion

Some horse-teams may appear difficult to control: on one side an African-American musician who's almost an octogenarian, one of the most gifted pianists of his generation, the eldest of the Jones brothers: his classical training is solid, and he was close to the great Art Tatum as well as being his heir. He also played with the greatest: Hot Lips Page, Coleman Hawkins, Benny Goodman, Lester Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, Cannonball Adderley, J.J. Johnson, Quincy Jones, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Wes Montgomery, Milt Jackson, Stan Getz, Johnny Hodges, Lionel Hampton, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, John Lewis... And he entered jazz' Hall of Fame while still alive.

On the other side, from Mali, we have a reputed arranger and band-leader, a songwriter, a multi-instrumentalist leading a pleiad of the crowned heads of Mandingo music: Ousmane Kouyaté, Kassé-Mady, Moriba Koita, Tom Diakité, Lansine Kouyaté, Diely-Moussa Kouyaté, Sékou Diabaté, Manfila Kanté, the Peul flautist Aly Wagué and the female Tunisian singer Amina...

Hank Jones and Cheick-Tidiane Seck succeeded beyond all hope with their reunion, and out of it was born a symbiosis, one of the spirit and the heart, a symbiosis of two genres; despite the bites of time and the vicissitudes of history, these two genres nevertheless perpetuate the same immemorial gesture, that of Mandingo plainsong, the very source and substance of gospel; thanks to the virtuosity of the musicians gathered together, the gesture adapts without cease to the most modern of sounds.

For some years now, artists, writers, scientists, thinkers, African-American intellectuals, many of them leaving the shores where their tragic itinerary had confined them, have turned towards Africa, as once did the great writer Langston Hughes or, closer to us, the pianist Randy Weston, who found his road to Damascus when he met the Gnawa of Morocco.

The conquest of the Holy Grail of Africa was not entirely peaceful for some. The Africa of their ancestors, the object of their deepest dreams, the Africa which had so fired the heart and genius of the black creators of America, was this the same continent that bore all the miseries and all the jolts of the contemporary world?

Riding himself of the tinsel of fame, and all the comfort that goes with the recognition gained by an artist at the height of this artistry, Hank Jones began to listen to the secret impulses that agitate this continent. In this initiatory quest he found the right instant and the guide necessary to lead him through this labyrinth of obscure light: Cheick-Tidiane Seck.

The latter comes from a long line of bards on the banks of the Senegal River. His Toucouleur ancestors came to Mali during the last century, following the armies of the Toucouleur religious leader El Hadj Omar Tall, who besieged Ségou, Cheick's native town. The first emotions of his youth were experienced in the quadrilateral region of Ségou, Sikasso, the Sénoufo country, a region of confluents where the three great sub-groups of the Mandé people cohabit, the Bambara, the Sénoufo and the Malinké. It is a region with a remote tradition where, since the Middle Ages, poets, bards and griots have been singing the prowess in battle of Soundata Keita, Mali's most prestigious sovereign, a contemporary of Saint Louis or that other Malian emperor, the Mansa Kankan Moussa, whose pilgrimage to Mecca in the 14th century left a trace in the imaginings of the Arab Orient. The Malian sovereign had taken so much gold, and distributed so many gifts, that the values of this precious metal dropped in Alexandria. Thanks to his mother, a famous singer of Mandingo ballads in diatonic mode, it seems to Cheick-Tidiane Seck that he has always known the blues.

Mandingo song is above all a poem-incantation, beautiful language declined over a pleasant mode. Its foundation is on figures of thought, comparisons, antitheses and figures of language. Whether parallelism or asymmetric figures, anaphora or chiasma, alliteration or assonance, puns on the timbre or on the meaning of words, the sounds always bear images that knot the correspondences between things, between forces and beings.

Mandingo song is a participation, communion. It's ample, hoarse, fluid and vehement accents are reminiscent of the virgin songs of Hellenic antiquity. Voices of vitalism that sing energy, cosmic messengers from an invisible world. They reach into the depths of the soul and bear with them an invincible dream celebrating the being in all its plenitude. Herbert Pepper, one of the best Africanist musicologists, and among other things the author of the music for Senegal's national anthem, tried to define Mandingo music thus: "It's strange," he said, "it's between the Bantu music of the forest and Arab-Berber music." It is fitting that Amina, a daughter of ancient Carthage, the fusion between the Mediterranean world, where 20% of black blood subsists, and the Negro-African world, should find her proper place here.

Such a heritage predisposes Cheick to be porous to all the breaths in the world. As an accomplished instrumentalist and talented arranger having worked with the greatest, such as Salif Keita and Mory Kante in the legendary Super Rail Band of Bamako, or the Ambassadeurs orchestra, or with Jimmy Cliff, Joe Zawinul, Graham Haynes or Amina, Cheick symbolizes the blossoming African artist who reconciles tradition with modernity in a synthesis that is often difficult to produce.

It took a year of patient work and difficult negotiations to convince his peers on the choice of themes and compositions, and then Hank sat down at the piano. The Mandingo musicians thought it was miraculous--he played like they did!

The music is flamboyant, and commences with a long call on the flute from Aly Wagué in which the memory seems to perceive, far in the distance, the "iooh!" of the Peul shepherd leading his flock across the tann country, a trumpet of Jericho magnified by Hank's subtle fingering on the keyboard, marrying a classical style to the audacity of bebop. All is ready for the entry of the Mandé musicians: tama, n'goni, doum-doum, balafon, kora and guitars strike up a long hymn to Providence in Sarala where Cheick-Tidiane Seck's warm and deep voice, by turns the wandering Mandingo player and the blues shouter out of the deep South, is sustained by the Mandé chorus and the rhythmic power of the doum-doum: he sings out a call to Africa and its diaspora. Cheick-Tidiane Seck exalts the spirit of the great Mandé ancestors of legendary moral rectitude, and is relayed from time to time by powerful voices of the great Kassé-Mady and Tom Diakité, and by the guitar of Ousmane Kouyaté... the compositions alternate, mingling the chanson de geste, romances, grief, dreams and bravery.

Long severed from the sap of Africa, the Blacks of America have for generations exalted the African soul: DuBois, the black American intellectual, in The Souls of Black Folk and his review Crisis; Marcus Garvey, in his Back to Africa movement and the Negro Renaissance writers such as Countee Cullen, Alain Locke... all of them symbolized this quest for Africa condensed into the popular myth of the black soul, the myth of the Negroness to be precise. Or, more recently, that of soul in the sense  "African values." Their meeting with the Negroes of Africa and the Caribbean in the interval between two wars fertilized the negritude movement and threw down the foundations of Panafricanism. Concerning Hank Jones, it was much more than a return to the spring in the twilight of the life of a great artist; it was a reunion, declined in simple mode between relations who, to be truthful, had never really left each other. They had simply been waiting for the storm to pass over before beginning to embrace their Mandingo cousins.

These simple melodies, sometimes serious, sometimes full of mischief, celebrate Beings and Time in long recitatives where generations and genealogies walk in procession. They sing the rhythm of the earth, the dan sangui of the Bambara, the rainfall that streams down at the onset of wintering, seeding the earth and giving life to the creators and plants... until they reincarnate in a single body the faro, the language-of-creation that causes the waters to stream over the earth, and bides its time in the sea; in other words, in the depths of the abyssal waters. Hank Jones and Cheick-Tidiane Seck are the bearers of the ancient language-of-creation.

- Macodou Ndiaye.

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Personnel --
Hank Jones, piano
Cheick Tidiane Seck, musical director, Hammond B-3 organ, percussion, lead vocals on 2 & 7

The Mandinkas:
Amina Annabi, lead vocals on 8
Manian Damba, backing vocals, solo on 9 & 11
Kasse Mady Diabaté, lead vocals on 4 & 9
Tom Diakité, backing vocals, solo on 7, percussion
Fatoumata "Mama" Kouyaté, vocal solo on 11
Aly Wague, flute
Djely Moussa Condé, kora
Lansine Kouyaté, balafon
Moriba Koita, n'goni
Ousmane Kouyaté, lead and rhythm guitar
Manfila Kanté, leag guitar on 9
Diely Moussa Kouyaté, rhythm guitar, lead on 8
Sékou Diabaté, bass guitar
César Anot, bass guitar, backing vocals, percussion
Eric Vinceno, double bass
Moussa Sissokho, djembé, tama
Maré Sanogo, doum-doum
Jorge Amorim, percussion

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Track List
01 - Aly Kawele
02 - Sarala
03 - Maningafoly
04 - Tounia Kanibala
05 - Komidiara
06 - Fantague
07 - Make
08 - Walidi Ya
09 - Soundjata
10 - Hank Miri
11 - Hadja Fadima
12 - Moriba Ka Foly

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EAC log and CUE sheet included.
Audio format: FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) 
http://flac.sourceforge.net/index.html

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TQMP. The Quality Music Project.