In this remarkable book, Steven Feld, pioneer of the anthropology of sound, listens to the vernacular cosmopolitanism of jazz players in Ghana. Some have traveled widely, played with American jazz greats, and blended the innovations of John Coltrane with local instruments and worldviews. Combining memoir, biography, ethnography, and history, Feld conveys a diasporic intimacy and dialogue that contests American nationalist and Afrocentric narratives of jazz history. His stories of Accra's jazz cosmopolitanism feature Ghanaba/Guy Warren (1923-2008), the eccentric drummer who befriended the likes of Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Thelonious Monk in the United States in the 1950s, only to return, embittered, to Ghana, where he became the country's leading experimentalist. Others whose stories figure prominently are Nii Noi Nortey, who fuses the legacies of the black avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s with pan-African philosophy in sculptural shrines to Coltrane and musical improvisations inspired by his work; the percussionist Nii Otoo Annan, a traditional master inspired by Coltrane's drummers Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali; and a union of Accra truck and minibus drivers whose squeeze-bulb honk-horn music for drivers' funerals recalls the jazz funerals of New Orleans. Feld describes these artists' cosmopolitan outlook as an "acoustemology," a way of knowing the world through sound.

JAZZ COSMOPOLITANISM IN ACCRA

Five Musical Years in Ghana By STEVEN FELD

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2012 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5162-7

Contents

OPUS....................................................................................................................xiFOUR-BAR INTRO "The Shape of Jazz to Come".............................................................................1VAMP IN, HEAD Acoustemology in Accra: On Jazz Cosmopolitanism..........................................................11FIRST CHORUS, WITH TRANSPOSITION Guy Warren/Ghanaba: From Afro-Jazz to Handel via Max Roach............................51SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE Nii Noi Nortey: From Pan-Africanism to Afrifones via John Coltrane............................87THIRD CHORUS, BACK INSIDE Nii Otoo Annan: From Toads to Polyrhythm via Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali.....................119FOURTH CHORUS, SHOUT TO THE GROOVE Por Por: From Honk Horns to Jazz Funerals via New Orleans...........................159HEAD AGAIN, VAMP OUT Beyond Diasporic Intimacy.........................................................................199"DEDICATED TO YOU"......................................................................................................245HORN BACKGROUNDS, RIFFS UNDERNEATH......................................................................................249THEMES, PLAYERS.........................................................................................................299

Chapter One

FOUR-BAR INTRO

"The Shape of Jazz to Come"

I'm here to tell stories about encounters with jazz cosmopolitanism in Accra. While luminous and vexing to me, I don't expect them to be as memorable or unsettling to you. But I do hope they will be productive of surprise and critical reflection, certainly about the shape of jazz as diasporic dialogue in an African urban modernity, and even more about jazz cosmopolitanism as musical intimacy.

This was hardly what I had in mind when I first visited Accra in October 2004. Not at all. The idea was just a two-week look and listen. Ruti Talmor, then an anthropology graduate student at New York University, invited me to come as she was finishing her fieldwork about Accra's National Arts Centre and the local contemporary art world. I'd help her out with some video work, and she'd introduce me to some musicians and artists.

I was at the time (and still am) at work on a project about how village, church, animal, and carnival bells have created senses of space and time over ten centuries of European pastoral history. I liked the idea of finding out something about an even older yet very contemporary world of forged iron hand bells played as timekeepers in West African musical ensembles. But I wasn't thinking that Accra would become more than a short musical detour before heading back to Europe and bells, and then home to the last months of the generous Guggenheim support that had me on leave from teaching.

Ruti had been in Accra for more than a year and knew the city well. René Gerrets, another NYU anthropology graduate student, and on his way to begin fieldwork in Tanzania, was at the time visiting her too. We met diverse people connected with Ruti's research and cruised the city in her banana-colored sedan on days it cooperated. This brief scan made me aware of a kind of fieldwork unlike any other I had experienced, certainly distant from my work in a remote rainforest in Papua New Guinea, or from pastoral villages or towns in Europe. It was the possibility of art world fieldwork in a large and globally layered city, simultaneously engaged with multiple sites, locations, niches, scenes, and styles of production. And it was the challenge, within those multiplicities, to grasp something about the intertwined yet markedly race- and class-differentiated realities of artists, patrons, and institutions with their array of local to global connections.

Things happened quickly. On my first night we dined with Virginia Ryan, a visual artist working with the Italian Embassy in Accra and busy establishing the Foundation for Contemporary Art-Ghana. A few nights later we dined again with Virginia and her FCA cofounder and codirector, Joe Nkrumah, a polymath art conservator, cultural historian, and "Uncle Joe" or "Prof" to everyone doing research in Accra. And just a few days later those two conversations led to meeting one of Joe's Accra art world friends, the sculptor, instrument inventor, and musician Nii Noi Nortey.

That crucial encounter streamed into others, an initial dialogue with Nii Noi about John Coltrane overflowing into what became five years of converging conversations, performances, collaborations, and recording and video projects about the feedback swirls situating Accra's jazz cosmopolitanism in the transnational diasporic currents Paul Gilroy calls the Black Atlantic and Caryl Phillips calls the Atlantic sound.

Thinking back, those first two weeks in Accra were extraordinary. Never before in a life of much travel had I experienced such an immediate ease of attachment with place, people, scenes; which must have been why it was so easy to say yes when Nii Noi asked if I would consider coming back to Accra to work with him. He said it was "divined" by our first meeting, speaking of the moment I asked if he would like a recording of the rehearsal that Joe, Ruti, and I walked in on when we first arrived at his home.

If Nii Noi's word of choice was "divined," mine for that fateful encounter was "captivated." That was my instant feeling about the recorded material, so much so that on my return to the United States I immediately edited the tapes and sent the CD back to Nii Noi for review. He responded that we were hearing the music's contours the same way. "I'm telling you, man, it's the shape of jazz to come," he said on the phone, seductively quoting the title of a famous Ornette Coleman LP from 1959, one that really did herald a number of 1960s major jazz developments. With that, I enlisted Ruti's help to arrange the rental of an acoustically bright loft designed and built by the architect Alero Olympio. And that's how I returned to Accra to set up a recording studio for a month in 2005 to record Nii Noi and Nii Otoo Annan's Tribute to A Love Supreme, in recognition of John Coltrane's classic LP.

For many years before all this I had lived two simultaneous professional lives, one as a musician consumed by jazz, one as an anthropologist consumed by cultural poetics and politics. Of course music had long found its way into my anthropology, and anthropology into my music. But it wasn't until I went to Accra, met Nii Noi and Nii Otoo, and agreed to return that a new synthesis emerged, my lives as musican and scholar more deeply fusing in the possibility to explore how the performance of jazz in Africa, and Africa in jazz, could relate to the anthropology of globalism and cosmopolitanism.

What happened was that I began the Love Supreme tribute project working as a producer and as a recordist together with Nii Noi's regular sound engineer, Agazi. But the course of events changed wildly when I fell in love with one of Nii Noi and Nii Otoo's instruments, a bass mbira box, and took it away with me to continue and deepen the affair.

Things also changed wildly in that dense month when Nii Noi introduced me to other musicians in his immediate circle, the "divine drummer" Ghanaba (formerly Guy Warren), the country's leading experimentalist, and then...