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MASA 97 and MASA 99 are the recordings of the live performances that took place at the Marché des Arts du Spectacle Africain (Market for African Performing Arts) in 1997 and 1999, and as such they include some of Africa’s very best musicians.
Go to : Indigo Africa ; The world of Indigo ; Indigo Tropical ; Urban Highlights.
Photograph: D.R.
Since the beginning of the century, through records, radio and the electrification of instruments, African music has never stopped inventing new idioms. To do so, African music integrated the exterior influences of colonisation, immigration, rural exodus, international media, into the traditional influences of heritage and local and regional specificities.
The nineteen-sixties, when the bell of independence was tolling, were the turning point when African music updated itself and confirmed its role and reality and proved how essential it was for national identities. How about this for a symbol: Joseph Kabasalé, the writer of the mythical Indépendance cha cha was a friend of Patrice Lumumba.
In the middle of the seventies, although several African musicians had already played the ambassador for their countries throughout the world, African music began to export itself in large quantities. This phenomenon, induced by the existence of an active French-speaking community, centred in Paris, which was at the time a fabulous concentration of African musicians, gave birth to an “African wave” (Touré Kunda, Manu Dibango, Salif Keita, Alpha Blondy, Youssou N’Dour, Angélique Kidjo, Mory Kanté, Papa Wemba and friends) which swarmed through all of Europe, but also through Tokyo, New York and Sydney. This movement had important economic consequences and this encouraged the singers and musicians who had decided it was time to base the creative process in their home countries, in order to put an end to the infamous unequal exchange. Hence a blooming of new studios, concert halls and artists’ associations in the South, which are all good reasons for optimism.
Created in 1993, MASA (Marché des Arts du Spectacle Africain – Market for African Performing Arts) took account of this potential and decided to accompany its development. Whereas the objective of the first edition was to be a window on African creativity, the second insisted upon the self-organisation of the cultural milieu and the third, through “Africanising” the event by basing it in Abidjan, expressed the desire to get closer to the expectations of those doing the groundwork: greater professionalism, emergence of production structures, reinforcement of the exchanges between different linguistic areas as the need was expressed by the post-Apartheid period, a bigger implication of States in fighting certain endemic plagues, such as piracy or non-perception of artist’s rights. As such MASA has become the first market for African Performing Arts open to the whole of Africa, be it French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arab or Berber-speaking....
MASA 97:
This double CD of the third edition, which presents the 26 groups selected for MASA 98 and 3 groups for MASA OFF, illustrates the desire of the organisers and their support (Agence de la Francophonie, UNESCO) to turn the event into a truly pan-African happening.
According to these stakes, this album gives a pretty good idea of the Babel of African music just waiting to be exported. Listeners will discover both emblematic figures such as Dolly Rathebe, Boubacar Traoré, Antoine Moundanda, and representatives of the new generation like Cyrille Effala, Fantani Toure or the Guisse Brothers. They will also notice that if “la Francophonie” (French-speaking) can also be sung in Lingara, Bambala or French, it is also open to the other languages commonly spoken in Africa, such as English, Portuguese etc... and that a strong stylistic reference to tradition is not the slightest bit contradictory with the use of contemporary languages, as proved by the Panafrican Orchestra, Jaojoby or Oliver Mtukudzi. For African music is fundamentally composite, despite what the eulogists of a “World Music” based on northern models might say. Born of different musical origins, it’s spectrum goes from the most sophisticated ethnic codifications, as demonstrated by Trogode Banda Linda, to hybrid creations which adapt the whole planet’s acoustic propositions to their imagination. Jubilant and unorthodox, African music indeed plays with the influences of pop, jazz, rock, soukouss, m’balax and jive. It accompanies many themes, which can be ritual, committed, entertaining or performing. It is organised as solos, bands, polyphonies or big bands. It still has very social uses. The best-known African artists still feel, wherever they play, that they represent a collective feeling left at home.
Frank Tenaille.
MASA ’99:
More than a simple best-of, the second album devoted to modern African music - which presents the official selection of groups having participated in the 4th MASA in Abidjan (Marché des Arts du Spectacle African – Market of African Performing Arts) – is a new series of sonic photographs (often completely new), which illustrate different aspects of the musical creation of a continent in cultural turmoil and in constant evolution. Traditional, living music (mostly recorded at Studio JBZ in Abidjan), over-talented instrumentalists, legendary voices, young talents full of energy, creators of atmosphere, poets, minstrels; Africa expresses here its difference and the universal character of its message.
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