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Gangbé Brass Band, multi-faceted ensemble
To the four winds
Paris
24/07/2009 -
In taking voodoo music away from ceremonies and out into the wider world, the Gangbé Brass Band sowed the seeds of a cultural revolution in Benin in the mid-90s. Since then, with the blessing of the highest voodoo authorities, the ingenious band has been rewriting a fascinating itinerary, where music energetically distils the story of triangular trade and at the same time blows some fresh air into contemporary Beninese music.
Back to their roots
Athanase Obed Dehomou started to play the trumpet after hearing Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis. For him, the music is “the only positive thing to come out of a dark period of history”. Slaves who boarded ships in Ouidah, Benin’s cradle of voodoo, would disembark in Haiti, Brazil or the USA, taking with them their bells, rhythms, songs and sacred prayers.
After abolition, some of the freed slaves took their musical experience from “the other side” back with them to Benin. On their fourth disk, Assiko, the track La Porte du non retour tells this painful history while retaining its cultural heritage: the birth of the blues, gospel and swing.
The group’s ten members have had very different experiences of music, yet they all hear a piece of Africa in New Orleans jazz and fanfares. During their tours, they have noticed that the bells and traditional Beninese rhythms lead Brazilians, Haitians and Americans back to their own culture.
Athanase recalls: “On tour in Haiti, we were invited to a voodoo convent. They had organised a big ceremony for us. We were really honoured, because people were asking us how we practised voodoo. For example, from generation to generation they had been chanting in Yoruba and Fon (Ed.: languages spoken in Benin), without really understanding what they were saying. The percussionists were playing phrases that we use in Benin, but with different nuances and additions and a new energy”. A fascinating return to their roots, sketched in by the Gangbé Brass Band.
Multiple facets
The group’s sound is multi-faceted, containing jazz, Caribbean vibrations, afro-beat and more. From the start, Gangbé has continued to nod at the African musicians who initiated a journey back to their roots and ended up inventing a revolutionary African sound. For example, Fela Kuti, an illustrious neighbour whose highlife included an American experience in 1969 before he returned to Nigeria and created afro-beat.
Back in 1994, the young Gangbé Brass Band played the first part of one of Fela’s concerts at the French Cultural Centre in Cotonou. After the concert, the “Black President” gave them this brief blessing: “You have understood everything. Carry on the same way.” Gangbé played homage to him with cover versions of Colo-Mentality on two of their albums. In Assiko, afro-beat’s energy is also present.
A little over ten years later, the jazz milieu gave their approval to the Gangbé groove. In 2005, the brass band played at the Montreal Jazz Festival. Artists and public alike endorsed the swinging brass and percussion music from Benin. Yet when Gangbé plays in Benin, the audience can of course hear nuances and rhythms that Haitians and jazzmen are impervious to.
For example, on the track Miwa, the Gangbé Brass Band plays the Kpamounouhoun rhythm that is used in the south east, in Porto Novo, usually to ask for a young woman’s hand in marriage. Athanase explains: “This rhythm is produced by banging on metal plates. We’re promoting rhythms from the whole country because a lot of them are unknown. Benin is a small country, but we have twenty counties, each with their own rhythm.”
The enthusiastic ensemble started promoting the country’s rhythmic heritage several years ago, with their project of creating a “Voodoo Rhythm Box”, and Assiko continues to do so in its own way. Actually, Athanase slips in, the Gangbé Brass Band has just had a new idea for promoting the use of wind instruments in Benin: organising an international brass band get-together in Cotonou! “Our work is a way of showing that there is another way of playing traditional music. The old people accepted to hand over voodoo music to us. Fela encouraged us. On each of our trips, people have noticed the symbolic force of our music. So we have persevered”, recounts Athanase.
Assiko, the name of this fourth album, means, “the time has come”. Time to get involved in rebuilding the country, but also, for the Gangbé Brass Band, time to reap the success it deserves.
Concerts on 25 July in London, 30 July in Senigallia, Italy, 1 August in Cassel, Germany, etc.
Eglantine Chabasseur
Translation : Anne-Marie Harper
02/09/2004 -
