Sory and His Magic
It’s not easy for me to create playlists. If I have a specific need or setlist that I’m building for an event, that’s easy enough, but if I’m creating a collection of songs that I enjoy, I have a hard time separating them into categories for driving, or siting at home, or a mood that suits me. They all end up in one big batch of songs. I tried creating a playlist of love songs. It started with songs that I had considered romantic, but quickly evolved into any song that I loved. It wasn’t long before I started adding songs that I only ‘liked’. Pretty soon it was hundreds of songs that I found my self furiously skipping through shuffle mode on, wondering how they got into the playlist.
I love finding new music. There is an exhilaration to discovery, and a sensation that is hard to repeat from the first emotion experienced that creates the impulse to ‘add’ a song to playlist, for instance. That feeling that made me click a button indicating ‘this is indeed a song that I love’ might not be there the next time I hear it. Sometimes a song might bring me back to where I was, invoke strong memories, lost emotions, or forgotten friendships. Sometimes I have no idea how it ended up on my phone, and it gets skipped. I tell myself that I’ll remove it next time I get a chance. That’s how my playlists get hundreds of songs long.
Today, I found a song that captured me before I even listened to it. It came out of a story of a griot, (a bard from Kita in West Africa) who sang the douga, a formidable chant, imbued with magic. It was so powerful that it would intimidate the other singers and cause them to protect themselves from evil genies that the song would set free. The person it was sang for dared not dance, nor the singer dared not sing, before certain precautions were taken. It was performed for a jeweler, and the words wove the history and family lineage, and spoke of the lofty deeds of his ancestors long gone by, spreading out like a great tree, whose branches spread far and wide. The tale celebrated his creations, and he rose with a great cry at its beginnings, in which happiness and triumph both mingled.
I found a rendition of the douga performed by Sory Kandia Kouyaté, and I felt like standing up and crying out as soon as he began to sing. There is an immense unexplainable power in his incantations, and the magic that is fused with the history of this tradition become immediately evident. There is no context that I have to relate this song to in my personal life, yet I feel its deep roots and powerful heritage, as though it traveled across time to sit within my own past. I had heard it for the first time, and yet had still been taken back to those powerful feelings of a past not lived by me, but perhaps by a long-lost generation. This was a song that invoked memory with no prior listening.
I love David Bowie, and there are several strong moments that I have associated with his songs. He has ties, for me, to important ceremonies, and he is an icon in the western popular music tradition. I was about to comment that I have never taken precautions before listening to his more valuable work, until I thought about the preparations we often make before going to a show. The formalities we have prior to going to a live concert often involve our own preparations to protect ourselves form evil genies, and we all know that the mosh pits of the average punk show, let alone a classic rock concert, is no place to get sloppy with your magic. It is one thing to be drawn in by music that I have a history with, and that familiar nostalgia that comes with it, but a different, somewhat mysterious joy that is part of the experience behind the songs of the griot and their alchemy. I can’t wait to hear more, but the revelry of today’s song is definitely worth the memories, even if I don’t know where they came from.
Here is Sory Kandia Kouyaté performing douga: