Florent Mazzoleni: I am a French writer. I used to be a journalist for many years, and when I first traveled to Africa in the early 2000s, I got a chance to spend time with Mahmoud Ahmed in Ethiopia, Cesaria Evora in Cabo Verde, Ali Farka Toure in Mali, so that's where my passion for African music [began]. And the more I came back to Africa, the more I fell in love with the different kinds of music from the continent, and I was lucky enough to meet all those great artists, be they Bembeya Jazz or Amadou Balak or the guys from Orchestre Poly-Rythmo. I produced their new album, Madjafalao, which is coming out next month.

So it started like that, and then around 2007, I started writing my first book on African music, and I've written about 10 more books on the subject, dedicating books to Ghana music, Burkina Faso music, Mali music, as well as Benin music, which came out last year. I have done a lot of compilations and reissue work, and while doing research in Burkina Faso a few years ago, I first met the great singer Amadou Ballak, and also Sory Sanl, a kind of unsung photographer from Bobo-Dioulasso, which is further south than the capital city, Ouagadougou.

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Exactly. They are the same presentation, Basically, I've written books in the past on James Brown, rock 'n' roll, rhythm & blues, and funk and disco music, but I knew that something was missing in African music. So the last few books I've done are just dedicated to African music, and as a record collector, I pay a lot of attention to the record covers, the sleeves and the design, and the sound, how it was made, and how this recording came to circulate, and how they were distributed throughout Africa, and sometimes to Europe and the U.S. So I fell in love with all this information that comes together just reading liner notes, or looking up the sleeve from an old dusty African LP. Most of these books proceed from my own archives which I was lucky enough to gather doing so many trips to Africa. I go there every two or three months, at least four or five times a year for 14 or 15 years now.

Amen. And you are right. This is such a missing component in the literature. There are so few serious resources on African music. You were lucky to find a publisher willing to put all those books out.

It is a small, independent French publisher called Le Castor Astral, but still I managed to do at least four or five books with them about African music, and I've done other books as well with other publishers. I have one of them that was the catalog for the exhibit I curated at the Zinsou Foundation in Cotonou, Benin, last year, which was called "African Record." It wasn't the story of African music as such, it was the story of African records, and how these records came to circulate across Africa. It was bilingual, like the Ghana book, in both English and French. Most of the other books are only in French.

I do have a few. I think I have quite an extensive collection, and it's all classified country by country. For Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali and Senegal, I think I have 99 percent of the whole discography by now. I think these records are testimony to how prolific and exciting these musical scenes were at the time. Right now, nobody knows that in Burkina Faso, in Bobo-Dioulasso, Volta Jazz did over 30 seven-inch singles, which was totally unheard of at the time, and from a totally unheard of band, so it is quite amazing.

I do also collect 78s as well because I think they also laid out the basis. I think my 78 collection will start to be reissued, possibly with Numero Group, from Mali and Togo, Congo and Benin and Nigeria, and Ghana for sure.

And then came the coup, which was led by Thomas Sankara in 1983. Basically that made the country totally blocked from outside influence. Thomas Sankara, for everything else that he did, he basically killed the music and the culture there. There was a curfew for musicians, and he said that all concerts must be free, so musicians couldn't get any money, and basically the whole Voltaic scene, which I cherish so much slowly died away. Then after Sankara was killed by Blaise Compar in 1987, basically the music and the culture from that country became totally estranged. No one really knew what was going on over there.

When I met him about seven or eight years ago, he was just in his compound, just waiting for nothing, waiting for no one in particular. He hadn't recorded music in many, many years. That's how I got the idea and the opportunity to save some money and fly down there and gather a band of really young musicians, really talented ones, and just work like that, in one take. It was done in a movie hall in Ouagadougou, that we converted into a recording studio to get the live feeling, like the sound people had in the old Stax studio in Memphis. It wasn't that ambitious, because our means were really low, but still, you know, we made it pretty cool record.

And what was amazing is how Amadou Balak sang. Because he sang from his gut. These days, you have a lot of throat singers. They're doing some fancy stuff with their throats, but they don't really sing with their gut. Amadou Balak was from the old school, and although he wasn't born a griot, he knew his griot and Mandingo repertoire by heart. He could practice those songs. So basically, that record was a fusion of these influences. You have to understand that during most of this recording, he was sitting on a chair. He wasn't even up and in the microphone. So that was just a truly mesmerizing performance that he did on that record, and after that, I dubbed some keyboard parts. I had to come back to Ouagadougou, and basically, he died a few weeks after that. That's why it was titled In Conclusion. That was the last testimony of this wonderful voice. To me, Amadou Balak was in the top five male vocalists for African music ever.

He was just a giant, but so simple. He couldn't read, but he was one of the smartest people I have ever met. He could read your mind. He could read your eyes. He worked by instinct and by heart. It was just out of patience that he did this recording. And I think that's the sound that we wanted to get from him. That was an amazing moment for sure.

Let's talk about Bobo-Dioulasso. My first exposure to it was through my brother-in-law, who was in the Peace Corps there and always talked about it. Then I went there in 1996, driving from Bamako on a little adventure. I remember it as a lovely, peaceful town. But talk about it from a musical perspective. It was always the second city, I imagine, but in its prime, what was the music scene like there?

I think the scene in Bobo was pretty exciting. First and foremost, you have to understand that Bobo-Dioulasso is like Mali; it's like northern Ivory Coast. It's Mandingo country. Mandingo music. It doesn't have anything to do with the Warba and the Were music played up north in Burkina Faso. Bobo was a city filled with dancing, dance halls and bars and clubs. It was a big crossroad between Mali, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast. So it was a big market town. Like in the U.S., places like Memphis or New Orleans, a commercial hub gathers a lot of artists and musicians. So the Mandingo tradition was really important in Bobo-Dioulasso.

Then you had young entrepreneurs like Idrissa Kon, whom I had a chance to meet. He started both the Volta Jazz orchestra and the Volta Photo Studio, because he knew there was a sense of modernity to catch in many ways, and young people were craving to drive a car, to record some music, to listen to some records and to pose in fancy clothes in front of a photographer's lens. So this young guy Idrissa Kon started the whole cultural scene over there. So he enrolled and was a patron for many, many musicians.

You have to understand that Bobo, if it's rich and it's a commercial town with lots of markets and things like that, is also really fresh. You have a lot of lush vegetation. The trees are amazing, and the climate there is soft, really fresh compared to Ouagadougou where it can get really, really hot. In Bobo-Diaoulasso, people would go out to an open-air dance hall and dancing places, and they would party. Every Tuesday, you know, one of the bands was playing. Then Wednesday, maybe Dafra Star was playing somewhere else. And then on Thursday, the Leopards were playing somewhere else. And then on Friday you had this incredible band that was called Echo Del Afric National, which was playing somewhere else. So basically you had the new material of all these bands.

All these bands had their fans, and their patron as well. People would pay for them to record. They would pay for their fancy clothes. They would pay for them to get amplifiers and guitars and all of that. There was a lot of support from the local community for these Bobo musicians. Unfortunately, as I said, these bands never really came outside of the city. The only stayed in Bobo. Maybe Volta Jazz played a bit in the Ivory Coast, because they were recorded by a guy from there. And maybe Dafra Star played in Bamako, Mali. But that's how far they went.

They never really played tours or anything like that. The closest they came to that was during the FESTAC in Lagos in February 1977, where there was a big gathering of Voltaic Musicians led by Tidiane Coulibaly. And there were members of Echo Del Africa and Dafra Star and Volta Jazz representing the Voltaic delegation at the FESTAC in Lagos. Otherwise, unfortunately, this music never went outside the city limits. It was too local, and that has made it all the more fascinating, because there is a saying by Jean Renoir, the great moviemaker, which says, "The more local, the more universal." And that's what I hear in these songs, because they were remote. They didn't have great instrumentation or great recording studios or equipment or whatever, but still, they managed to sing with their guts, and to craft some incredible pop songs. To me, the Volta Jazz songs should be as well-known as any Beatles songs, or any Rolling Stones songs. Five or six decades later, it's just amazing to hear how crisp and how fresh and how dynamic this music still sounds. 152ee80cbc

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