I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: AMADOU AND MARIAM-Tiny Desk Concert #695 (January 19, 2018).

Amadou & Mariam are musicians from Mali.  And they have a pretty fascinating history.

The story of Amadou and Mariam is still worth telling almost 40-years (and eight albums) into their career because it speaks well to who they are, the obstacles they’ve had to overcome and the positive yet realistic attitude that has made them such an international success. Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia met when they were children in Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind. Both had lost their sight when they were young and they began performing together. Later, in the 1980s, they married and began a career together.

As Amadou and Mariam said when their newest album, La Confusion was released, “We seek to make people happy with our music, help humanitarian causes and share positive messages about the good work being done by people in every corner of the world.”  Amadou & Mariam  bring some of the most lyrical melodies and joyful sounds we’ve ever had at the Tiny Desk, and their performance comes while their country endures great turmoil, including a coup and insurgencies.

Typically, they play with a bigger band but they stripped down their sound to a keyboard, a percussionist and a backup singer while the couple holds it all together with Amadou’s stuttered melodic guitar and Mariam’s sweetly gruff voice.

They play three songs.

“Bofou Safou” has a great slinky keyboard opening melody.  Amadou plays this cool understated guitar that’s pretty much always in motion But mostly I love watching the drummer pound on that giant gourd thing.

I love the clothes that Mariam and Amadou are wearing–a cool purple on blue pattern with each of the outfits made from the same material, but with the stripes going in different directions on each.

“Dimanche à Bamako.” opens with more of that cool riffing from Amadou and the audience clapping along.  Amadou actually sings leads on most of this song.

“Filaou Bessame” opens pretty big and clappy with a kind of disco feel to it.  It slows down in the middle with Mariam taking a little vocal section before it starts up again.  I love the discoey bass keyboard riff at the end.

The music from Mali is really fun and I’d love to see a show like this live.

[READ: July 21, 2016] “Inventions”

This story was translated from the Yiddish by Aliza Shevrin.  Singer died in 1991, so I’m not sure if this is a recently found story or an old one.

What’s particularly fascinating about this story is thew way it is framed.  The narrator says that since he moved to the country, he finds that he falls asleep by ten o’clock and he sleeps soundly until about 2 AM.  He feels totally rested and ready to do something.

One night he was inspired to create a story.  It would be about a Communist theoretician who attends a leftist conference on world peace and sees a ghost.

So he just summed up what his story would be about and then he proceeds to tell the story.  But it is told very casually–as a man retelling a dream, rather than as someone writing a short story.

The communist Morris Krakiwer defends Stalin and presents an excellent speech on the first night of the conference.

But that night, while falling asleep in the hotel, he feels the blanket pulled off of his bed.  He wakes and turns on the light several times but sees nothing.  He is mad at himself for being afraid, but he cannot explain it.

Is it a hallucination?  A dream?  There is no evidence of anyone there.

After the third or fourth time of this happening, the word Ghost pops into his head.  But that would undermine everything he believes in.  Can there really be demon?  If so then everything falls apart.

What’s interesting is that the narrator interrupts his own story to tell about a dream he had–he hid in a dark space and he hears creatures crawling around.  He tries to flee but realizes he has left something important back in the room.  It becomes so hard to get back there that he knows it must be a dream. And when he wakes himself up he realizes he has to go to the bathroom: “What an involved way to let a person know that he has to urinate!”

Then he gets back to his story.  The blanket is pulled down again, but this time he sees the image of Comrade Damschak, a traitor to the cause who vanished.   But how can this have happened?

What can Morris Krakower say to himself to make this all okay?

The final line is a nice tidy summation of everything we’ve seen, although we never do hear anything more about the narrator’s own sleeping patterns.