It’s Music Monday, and you know what that means. It’s another All Things Considered Turntable where we catch up with the GBH music connoisseur and hear what’s on their playlist.
And now we’re going to do a musical Möbius strip with GBH’s Marco Werman, starting with a new remix of an old track from Cameroon. Then we’ll bounce back to the United States before connecting these sounds to a track from Egypt. Are you ready for liftoff?
Marco Werman: This just came out last month. It’s a new remix of an old track from Cameroon from the legendary artist Francis Bebey.
[“Forest Nativity – Red Axes Edit” — Francis Bebey, Red Axes]
Arun Rath: Nice, and you’ll tell us more about him in a moment, but talk about this remix and what we’re hearing on this new release.
Werman: So the remix, like the original, is titled “Forest Nativity - Remix” and was remixed by a production duo out of Tel Aviv named Red Axes. They blend disco and house and psychedelic. This track is just one part of a whole remix project taking classic tracks by Francis Bebey. The remixes are on the label Africa 7, hence they’re known as the Africa 7 edits.
What’s cool about these remixes is that they just remind us of the genius of this late Cameroonian musician, Francis Bebey. He died in 2001, and he produced the original version of these songs.
Now, depending on your interest and hobbies, Arun, there’s this great video that the algorithm may have sent your way. It shows Francis Bebey, I want to say back in the ’80s, explaining how his music was influenced by the culture of Pygmy people in Cameroon that he spent a lot of time learning from. And in the video, he’s both playing the Pygmy flute and singing. Have a listen.
Francis Bebey recording: It’s a bamboo flute playing only one note. That’s the only note you can get out of that flute. But the Pygmies, who are the inventors of this flute, are clever people. You ask the flute to speak to you, and the flute says something like... and you reply to the flute by saying...
Rath: Wow, that is amazing. And I got to say, Marco, actually, I missed that. I’ve heard a fair amount of Nigerian music, but I almost know nothing about the music of Cameroon. That’s amazing.
Werman: Yeah, very, very old traditional music. I mean, the best way I can describe this is kind of like auto call and response. If we listen to the original version of Francis Bebey’s “Forest Nativity,” you’ll hear how he used that technique he’d borrowed from Pygmy culture.
Francis Bebey recording: Awaken to life, my child. Come, the whole forest is expecting you...
Rath: Marco, that is wild. I mean, it sounds so modern, is what I’d say. It sounds good. It’s out there.
Werman: Yeah, it is impossible not to pick up on the kind of trippy sonic landscape Bebey is creating in 1982, coming out of the ’70s. Someone like Bebey, who’s traveling between Yaoundé and Paris, equally influenced by the sounds of his native Cameroon and what was happening musically in the West, but all over the globe.
So Francis Bebey, a musician and a researcher, really an academic, a scholar of Cameroonian Indigenous music. In a way, he discovered in his own country. The roots of what is today called beatboxing, an expression of two sounds coming from different parts of the human body, in this case, the voice box and blowing into a flute.
We can hear how other artists have picked up on that. You hear it in Bobby McFerrin’s music, also Herbie Hancock. He had listened to field recordings of this technique and you hear it in the opening to his cover of “Watermelon Man” that he recorded with his band Headhunters.
[“Watermelon Man” — The Headhunters]
Rath: That’s so wild to listen back to this, Marco, because this is one of my favorite Herbie Hancock albums, and I had no idea that’s where this is coming from. I mean, this is... We haven’t even gotten to the melody of “Watermelon Man.” It sounds very different from the original one that most people know. That’s wild.
Werman: Yeah, no, when I discovered this, just like a few weeks ago, my mind was blown. I mean, you’re right, it takes the band a while to get to the “Watermelon Man” theme, but the influence of Cameroon and Francis Bebey on Herbie Hancock’s fusion jazz and that mouth and flute introduction. It’s just unmistakable.
So, I did promise that we would connect all this back to Egypt. So, here’s a track called “Egypt Strut” from a group known as Salah Ragab and The Cairo Jazz Band.
[“Egypt Strut” — Salah Ragab, The Cairo Jazz Band]
Rath: So it’s funny, that’s got to sound a bit closer to the original version of “Watermelon Man.”
Werman: Yeah, I love stories like this. So, Salah Ragab in 1968, he was the leader of the military music department in Heliopolis, Egypt, the Egyptian military. That was when he decided to form the first jazz big band in Egypt, The Cairo Jazz Band. So, we have Records Tour Day in 2021 and the Prism record label to thank for uncovering this track, and a bunch of others from The Cairo Jazz Band’s recording sessions.
These happened in the years 1968 to ‘73. And the connection, obviously, you heard it to where we just were, “Watermelon Man,” composed by Mongo Santa Maria. You hear it so obviously when they get to the hook, it’s just instead of the beat that forms watermelon, man, you hear this cool Arabic maqam piano feature.
So, there you go. There’s your global Möbius strip, Arun.
