Travelogue: West Africa with Sō Percussion
A week of experiences and epiphanies in our first trip to the continent
In December 2023, Sō Percussion toured Benin and Burkina Faso in West Africa with our colleague Olivier Tarpaga. We presented his fantastic new piece Fēfē, as well as some of our favorite recent repertoire. Upon returning from the trip, I journaled my memories of each day’s experiences, impressions, and insights before they faded. The experience was so rich and full of meaning that what was intended as a dispatch became a whole article.
So many friends, family, and sponsors have asked about our trip that I’m also hoping this article can serve as an account for all of them to read.
December 11th
After arriving from three flights in Benin and winding our way through customs, we spilled out of the airport with a dozen or so cases full of gear. We loaded them into the rack on top of the van that was sent to pick us up. At our hotel, Olivier Tarpaga, our colleague who arranged this trip, connected with our host Marcel Gbeffa, a choreographer and dancer who runs the Multicorps Festival in Cotonou. They found a place for us to have a late dinner, which was called, in English, the “Chill n’ Grill.” (Benin and the surrounding countries speak French and local indigenous languages).
We ordered food with Oliver’s and Marcel’s guidance (grilled fish with something on the side called pilon and local beers). We settled in to compare notes on our travels. This was at about one AM. When the food came out, I was delighted to see that my grilled fish was a whole grilled fish, clearly caught that day from the nearby coast. The pilon is a sort of hearty paste made from cassava which is starchy, spicy, and delicious. I couldn’t get enough of it. Everywhere we traveled in West Africa, the food was always homemade from scratch.
December 12
Since we had arrived at night, and the city was so sparsely lit, I had no real sense of what Cotonou looked like. The next morning, I awoke and opened my shutters to a flood of light and color. Palm trees, green bushes, and tropical flowers flowed into the courtyard. We took breakfast outside, with fresh local pineapple as the main attraction.
The lobby of the hotel had a few instruments strewn about as decoration, including a small balafon* that Jason improvised on while we waited to head out. We made a plan to drive to the venue, check out the rented instruments, and source a few instruments locally for Olivier’s piece such as the calabash (half of a dried-out gourd which is played like a drum but also can serve as a bowl and receptacle).
We drove to the venue, called Africa Sound City, through a bustling and chaotic Cotonou. The roads were a bumpy mixture of dirt and paved; motorcycles with families of two or three (and even four) whizzed past our van, dodging in and out of traffic. I noticed that few businesses by the side of the road had any kind of corporate branding, and most were of tin-roof construction: almost all the business seemed to be local business. In the center of the city is one of their most breathtaking landmarks – an enormous statue commemorating the famous Dahomey “Amazon” all-female military regiment, who existed in Benin from the 1600s to the 1800s.
Africa Sound City is a two-story club with two stages and a restaurant. The bottom floor with the main stage houses a restaurant and is decorated with photos of notable Black entertainers from all over the world. The second floor, where we played, was up a strangely steep staircase, and was mostly open-air with colorful banners hanging from the rafters.
When we met the proprietor, a man named Jah Baba, we learned that he works part time teaching in the USA near our studio in Brooklyn. Most of the artists we met there had a presence in the US: Olivier Tarpaga is our colleague in Princeton, Marcel was a Fulbright scholar who taught for a year at SUNY Purchase, and our host Aguibou Sanou in Bobo-Diolassou has a tenure-track position teaching dance at Grinnell College in Iowa. Each of them splits their time between teaching in the USA and running festivals and venues back home in Africa. So our first encounter with a local artist involved him saying “oh great I’ll be in Brooklyn in February, we will have to meet up!”
Not only is the artistic exchange between the USA and West Africa more fluid than one might imagine, but these artists are immersed in trends of contemporary performance in the USA. I had the sense that we were just part of an ongoing exchange, although fewer artists come this way from the USA to Africa.
Much of music that we performed on this tour was from our standard repertoire. We featured Olivier Tarpaga’s new piece Fēfē, which we had recently premiered at Carnegie Hall in early December. Fēfē is a contemporary percussion quartet that draws from Olivier’s experiences as a drummer in Burkina Faso. The last movement is for five-octave marimba, which is a descendent of the various types of balafon that originated in Africa.
The marimba/balafon movement is called “The Dusty Road to Dolo,” after the small village that Olivier’s grandmother comes from. In turns out that most balafon playing in Burkina Faso is one to an instrument, but in this village, they play a larger instrument with multiple players on a single balafon in different registers. During the process of composing for marimba, Olivier one day suddenly realized that he was unconsciously recalling the music he heard in this village as a child. The movement, which we play last in the four-movement sequence, has a special kind of poignance for this reason.
At our first concert of this tour, we were about to try a new idea: adapting a marimba piece inspired by balafon back onto balafon. Manufactured marimbas don’t really exist in this part of Africa for the obvious reason that they are not needed! Tuning-wise, this means finding an instrument tuned to a diatonic scale (the white keys on a piano), instead of one in a pentatonic scale (the black keys on a piano). If we have a couple of octaves of any natural minor scale (A-A white keys on the keyboard), we can play the piece.
Throughout Fēfē, Olivier makes strategic choices to distinguish his percussion quartet from its West African influences. This includes taking material from djembe hand drumming and transferring it to amplified table. Even when we play “The Dusty Road to Dolo” on balafon, Olivier still wants us to play with our own rubber mallets and the unusual sound of pencils wrapped in moleskin, something that would never occur in traditional contexts.
Upon arrival at the venue, we inspected the balafons that had been sourced for us. One of them had exactly what we needed: two and a half octaves of diatonic notes. The next challenge we faced was that western keyboard instruments are based on the layout of the piano, with the groups of two and three accidentals (C#, D#, and F#,G#,A#) as key to visual orientation of where C is.;
Balafons are set up differently: each note follows the other in an undifferentiated sequence on one register, so a completely different mode of hand-eye coordination is required. By the second performance, we solved this problem by placing little pieces of tape at our home keys for visual orientation.
These balafons were closer in sound to western xylophones than marimbas – they had a short, sharp sound and required more powerful stroke. Because of the smaller range, we also chose to stand on opposite sides of the instrument rather than all on one side. Having only one register of bars made this easier on balafonthan it would be on marimba.
Here is our first attempt at making this idea work:
At this first concert, we didn’t know what reaction to expect from the audience, and we were intimidated to play instruments like talking drum and balafon for them. We shouldn’t have worried, for two reasons: 1) The audience appreciated Olivier’s taste in how he employed these instruments, and 2) as we were to find throughout the trip, these festivals, which feature mostly dance, are presenting very avant-garde work.
We opened with band member Eric Cha-Beach’s 4+9, an exploration of a single nine-beat pattern (3+2+2+2) and all the mathematical ways it can be multiplied and divided. We play the piece on a single metal pipe each, alternating between a resonant sound which is achieved by holding the pipe very lightly, and a short non-resonant sound yielded by closing the fingers around the pipe. While talking to audience members afterwards, many of them expressed appreciation for the piece for “four bells,” which in local usage meant something like the metal cowbell and agogo bell instruments which form the heart of the patterning in much African – and by extension much Caribbean and South American – music.
The crowds in each venue seemed to warm up to Olivier’s piece, with its West African references. The end of the first movement involves us splitting off from the amplified table to play calabash, talking drum, bell, and water calabash (a calabash which is placed upside-down in a bucket of water). Olivier calls this the “Afrobeat” section, and it is the first music in the piece that is recognizably West African. Olivier made a number of small tweaks to the way we play, such as having me play talking drum with a metal thimble on my finger rather than with the long curved stick that is traditional.
Bryce Dessner’s Music for Wood and Strings was the perfect closing piece for these concerts. The modified electric guitar instruments and the ping-ponging rhythms are exciting and accessible wherever we perform them.
*the word balafon includes the French suffix -fon (like English -phone), and some musicians here prefer the word bala without this ending as more authentic and less colonial. Olivier says Balafon so I will continue to use it here, but I thought the difference was worth noting.
December 13
On this tour, we performed four shows in five days, which was a demanding itinerary for our first time in the region. Although much of our time was spent traveling and setting up for shows, on the morning of the second concert in Benin we visited the nearby town of Ouidah.
Ouidah is the site of the ancestral home of the Vodun religion (more commonly and problematically known as “voodoo” in our culture), as well as site of the second largest slave market and port of departure in Africa for the horrific middle passage during the era of the slave trade. One million people were kidnapped, tortured, and shipped from Ouidah between the 1600s and the late 1800s.
Our tour guide led us along the various stages of the path that enslaved people were forced to tread before being loaded onto the ships. They encouraged us to take photos, as there are now many memorials and works of art onsite to commemorate this history. The one that feels appropriate to share is of this magnificent centuries-old tree which towers over the main square of the “market.”
This tree and others like it have stood in this location for many years. A Portuguese fort looms behind the tree, home to the overseers of the market. Our tour guide was unsparing while describing the atrocities committed here. The sadistic tools that enslavers and local accomplices used to subjugate, disorient, and demoralize captives were designed with acute awareness of the vulnerabilities of human psychology in mind.
The government of Benin seems to be developing this site further as a memorial for tourists to visit, akin to museums at sites of other atrocities such as Auschwitz. Everywhere we went in both Benin and Burkina, we saw evidence of huge infrastructure projects by Chinese construction companies. As we walked among the relatively humble memorial locations, huge bulldozers moved earth, and the signs around the site were unmistakably Chinese. We saw a sprawling hospital being built in Burkina, as well as plans for a gleaming new airport in Lomé, Togo.
After our somber trip to the memorial sites, we had a somewhat more light-hearted visit to the Temple des Pythons, the ancestral home of Vodun. Our previous guide handed us off to the temple guide, who provided us with a brief overview of the mythology and cosmology of Vodun in Africa (the version of Vodun that became prevalent in Haiti merged via forced conversion with Roman Catholicism).
He described it as a nature-worshipping religion and explained that snakes were a sacred animal. He characterized it as a peaceful practice oriented around positive thoughts and emotions, after which his assistant brought out a docile python for us to hang around our necks (the big photo op). Then we proceeded into the temple, a small domed room with brightly colored murals depicting Vodun rituals all around the inside of the dome. About a dozen pythons were lazing on the floor. I admit that I had never been this close to such large snakes without some kind of barrier, and it was a little disconcerting. Eric nearly jumped out of his skin when I stepped backwards unaware of the python right behind me on the floor.
That evening, we performed at a cultural center outside of Cotonou that was located on an impossibly picturesque beach. At first, our driver couldn’t find the entrance because there was so much construction going on around it.
The previous night we had winged it a little bit with the balafon adaptation. I was not personally happy with my performance, so I developed the trick of putting tape down on the home key to continually re-orient myself. I also had mis-identified where the mode should start – it was off by one note the first night - and fixed where on the instrument we would be playing.
The second performance came off brilliantly. We substituted Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood for Eric’s piece and performed “Story” from John Cage’s Living Room Music, which I think was kind of a hoot for a French-speaking audience.
December 14th- 15th
After two nights in Benin, we set off for Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, Olivier’s hometown. Burkina Faso has endured political instability and jihadist terror attacks in recent years, so we spent months preparing for this trip with the American embassy (they were extremely friendly and helpful). They encouraged us to come but offered commonsense guidelines to follow. Olivier grew up here, visits for months each year, and he was with us every step of the way.
One of the hazards of touring with a percussion group is that our menagerie of instruments and cases looks a bit odd, and sometimes even suspicious. The toughest and best-fitting cases for Bryce Dessner’s “chord stick” instruments are rifle cases, and our sound engineer Nelson Dorado travels with expensive microphones, consoles, and other gadgets. Usually, we are asked what is in the cases, but in Burkina our intrepid tour manager Kelly Watkins was asked to step into a customs office with Olivier to account for everything.
I felt safe in Ouagadougou, but every hotel, restaurant, and venue we visited had security screening and armed police. The officers were unfailingly respectful, polite, and occasionally even eager to try out their English (“Welcome, we are happy you are here”). Our gig the next day was at the Choreographic Dance Center (CDC), performing on the Dialogues des Corps festival, which features mostly dance. The CDC has a standard black box theater with a sound system.
Preceding our late performance, we attended a premiere of a new work by Wilfried Souly, an old friend of Olivier’s. Like Olivier, “Willie” seems equally accomplished as both a musician and choreographer. He is a master performer on the dun dun drums, but tonight we were seeing the premiere of a new dance piece.
This is one of the most striking cultural differences between Africa and the west: in most of sub-Saharan Africa, music and dance are interwoven so completely that artists frequently practice both at an extremely high level. In Kofi Agawu’s book The African Imagination in Music, he claims that most indigenous languages in Africa do not even have a dedicated word for music, but that music is referred to obliquely through reference to dance or song. I checked with Olivier, who confirmed that this is true in his first language.
In practice, this means that many of the artists we met were versed in both, and that the initiatives they pursued in the USA depended on what opportunities came up (Olivier impressively had a new chamber music composition premiered at Carnegie Hall and a New York Times top ten pick for his dance company’s run at the Joyce Theater in one year. I can’t think of a westerner with a similar accomplishment).
The ongoing concern every time we play is whether we are too “weird.” Willie’s piece was thrillingly avant-garde. The first half of the work occurred in near-silence, and felt almost like a Merce Cunningham work, except with more of an African default movement vocabulary rather than ballet or Martha Graham. The second half featured sound clips from Black Lives Matter protesters interwoven with Donald Trump and other political figures. This was another surreal moment of cultural proximity, where I felt like I could have easily been watching the premiere of a piece in Princeton or New York.
For our concert afterwards, Olivier brought some of his local collaborators in as guests on his piece Fēfē,acting as conductor. We had already met some of the musicians in Princeton. The set was mostly the same as the last two nights, with a beautiful Burkina balafon that was appropriately tape-marked for the performance. We also added the movement “Much More” from Nathalie Joachim’s piece Note to Self, which was written for us. After the concert, we all visited Olivier’s house for a feast of home cooked food that his mother and sister had prepared for us: chicken, cous-cous, meatballs, braised vegetables, and more.
December 16th
After one travel day and the performance in Ouagadougou, we ventured forth to our final gig in Bobo-Dioulasso. We originally had planned to fly between the two cities, but the flights we wanted weren’t available. During the drive through rural Burkina Faso, we passed through several security checkpoints, but it was a vivid way to experience the countryside. Ougadougou is in the center of the country, going towards the desert, while Bobo is in the southwest, closer to the tropical climate of Benin.
This was a tight trip. We planned to drive five and a half hours, set up and play that night, then drive all the way back the next morning. During the ride, I asked Olivier a few questions about his work considering all that I had seen here. His answer to my first question surprised me but was revealing in its forcefulness. I asked, in Willie’s piece from the night before, what elements of movement he could identify from traditional African dance? I don’t remember what he said word-for-word, but it was some version of “It’s a contemporary piece, and whatever is in his language as a choreographer is in there, but there isn’t a deliberate effort to incorporate traditional dance.”
Olivier has told us many times that “Africa is contemporary,” which I’ve always taken to be a form of pushback against the impulse -- either overt or well-meaning but unconscious -- to freeze Africa in an unchanging past, refusing to see the messy, evolving reality that it represents today. His answer was friendly but assertive, and his reaction reminded me of how I feel when I am asked rote questions about percussion practice over and over.
Bobo is a sprawling, flat city, with one wide and copiously dusty main road threading right down the center. We knew we were playing an outdoor show at the In and Out Dance Festival, and that our contact Aguibou Sanou had rented the gear and sound equipment, but little else. Eventually, the cars pulled into a long side street full of sand perpendicular to the main road. We exited our cars and walked towards a crowd of people gathered in a circle. We could hear music and see flashes of movement over the tops of the heads in the crowd. Moving closer, we saw a performance of drummers with dancers. A single talking drum player was out in front playing expertly, and about eight to twelve women were performing fast foot movements, waving colorful red banners behind them.
As we inched closer to the performance time on the itinerary, I could see that Nelson was nervous that we hadn’t even unloaded the truck yet. But we had long since fallen into the rhythm of events here and tried our best to go with the flow.
Sanou was leading a small parade down the sandy street. He invited us to sit down in the seats by the side of the road. It was here that we met Jaime Loda, the cultural attaché from the US Embassy in Burkina Faso.
Yet again, we experienced a fascinating cultural mixture of old and new. After the serenade by the parade ensemble of drummers, we witnessed a dance performance by a youth troupe using oil barrels as props. They walked along the top of them, spun and rolled them on the ground, and even threw them at each other. At one point, Kelly was recruited into joining a group of children running and spinning around the giant pylon that had been created by stacking them vertically.
Finally, it was time for us to set up. The best way to describe the scene is that we were setting up a full Sō Percussion show on a beach volleyball court. As was usual here, we had a minimal amount of light. Sanou switched our performance time around to give us plenty of time to set up. Eventually, miraculously, we had it all together: two movements of Olivier, Dessner’s Music for Wood and Strings, Steve Reich’s Music for Pieces of Wood, and Jason’s Extremes. Some of the best photos and videos from the entire tour came out of this show, which was held underneath a fulsome tree (I think it is a Shea tree). The audience of all ages was attentive and respectful, a rarity for us at outdoor concerts.
Playing for audiences in Africa induced a strange sense of calm in me. In the United States and Europe, I still feel the need to sell the concept of percussion music to audiences. Here, there was more of a sense of how we made all-percussion music, not whether it was a legitimate thing to do. I imagined that this was what it was like to play a Beethoven symphony in Vienna, or jazz in New Orleans. I felt respected by these audiences. I don’t think our tour could have been as successful without Olivier’s piece. It was the perfect cultural bridge, a signal that we were willing to spend some time immersed directly in their musical ideas.
After this exhausting whirlwind, the trip home was long and difficult. But writing this travelogue, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for how it jolted my perspective. Each day on this trip contained a week’s worth of insights and new experiences, and this writing is about twice as long as I expected it to be.
In particular, the process of adapting Olivier’s movement for the balafon opened a new vein of deeper insight and curiosity for me as a percussionist. It pulled those related practices out of the past and closer to home. Many of my colleagues, such as the great Russell Hartenberger, undertook these investigations early in their careers. Because of the trajectory of my own career, and a graduate study intensely focused on western classical music, I’m getting there later. I suppose one of the gifts and curses of percussion playing is that I will never have enough time to chase down every instrument I want to learn how to play, or to investigate every style of music that fascinates me.
Over breakfast on the morning after our last concert, Olivier said to me “now that you’ve been here, everything is different.” That’s how I feel, exactly.
Thank you for such an insightful and detailed post, Adam. What a life changing experience, and I am so happy that you guys got to live it!