Mory Kanté – My Thoughts and Reflections on “Akwaba Beach” and the origins of “Yeke Yeke”

I first met Mory in early 1987, in Paris, where we constructed and routined the piece of music that would eventually become the European Number 1 hit “Yeke Yeke”. Three English guys and a Mandinka musician from Guinea, at the start of a creative experiment. More about this later, firstly some background of the circumstances that led to this collaboration.

SOME BACKGROUND

 I met record producer Nick Patrick some time in 1984/5; he would book the studio I then owned in South London for some of his music projects. He had graduated to the producer’s chair from his background in audio engineering, so he had the technical knowledge; what first made an impression on me were his people skills, perhaps the most important hat a producer must wear. I played keyboards on some of these sessions, which would set the scene for later collaborations. At some stage he invited me to be part of a project that was about to commence in France. We would be meeting a guy called Mory Kanté, originally from Guinea, West Africa, and listen to his music.

 On our flight to Paris I first met Roland “Roley” Kerridge, a drummer and drum programmer, with whom I would work many times in subsequent years, and who also became a great friend. Once checked in to a hotel, the three of us went to Mory’s apartment, where we listened to various tunes over a few days, some on vinyl from his previous work, some on cassette, which were new ideas in progress. We began to figure out how we could combine our musical skills on the project.

PRE-PRODUCTION

 Before meeting Mory I had only a little knowledge of the tradition from which he came; Topic Records had previously released some recordings performed by Mandinka (a.k.a Manding/Mandingo) musicians, which I’d heard some years before, and which added context to what Mory played for us at those first meetings. Mory Kanté was part of that same tradition, part of a family of “griots”, a French word signifying a group of people who tell stories and history through their music, some of that music evolving over centuries of performance. Much of the music is based on the “call and response” structure, where the solo performer “calls” the story through singing and playing, the “response” often coming from a chorus of singers and answering improvisations on the instruments. Central to the sound of the genre are the kora and the balafon; Mory was already well known as a kora virtuoso. His musical feet were also firmly planted in funk, soul, and other Westernised forms, a fusion perhaps that musical purists would deride; we would be tempting more derision from said purists by adding electronic and techno elements!

 I got my first close-up look at the 21-string kora at this time, and was fascinated to see how it was played and tuned. Later on I realised that many tropes of Mandinka music were defined by the tunings and scales of the instruments, as well as the compositions and performances of the griots (a.k.a “jali”), and there would be an inevitable evolution of my ideas regarding parallel Western modes when creating the fusion between us. One of the tracks we listened to on cassette was called “Yekeke”, around ten minutes long, featuring kora, balafon, guitar, percussion with voices male (solo - call) and female (chorus - response); we gathered that this tune (or similar arrangements) would have been hundreds of years old.

So the first task was to deconstruct the traditional piece into sections, and then reassemble into a more commercial and “radio friendly” arrangement. Musically there are only two chords in “Yeke Yeke”, C minor and G minor in Western parlance, although this is quite a simplistic analysis as the piece is also modal, due in large part to the tuning of the kora and the interlinked harmonic language of Mandinka. Having heard the “original” version both Nick and I were desperately keen to not destroy the narrative structure of the song, and we asked Mory many times whether our edits would make a nonsense of the story. He was generally reassuring in this; eventually a rough and shorter structure emerged and the process continued across other pieces that Mory had us listen to. There was a keyboard at the apartment, Roley played a little percussion, Mory sang and I seem to remember that Nick recorded some of the ideas to a Walkman cassette for reference.

 I think we spent three or four days on this part of the production; the three of us then returned to England for other work, but in March 1987 we returned to France for the studio recordings.

THE RECORDINGS

 “Studio Venus” at d’Huison-Longueville was the recording studio. Situated about 30km south of Paris the studio was located in the former stable block of the chateau where we also stayed. The studio featured good-sized control and live rooms; most of the preliminary recordings were done in the control room. Roley and I set up our instruments and hardware; Roley played an Octapad connected to a Linn 9000 sequencer and an Akai sampler. I used a Yamaha DX7 as a master keyboard connected to various modules – e.g. an Akai S900, Yamaha TX816. Because we were working 24-track analogue we sync’d EBU timecode from the 24-track to a Roland SBX-80 that became the master MIDI clock to both Roley’s and my setups, Roley programming through the Linn, me programming through a Roland MC500. I also used my Prophet 5 and MiniMoog, which feature heavily on the album, but not as part of the initial programming setup, as they didn’t have MIDI interfaces.

 Referring to the cassettes previously made at Mory’s place I constructed bar charts of the tunes. The first few passes of “Yeke Yeke” were to nail the tempo, allow for Roley to come up with the drum part while I played guide chords on the keys and Mory sang guide vocals in the live room – more on Mory’s concept of “guide” later... this was one of the most experimental parts of the entire process, as the arrangement constantly evolved as we were performing. One of the great things about this recording in my opinion is that although sequencing was the way of storing the data, the foundation of every track was a live performance of both drums and keys. Very little was committed to actual tape though at the early stage.

 “Yeke Yeke” is built on a four on the floor bass drum, back-beat snare and sixteenth note percussion in what has now come to be known as Euro-house (although I hadn’t heard the term at the time). Once the arrangement was set, then the drum/percussion parts were recorded first, along with the synth bass part, which Mory and I composed. Most of the tracks on the album were arranged and recorded this way, performing into our respective sequencers before putting those performances on tape.

 On the subject of Mory’s guide performances – perhaps through language miscommunication he initially wasn’t aware that he was singing as a “shape” for the tunes, so the first time he was asked to sing the proper vocal there was a sense of bafflement from him – as far as he was concerned it was already recorded! Once we’d had a laugh about the confusion he knew that it was time for “La Bonne Guide” as he put it; some of those guides became the master vocals, on “Inch Allah” for example, it being an improvisation we built the music around. With that in mind Nick was careful to get the mic/vocal sound right from day 1.

 Although drums and bass were sequenced and sync’d, a lot of the other keyboard parts were performed direct to tape; the Prophet and MiniMoog having no interfaces to sync. The brass synth on “Yeke Yeke” was played with a live delay/echo, using the Prophet, and the bass synth a combination of sampled MiniMoog for the low end, and FM synth from the TX modules for edge.

 The intonation and harmonic overtones of the balafon didn’t sit in the track, so I sampled a few notes from the instrument and played it from the keyboard. While doing this I learnt something from Mory that has stayed with me ever since – the concept of counting in his genre is quite different from the Western one of a time signature defining a structure. We can of course listen with Western ears to “Yeke Yeke” and for us it will be in 4/4 time, but as far as Mory was concerned, the harmonic instruments would wait for their own down-beat, or “one” to know when to start playing – I guess this is a kind of polyrhythmic analysis, as the down-beat might actually be perceived as an off-beat to Western ears – his explanation to me being that the foundation of many of the Mandinka patterns is the natural world – the birds and creatures of the jungle, sounds of the Earth and of the human heart – all create their own rhythms and shapes; listening to the “one” became the basis for quite a few of what I would have otherwise referred to as off-beat keyboard parts, and became a valuable performance aid for humanising the otherwise techno grooves.

KEYBOARDS AND SAMPLES

 Subsequent to the rhythm track, and the preliminary vocal shape, I added textures from the keyboards, initially harmonic – a pad or two, then some other rhythmic parts – an electric piano riff, the balafon sequence, and a rhythmic brass synth, which has featured on some of the remixes – more later. These were a combination of played and sequenced sounds – we all agreed that the “pull” between the computer and the performance was key to the feel of the track – add in kora, backing vocals, guitars and live percussion, and there was “Une Bonne Groove” as Mory put it. Here also the sampler was used to tidy up some of the real brass – Mory had a composer’s ear for what I would describe as some pretty fiendish brass parts! – on the sessions we sampled some of the tighter (better performed) riffs into the Akai, which I doubled with brass samples to create the sound of the record.

REFLECTIONS

 I believe that the making of this recording was a great creative clash and collaboration between musicians from totally different backgrounds and disciplines. It brought together ancient (living) performance traditions with what was then cutting edge music technology, in a glorious melting pot, from which emerged “Yeke Yeke”, and the other fine music of “Akwaba Beach”. I believe that this fusion explored new ground (we were obviously aware of Paul Simon’s collaborations with the great South African musicians, also Peter Gabriel, Joe Zawinul et al), and the subsequent success of the record was if nothing else a popular vindication of the project – the first “African” single to sell over a million copies, number one in several European countries in 1988. Any brief look at online music platforms will unearth a plethora of remixes, so the track still has legs, so to speak, over thirty years since its first performance.

It is very important to remember that in no way should this record be considered a form of cultural appropriation – all involved were hugely enthusiastic participants in the exploration and realisation of this music. I have over time been accused of being party to a post-colonial and exploitative mindset regarding this project (and the follow up album “Touma”; a tale for another time), but I leave such pointless imputations to the musicologists – we just had loads of fun! Ultimately I’m happy and proud to have been part of the project that produced this landmark piece of World Music.

R.I.P. Mory, and dear Roley too; I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to share time on this planet with you guys and make music together.