John Williams [guitar]

John Williams [guitar]

JOHN WILLIAMS'S AFRICAN JOURNEY

The Guitarist and Friends Explore the Mother Continent's Music on The Magic Box
Throughout his four-decade career, classical guitarist John Williams has shown a healthy appetite for music making beyond the bounds of the classics. There have been notable forays into folk, jazz, flamenco, and even art-rock, and now his adventurous spirit has taken him to Africa. The Magic Box, a collection of pieces based on traditional styles from across the continent, is the fruit of that musical exploration. It's another collaborative effort from the gregarious guitarist, with performances from percussionist Paul Clarvis, jazz guitarist John Etheridge, Richard Harvey on woodwinds, Chris Laurence on double bass, and especially Cameroon native Francis Bebey, who sings and plays the thumb piano in addition to composing 5 of the 15 tracks. Williams shares composer's credit, too, with a pair of pieces, along with the Congo's Jean Bosco Mwenda, Madagascar's Rossy, Cape Verde's Vasco Martins, and others. He took time to speak about the album with Barnes & Noble.com's EJ Johnson.

Barnes & Noble.com: You've had a wide-ranging career, and this certainly isn't your first venture away from the classical world. So what drew you to African music?

John Williams: I've always loved African music going back years and years, both instrumental music and the singing and drumming. But the new factor for me was that I'd heard a lot of kora music, the West African harp/lute. It's the most identifiable sound of West African music, in particular the area covered by the old Mali empire -- Mali, Guinea, the Gambia. And also, I met Francis Bebey from Cameroon, who's a kind of father of African music. I met him actually about 20 years ago in Paris, and we'd sort of lost touch. It's only when this idea came up, when I got real interested in the guitar connection in Africa and the background to it, that I saw him again. That was about four years ago, and we struck up a really lovely relationship. He died, sadly, last year, but the interesting thing about Francis was that, being totally an African musician, his first instrument had been the classical guitar in the 1930s when he was a boy in Cameroon.

B&N.com: Well, the guitar is used in traditional African music, is it not?

JW: It is in the last 100 years. And guitar-like instruments, of course, go back further there than they do in Europe or anywhere else.

B&N.com: How did you go about collecting these pieces in particular?

JW: I've just been buying lots of CDs and listening to a lot of the different music from Mali, Zaire, Zimbabwe. You know, there's an enormous collection you can get and listen to. For instance, there was a guitarist who was very famous throughout Africa in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s called Jean Bosco Mwenda. He was a sort of steel-string acoustic guitarist/blues singer who Pete Seeger and a lot of the American guitarists of the '60s were very influenced by and knew. He was recorded by a great musicologist called Hugh Tracey, and I had that old recording. So, you know, the source of my material has come from a very wide range of things, because the guitar is all over Africa.

B&N.com: I wouldn't call this album a survey, though; it seems more like a collection of pieces that you especially liked for one reason or another. It other words, you didn't try to be inclusive, did you?

JW: Exactly. No I didn't. One of the problems I had was that there is so much music, I thought at one stage I might stick to just the music of West Africa, maybe a lot of Francis Bebey's music from Cameroon -- which is composed music, but on traditional themes and dances and rhythms -- and music from Senegal, kora-based music. But then there's these other pieces by Mwenda and the little themes and dance rhythms I've picked up from Zimbabwe and others. And it was a question of, shall I resist doing that and try and be concentrated on one area? Or shall I just simply do a sort of representative selection of the music that I've really been lucky enough to find and basically love playing? And I thought I'd do that rather than get too heavy handed and specialist, you know.

B&N.com: They all seem so optimistic, these pieces.

JW: Well, that is a quality of African music, I think. I mean, it's awful to generalize. Obviously, in the vocal music they cover a whole range of human emotion just like anywhere else. But there is a general characteristic of happiness about African music. And that comes out in Francis Bebey's book [on African music and instruments] when he relates the stories and the myths of the ancestors and how they're expressed in traditional music. You tend to find storytelling on the one hand and celebration on the other. And it's quite "up" sort of music.

B&N.com: The title comes from Francis Bebey, does it not? What does it refer to?

JW: It's one of his pieces. I'm not sure in retrospect that it's a great title, to be honest. [laughs] It's kind of nice, and it has a nice meaning: magic box, unexpected things, that the guitar will be related to African music. The piece itself is originally a song and a guitar solo. It describes when Bebey was a boy in his village and the first wind-up gramophone arrived. And he says that the families had great arguments as to where the singer was. Was the singer in the box or on the little discs that they put in it? And they eventually decide that he's on the disc, because without the disc on the box, the box doesn't make any noise. That's a sweet sort of song!

B&N.com: "Maki," the third track, you said you are particularly fond of. Why is that?

JW: It just totally captured me when I first hear it on this CD called Island of Ghosts by Rossy. He's probably Madagascar's leading singer/songwriter. He plays the valiha, which is a bamboo cylindrical harp, and I just loved it so much. Again, it's got that characteristic, it's very "up", it's very happy, you know, sort of music.

B&N.com: It refers to lemurs, right?

JW: Yeah, maki means "lemur" in Malagasi. And the valiha has got a very high sort of twinkly sound. Absolutely wonderful! I use a very highly-strung guitar there called a requinto. If you played it at a normal guitar pitch, it wouldn't have that twinkly, magical quality about it.

B&N.com: Well, there's quite a variety of instruments on the album that your collaborators play. Even a fork and a beer bottle.

JW: That's right. The fork and bottle is actually traditional in Cameroon. Yeah, the percussion and the wind. I mean, I stick to only guitars, and John Etheridge plays his steel-string guitar, and there's the double bass. But the percussion instruments, there's quite a few African instruments there. And Richard Harvery, who's the wind instrument player, plays...I don't know all the names of them, to be honest. Some Malagasy flutes, a pygmy flute, and there's a Cameroon something. I don't know the names of all of them! [laughs]

B&N.com: You composed two of the pieces yourself. What inspired you there?

JW: "Malinke Guitars" is based on three traditional griot themes. Griots are, loosely talking, the troubadors, the storytellers, you know, a very respected tradition in that part of Africa that goes right back to the old Mali empire, the 12th and 13th centuries. There are certain tunes that are very traditional that probably go back that far, and that piece is based on three of them. And the other one, "Musha Musiki." For the beginning, I took one of the rhythms that you find with the talking drums from Ghana, where there are lots of polyrhythms going on together. I start off solo with an irregular time, like a minimalist time figure repeated. But the main part of the piece is where the percussion joins in halfway through...in our concerts, it becomes a much longer piece. It's difficult to do on the CD, but in performance you can build in a lot of improvising.

B&N.com: Do you participate in that?

JW: My improvising is minimal. I tend to sort of keep the structure and keep the thing going. It's just that with John Etheridge, being originally a jazz guitarist, you know, there's no point in me doing it badly when I've got someone who does it well!

B&N.com: Has your non classical work like this influenced the way you play, say, Bach? Or is it completely separate for you?

JW: Oh, I think so, yes. But I think it's always been happening, even if I go back a long time ago, like when I first met John Dankworth and Cleo Laine back in the late '60s, and then a long time after that we had a group called Sky, and anything like that. I think this would apply to any so-called classical musicians, and especially guitarists. Any music is a learning process and therefore teaches you a lot about how to play other music. Whether it's the sense of rhythm, the shaping of melodies, or whatever, I think definitely, music really is one. You talk about notes, which are by nature abstract; it's not like words and syllables. And I think different musical cultures have different ways of using those. But they're all complementary.

B&N.com: So then you must be pleased with the direction record labels are taking nowadays by releasing more and more crossover albums like this one. I mean, it seems like that development plays right into your interests.

JW: Absolutely, yes. I think all these categories like "world music" can be criticized. It can be quite insulting to have a phrase like that. Why should music from Africa come under "world music" any more than music from Germany or France? But I think you have to take the general meaning of it, which is a way of escaping from a very rigid, classically run attitude to music, which is that European music was, as it were, the best and the main stream of good music, and everything else was kind of also-ran. And I think those barriers have inevitably broken down, and we're in a bit of a no-man's-land as to how to describe everything. You know, a lot of people are seeing films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and they're getting these film scores, which after all are played by ordinary classical instruments, and they're really being turned on. You know, Yo-Yo Ma playing the cello in Crouching Tiger. My son is absolutely mad on that! So, I think you have to take the long-term view and look at it as a really inevitable and really good social change in the way we consume music.

February, 2002 EJ Johnson