CHAPTER 1
The Afro-kinetic Passages of Madam Zajj
Driving Jazz âHomeâ with Manu
Dibango and Duke Ellington
One of the many conflicts raging in postcolonial Africa was the war between Libya and Chad. After Colonel Muammar Gaddafiâs coup in 1967, Libya aspired to expand its influence in central Africa, and the military occupation in 1973 of the desolate but mineral-rich Aouzou Strip just beyond the border with its southern neighbor was a first move in escalating a long-simmering territorial dispute. Taking advantage of Chadâs intensifying civil war that pitted the predominantly Muslim North against the Christian South, Gaddafi established an airbase and extended citizenship to the areaâs few inhabitants, resulting in the de facto annexation of the barren strip. Over the next few years, there were several attempts to expand the influence of the Gaddafi regime or to expel the Libyan garrisons from the Aouzou, prompting two military interventions by France, which succeeded only in consolidating the status quo, dissatisfactory to both sides. The last phase of the conflict began in January 1987, after most of Gaddafiâs Chadian allies in the North, fed up with the dictatorâs meddling and suspicious of his motives, switched sides and joined the troops of president HissĂšne HabrĂ©. The Libyan units were heavily mechanized, but the defection of their allies deprived them of a nimble ground option. Perhaps the most effective weapon in the arsenal of the ragtag Chadian forces, on the other hand, was the Toyota pickup truck: its speed and dependability proved a decisive tactical advantage in the desert terrain of the Aouzou and helped deal the Libyans a series of humiliating defeats, culminating eventually in their expulsion and the restoration of the region to Chad. The sight of these technicals was so ubiquitous that the 1987 conflict was dubbed the Toyota War.1
The somewhat flippant moniker also pointed to the strong presence of the Japanese car manufacturer in the global economy. A major supplier of trucks to the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, the companyâs postwar resurgence was also fueled by expansion into third world markets. From its hub in apartheid South Africa, where the company had built its first assembly line in 1962, Toyota targeted the newly independent nations to the north. Toyotaâs marketing juggernaut proclaimed, âLa musique est un monde sans frontiĂšres. Toyota aussi.â Ironically, it managed to enlist even the voice of Mama Africa herself, Miriam Makeba, on the promotional single âToyota Fantaisie / Canât Stop Myself,â a bouncy bit of Afro-funk in which Makeba praises the carsâ unstoppable kinesis in French on the A-side, in English on the B-side. Toyota also approached the other superstar of Afropop, Manu Dibango, who delivered with âToyota Makossaâ another catchy promotional jingle. Toyota sponsored a tour through much of the continent, during which copies of the single were given away gratis by the thousands, making it a hugely popular song that everybody soon knew: Dibango remembers that through much of the 1980s, taxi drivers in Douala and YaoundĂ© would heckle him if they spotted him climbing into a different make of car. To maximize on Dibangoâs stardom, the title referenced the biggest record of Dibangoâs career, âSoul Makossa.â While the global megahit is actually much closer musically to James Brown than to Douala, the Toyota jingle is indeed a prime example of makossa, the dance music popularized at midcentury in the urban areas of Cameroon that is characterized by a prominent bass line and horn section: here, a punchy yet spry electric bass, bubbly percussion, and Bokilo âJerryâ Malekaniâs filigreed guitar work create an irresistible groove over which both Dibango and the horns effusively approve of the female vocalistsâ claim that âMa Toyota Corolla est fantastique, oh oui!â2 And like the genre to which it claims allegiance, âToyota Makossaâ is very much a musical hybrid, with its only overtly âjazzyâ element Dibangoâs extended solo on tenor saxophone. The jingle bears the fingerprints also of longtime musical director Malekani, who grew up with soukous, the Congoâs guitar-centric equivalent of makossa, but achieved success as leader of Rico Jazz, a band comprised of fellow West African expats that became a sensation in the French Antilles in the early 1970s. Finally, âToyota Makossaâ also prominently features the synthesized pinging sample that signaled Dibangoâs growing involvement in electronica. And so, âToyota Makossaâ is a decidedly transnational affair resonating within a complex constellation of consumer capitalism and the global economy, technology, entertainment, and the bloody effects of postcolonialism from which black music was not exempt.3
Navigating this musical mĂ©langeânot to mention the sociopolitical and economic oneâhas not always been easy for Dibango. As he has recounted more than once, âThere were two aspects to my fight. The first was in Europe, where people knew I played saxophone and piano but would say, Thatâs not an African instrument. To be a musician you must play balafon or tom-tom. The other was in Africa, where you could not be a professional musician. Musicians were folk artists: People invited you to play and gave you food and drink. Not money. In between Europe and Africa was Manu Dibango.â As allergic to categorization as his idol Ellington, the Cameroonian expat explains that âAt first people in Africa said that I made Western music, that I was black-white. I carried that label around for a long time. In France people often told me that I made American music. And when I went to the United States, the Americans thought that I made African music. Itâs impossible to be more of a traitor than that!â4
This sense of âin-betweennessâ is what Afropolitanism turns into sound. With the Afropolitanâs quintessential background, it was jazzâAfrican American jazzâthat filled the musical interstices in Dibangoâs Black Atlantic identity. Still dividing his time between his saxophone and his studies when he got his start in Congolese Joseph âLe Grand KallĂ©â Kabaseleâs appropriately named outfit African Jazz, Dibango was part of the first generation of self-defined jazz musicians from sub-Saharan Africa. Guided through the music by a fellow student also from Cameroon, Francis BĂ©bey, who in turn would go on to become one of the continentâs premier ethnomusicologists, Dibango cites Duke Ellingtonâs âMorning Gloryâ as the first jazz record he purchased.5 And via the Duke, he discovered Count Basie, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and especially Sidney Bechet, to whom the Lion of Africa would devote an entire tribute album. These discoveries in turn would allow him to understand how he could negotiate the musical heritage of his native Cameroon in novel ways: âTake makossa: I treat makossa like people treat the blues here, or in Brazil samba. These kinds of differences are necessary. Iâm not a Mississippi man. I donât drink Coca-Cola; I drink beaujolais. But in the total realm of jazz, you can bring something to it: You can be yourself. Jazz is also free, so you can do your thing with it. Itâs big enough to take a lot of ingredients. Bring your differences. Within jazz, everything is equal, but not the same.â6 Jazz is the stickum in this Afropolitan musical pastiche.
Over the course of his career, more and more influences accumulated in the trunk of Dibangoâs far-ranging musical Toyota Corolla. The saxophonist began to experiment increasingly with electronica; on his 1984 album Surtension, for example, the drum parts are all courtesy of a newfangled LinnDrum digital drum machine of the first generation, with only sporadic support lent by two human percussionists, an experiment that promptly got him branded as âa traitor.â7 Clearly, the Cameroonian expat headquartered in Paris has never had the intention of delivering traditional, somehow âauthenticâ makossaâespecially not since the genre itself is a hybrid, of course. Just as clearly, if not always audible in prominent ways, the Afro-kinesis of American jazz continued to furnish the sonic protocols of Dibangoâs Afropolitan soundscapes. It is therefore no coincidence that when Duke Ellingtonâs French protĂ©gĂ©, bandleader Claude Bolling, planned a commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of his mentorâs allegorical suite A Drum Is a Woman, he tapped the Afropolitan Dibango to narrate the saga of jazz and the passages of Madam Zajj, the musicâs mythical personification. Shortly before his death, Ellington himself had made plans with Bolling to revive the suite for a French-German television coproduction, but the project never came to fruition due to Ellingtonâs precarious health. His âspiritual son,â however, didnât forget his mentorâs intentions, and when fragments of the original score of A Drum Is a Woman were discovered among the holdings of the Smithsonian Institute, the Frenchman revived the project to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the suiteâs debut. Bollingâs version is not an update of the original, but rather a faithful reproduction. Bolling and his associates painstakingly reconstructed the score from the original recording as well as from the newly rediscovered fragments. They even went so far as to transcribe the original solosâtherefore, there was next to no instant improvisation to be heard when the suite was staged at the ThĂ©Ăątre national de Chaillot in the spring of 1996. The only marked deviation from the original was that Manu Dibango, the Lion of Africa, took on the role of the Duke of big band swing to narrate the adventures of Madam Zajjâin French.8 Exact copy that Bollingâs performance aspired to be, it ironically confined the Afro-kinesis of the original to a detailed script, somewhat akin to steering a souped-up Toyota Corolla through the turns of a closed race course instead of the off-road racing of the ParisâDakar Rally. Dibangoâs French narration is the only element that amplifies the polyglot Afropolitanism of Madam Zajj and the Lion of Africa both. Since âRhythm came to Africa from way back,â we have to trace the passages of A Drum Is a Womanâs heroine further back than that spring evening in Paris when Claude Bolling and Manu Dibango retold her story, and further back even than the first time Ellington accompanied her appearance onstage four decades before.9
The demise of the swing era in the postwar years, hastened by the ascendancy of bebop and rhythm and blues, found the Duke Ellington Orchestra in dire straits. Though one of the very few large jazz aggregations to survive the changing economic and musical landscape, it was rattled by the exit of several key members, perhaps most crucial that of Johnny Hodges, whose creamy alto saxophone had been a signature sound of the orchestra since its Cotton Club days, and the extended leaves of absence Billy Strayhorn was taking from his arranging and composing duties. Strayhorn in particular was missed dearly by the Duke: âHe was not, as often referred to by many, my alter ego,â Ellington would later write. âBilly Strayhorn was my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brainwaves in his head, and his in mine.â10 But in the mid-1950s, two events signaled the sudden resurgence of Duke Ellington. First, both Strayhorn and Hodges returned to the organization after finding the going economically unfeasible and artistically unsatisfying. Strayhorn, who rarely performed in public anyway, realized that it was ill-advised to sever his ties to Ellington; and Hodgesâs only hit in the four years away from Ellington was âCastle Rock,â which, ironically, featured fellow Ellington alumnus Al Searsâs tenor saxophone instead of the bandleaderâs alto.
Second, Ellingtonâs appearance at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival instantly became one of the most legendary moments in jazz. It began inauspiciously enough when several members of the band were not yet present for the first set (the Ellington orchestra was notorious for its lack of discipline, and it was a common sight to see musicians casually stroll onstage well after a concert had already commenced). Beginning shortly before midnight, the second set finally had the full band assembled. Things took a sudden and entirely unexpected turn with âDiminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,â two blues Ellington had first recorded separately back in the 1930s and rarely revisited since. At Newport, the two sections were bridged by Paul Gonsalvesâs tenor sax solo, a marathon performance of twenty-seven choruses of volcanic energy. The savvy bandleader recognized the rare magic in the air that night, for he kept spurring his lead tenorist on by shoutingââDonât stop now! Donât stop!ââand pumping his fist. Before long, Jo Jones, Count Basieâs drummer, who was standing in the wings, became infected with the galvanic Afro-kinesis and began pounding out the beat energetically with a rolled newspaper in his fist. Next, a striking, platinum-blonde woman in a black cocktail dress leaped from her chair and started to dance, prompting many others in the audience to do the same. With festivalgoers in a frenzy and angrily refusing to let the band end the concert, organizers feared that a riot would ensue and tried, unsuccessfully, to put an early stop to the show. On the unedited tapes, impresario George Wein can be heard arguing vociferously with Ellington in between numbers, who, following Gonsalvesâs explosive solo, attempted to placate the crowdâs fervor with a couple of slower tunes showcasing Hodgesâs soothing alto. The national press reported widely on Ellingtonâs and Gonsalvesâs exploits, and a gushing six-page cover story in Time magazine capped the mediaâs heralding that the Duke was back indeed. It was simply âjazz at its jazziest,â effused one who witnessed it all and would have knownâLangston Hughes.11
The flurry of activity immediately following the historic night at Newport included a suite commissioned by Canadaâs Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario based on the Bardâs plays and characters and taking its title, Such Sweet Thunder, from Puck in A Midsummer Nightâs Dream, a new contract with Columbia Records, and plans for an extended European tour. Closest to Dukeâs heart, though, was an ongoing project he had tried to put onstage before. The idea had actually arisen with âCreole Rhapsodyâ in 1931; ever since then, an even larger historiography in sound had been on Ellingtonâs mind: âI have gone back to the history of my people and tried to express it in rhythm. We used to have it in Africa, a something we have lost. One day we shall get it back again. I am expressing in sound the old days in the jungle, the cruel journey across the sea, and the despair of the landing. And then the days in Harlem and the cities of the States. Then I try to go forward a thousand years, when, emancipated and transformed, the Negro takes his place, a free being, among peoples of the world.â12 In 1943, finally, he premiered Black, Brown, and Beige at New York Cityâs venerable Carnegie Hall, an extended work subtitled âA Tone Parallel to the History of the Negro in America.â The âtone parallelâ attempted to tell, in jazz, the history of black people in the New World, but its scope was so ambitious that the forty-plus minutes at Carnegie Hall presented only a truncated version of Ellingtonâs elaborate, carefully researched scenario, and the comp...