Once a place of terror, a Mali hotel becomes a place of jazz
The Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali, was once the site of a mass execution. Now, under heavy security, it’s the home of a jazz festival.
BAMAKO, Mali
My girlfriend didn’t say I was dumb for going. She didn’t have to.
She had just read the security warning to me, naming specific threats against hotels in Bamako. I was going out to see a jazz show. In a hotel. The Radisson Blu, in fact. If people have heard of the country called Mali it’s probably because of the terrorist attack and hostage situation at the Radisson Blu. And this concert was Nov. 5, a couple weeks before the first anniversary of the attack.
As I stepped out of my rickety taxi in front of the Radisson, I was greeted by two soldiers in full get up, relaxing in lawn chairs, their rifles lying on their laps. Land Rovers and BMWs stopped at the gated entrance to the hotel while another pair of soldiers examined the trunk and passed a mirror under the car. I walked in the pedestrian entrance where a pair of security guards made me empty my pockets and step through a metal detector. I looked in a panic for the TSA agent pulling on his plastic glove.
On Nov. 20, 2015, just as guests were coming down for their breakfast, an undetermined number of gunmen stormed the hotel and took more than 170 hostages. It was reported that the gunmen quizzed hostages on passages of the Koran to find Muslims and free them. U.S. and Malian special forces raided the hotel and secured the building floor but 20 hostages had already been executed. A group affiliated with Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb took credit.
I watched events play out with a morbid fascination; I had found out just the day before that not only would I be moving to Bamako at the end of the year but that my future office and apartment were a stone’s throw from the Radisson.
This was my first trip to the hotel, despite being its neighbor for six months. It was odd walking into a place I had never been but knew the interior from news photos. I stepped into the lobby where commandos with riot shields and jackboots had stomped over shattered glass. There was the wall that had been pockmarked with bullets. Tonight everything gleamed and shined, which was unsettling. Red dust blows in from the desert and blankets Bamako so that only the most recently washed cars are free of a slightly pinkish hue. The lobby was clean and bright and empty like a morgue.
Like an idiot, I had showed up at 8:30 p.m., right when the event was supposed to start. I walked into a standard hotel conference room with a makeshift stage at one end and chairs set up auditorium-style. Musicians were on stage lazily going through sound checks. Technicians were placing speakers and cameras. I was the very first spectator. I took a seat in the front row until one of the ushers kindly told me the chairs with special covers were reserved for VIPs. I looked around. The first nine rows of chairs had these covers. When I said that I was the only one here the usher politely said, “But you are not a VIP.”
The 1st Bamako Jazz Festival, a three-day event, kicked off Nov. 3 in the capital of Mali. Over three nights, artists converged from Mali, Côte d’Ivoire, Iran, France and Denmark (they were easy to spot).
That Bamako, a city on the sleepy edge of the Sahara, does not seem a likely music hotspot only underlines its recent hard times. Starting in the 1990s, after the international success of Salif Keita and blues man Aly Farka Touré put Mali on the map, Bamako became a breeding ground and incubator for the finest musical talent West Africa had to offer. Musicians from Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal along with different Malian tribes, such as the Tuaregs from the Sahara, the Dogon from central Mali and the nomadic Pulaar, all brought their musical traditions to the city and intermixed them freely.
These traditions have deep roots and surprising offshoots. The griot, a sort of oral historian, the traditional bard of West Africa, dates back to the Mali Empire of the 12th century. Working with a kora, a 21-string instrument that looks like the offspring of a harp and a banjo, the griot would commit his community’s history to memory and apply it to song for posterity. Later, when West Africans were kidnapped by Europeans to be sold as slaves, they carried these musical traditions with them to the New World, and they served as the seed for new musical genres all over North and South America. One could say that the roots of modern blues music originates not in the Delta of the Mississippi but in that of the Niger.
As recently as 2011, Bamako hosted a vibrant and thriving music scene. It was the only place where a music lover could pay a $5 entrance fee and have the off chance of seeing Amadou and Mariam or John Lee Hooker take the stage. Large music festivals, such as the Festival of the Desert held just outside of Timbuktu, drew thousands of attendees and brought much-needed cash to the country.
Then in 2012 there was a rebellion of Tuaregs in the North and an eventual coup d’état. The country plunged into chaos. Jihadists, supported by Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, took power and began imposing Sharia. Mali has been a Muslim country for centuries, but they also have no problem with playing music, dancing late into the night or imbibing — call it the French influence. All of that disappeared. The Festival of the Desert became a Festival in Exile. A country whose very history is contained in music fell silent.
It has only been this year that major festivals have begun to return to Bamako again, all featuring beefed up security. Despite the lingering instability, there is a resilience to Malians, a desire to continue their way of life unafraid. In the program the organizers of the festival said it is “intended to be an opportunity to open to the world, to be a moment of national reconciliation, rallying together around the best of traditional and contemporary music.” That’s a lot of pressure on a music festival, yet the tension I felt upon entering the Radisson fortress melted away once the music started.
It was about 10 p.m., and I was at the hotel bar with some friends when I heard the first notes coming from the conference room. We ambled back to the half-full room to see the opening acts, Nordie Jazz Quartet and Equinoxe. Then Malian royalty began to take the stage. First was the band of the late Aly Farka Touré, a multi-Grammy-winning artist who had collaborated with Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. They are an exemplar of the Sahara or Tuareg Blues genre. They were followed by the two-time Grammy winner Toumani Diabate, a modern griot and his kora. He was joined by two of the most famous singers in Mali, Babani Kone and Habib Koite. The night ended with the artistic director, Cheick Tidiane Seck, taking the stage. The gregarious keyboardist and his drummer, Paco Sery, who has worked with Nina Simone and Eddy Louiss, performed a couple numbers with Diabate, who was then replaced by French violinist extraordinaire Didier Lockwood.
But the shining star of the show was the all-women Ivorian band Bella Mondo. They played seemingly every genre of music besides jazz (between the two nights I saw them they covered Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” Gloria Estefan’s “Mi Tierra,” a slinky number that sound like vintage Rick James and some standard Afropop), but the two lead singers’ infectious energy and dancing moved the crowd to their feet.
This was not your standard jazz festival. There was not a single saxophone, trumpet or upright bass. Toumani Diabate’s band was more traditional Malian music, a plaintive kora over a rhythm driven by two djembes (goblet-shaped drums topped with goatskin and played with the hands) and a dundunba (a large, cylindrical drum worn over the shoulder on a strap and covered in rawhide that the drummer wails upon with a curved stick). Cheick Tidiane Seck’s group showed more jazz and funk influence, with Seck’s soaring and intricate work on the keyboard and Sery’s syncopated drumlines. Didier Lockwood, who worked with Miles Davis, amongst others, conjured dreamy soundscapes by looping different stanzas on his electric violin together. The songs, when they had lyrics, were sung most often in Bambara, which meant I didn’t understand a word, only the emotion behind it.
I left at 1:30 a.m. from a show that was supposed to end at midnight, and there were still Malians pouring in. The room was almost full. The cameramen kept having to shift positions to see around the audience that was standing and dancing amongst the chairs. As I walked out, Lockwood’s layered violin solos sounded like the soundtrack for a yet un-conceived Terrence Malick picture. Jazz, unlike other music, doesn’t evoke emotion so much as it conjures an immediate and powerful awareness of the present. Improvisations impossible to resist or predict had seized me and forced me to forget the wounds of yesterday and stop fretting about the perils of tomorrow. There was only this evening, this room and this music.
