Magic Night: A Band Plays From the Soul

9/2/2018

We were upstate, visiting our daughter. Laura had three tickets for a concert in the park in Saratoga Springs – a group from Chad, now living in Montréal.

It was the last night in a Monday summer series -- called On Stage, because the chairs were on the stage of the large outdoor theater, an intimate setting for a few hundred people.

Four musicians, known as H’Sao-* -- three Rimtobaye brothers, Caleb (guitar), Mossbass (bass) and Izra L (keyboard), and their childhood friend, Dono Bei Ledjebgue (percussion) -- blended in intricate harmony, went off on solo riffs.
We caught bits of French, bits of English, and a lot of their tribal language.

The longer they played, the more we realized we were hearing a cri de coeur, a call from the heart – the life of the immigrant, trying to stay alive, seeking less dangerous corners of the world.

They have been in Montreal since the turn of the century, but have never left home.

One song, “For My Family,” began with drummer Dono Bei, rapping about waiting for a bus in Montreal, at 5 in the morning, reading a postcard from home, a cousin asking him to send him a car. The audience chuckled, but Bei’s piercing voice let us know this was serious business:

“You wanna make it happen so badly for your family,
“You keep digging, you keep digging.”

“I got ten brothers left behind,
“Their scholarships are all on me.”

The music was beautiful; it came from deep. One of the brothers explained why they had left home – childhood friends were having to choose between Christianity and Islam, with apparently ominous results. Their voices blended:

“I do this prayer to whoever’s up there,
“Jehova, Jesus, Allah, we need an answer.”

At times the group reminded me of the tight, intuitive “Buena Vista Social Club” from Cuba and at times it reminded me of the plaintive voice of Bob Marley cutting through the ozone. I thought I heard some of the South African chords Paul Simon incorporated into “Graceland” and at times I heard Sam Cooke on “A Change Is Gonna Come.” But mostly I heard these four brothers from Chad and Montréal, trying to work it out.

The musicians teased us: How do you know you are alive? Somebody in the audience said, “Because we are moving.” Exactly, the musician said. Prove you are alive. Get up and dance. Many people did; Laura stood up, made eye contact with Caleb, the closest to us, letting him know she was very into their music.

They wailed, they rapped, they talked about love. They told a tale about a rite of manhood, going into the wilderness to confront a lion.
(The band used to be bigger, or so they claimed.)

They prodded us to sing a chorus, in their tribal language. One band member chided us: we didn’t know what the words meant, did we. Something not very nice, he suggested.

After 90 minutes, on this balmy upstate evening, we were part of the rhythm, part of the harmony, part of the sadness, part of the joy, the front pages of the papers and the news on the television, immigrants drowning, Rohingya being slaughtered, children being ripped from their parents on the U.S. border.

After the show, the musicians stayed around, chatting softly, giving hugs. Dono Bei said the band was heading to Montreal in the morning; my wife and I would return to New York a day later.
“Bonne retour,” he said. Good return.

We bought all three of their CDs and rocked with them all the way down the Northway.
When I got back to my laptop, I looked up their site:
https://hsao.ca/en/

The group has been discovered by the Canada Council for the Arts, has performed in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Australia and also New Zealand with its rich cultural programs. But they have not been in New York since a visit to Lincoln Center in 2017.
I went poking around for a video: the first one that popped up showed them in choir robes, in a cathedral (see below.)
Exactly, my wife said. They are immensely spiritual.

Messieurs: quand allez-vous jouer à New York?

* -- H'Sao means the Swallow of the Sao, the people who were the ancestors of present-day Chadians. The group's origin is presented in its name: the musicians in H'Sao come from N'Djamena, the Chadian capital, a vast country located between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa. -- www.festivalnuitsdafrique.com/en/artist/h’sao

Tom Schwarz link

9/3/2018 02:10:20 pm

Brilliant!

Mendel

9/4/2018 07:38:25 am

Magical. Tapping my feet now at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. Caught the guy next to me peeking at my screen.

bruce

9/4/2018 02:25:08 pm

george,

great stuff.

your eclectic taste in music is certainly not a minus.

i'd like to add that you'll notice the canadian council for the arts had something to do with this group.....sounds kinda like socialism.

also, you might know their frenchness was most certainly why they ended up in quebec.

la belle province has some power over who they allow into the province and also has a cultural presence outside canada.

and, of course, their success couldn't have happened in any other country in the world, but canada.

sorry, george, i couldn't resist.

thanks for posting this. it was wonderful.

bruce

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/politique-du-quebec-immigration/

Altenir Silva

9/4/2018 03:04:04 pm

Dear George: Wow! The band is great. I liked to know the rap regarding the cousin dreaming about the car. It is very significative on the immigrants. The family members that stay in their poor countries create a false image from those that go away from home. Actually, they wish and dream that their relatives have found the promised land.

Beautiful song from the video. It has some choreography inspired in the Capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art. The Capoeira was used for the slaves as one defense against the Portuguese colonialists.

Best. Altenir

George Vecsey

9/4/2018 08:17:31 pm

Tom, thanks for the response.
Mendel: no toe-tapping in any library.
Bruce: the band members were welcome in La Belle Province. Only in Canada, to coin a phrase.
Altenir: I laughed out loud as soon as he started the rap. And you, as a writer and film writer in Brazil, would appreciate how the band repeats the opening stanza at the end, to complete the circle.

bruce

9/5/2018 02:31:18 am

altenir,

quite a cultural disaster in brazil.

sounds like everything was messed up.

an awful thing.

bruce

Altenir Silva

9/5/2018 01:00:41 pm

Dear Bruce,
Thanks for your concern.
It was very sad. Only 10% of the museum's collection remains.
Best. Altenir

George Vecsey

9/5/2018 02:48:27 pm

It's horrible. I've never been there. I don't know much more about Brazil than Pele and Socrates, Tom Jobim and Caetano Veloso, but I am gutted at the loss of so much patrimony

Altenir, I saw a demonstration of Capoeira -- I believe from a female master of it -- in a documentary a few years ago, I believe by poor Anthony Bourdain, in Bahia. One of his best. I remember the woman demonstrating technique on the beach. Plus, a national drink, and food, and people singing. But I can only image what the national museum contained, things I will never see. Awful. GV

bruce

9/5/2018 02:57:24 pm

george,

i'm a bit surprised you've never been to brazil, given all the years you were the nyt soccer guy.

they are to soccer what Canada is to hockey, nz to rugby and the usa to truthful hyperbole.

bruce

Altenir Silva

9/5/2018 03:08:19 pm

Thanks, George!
It was an awful thing. I visited the museum sometimes as a tourist and to do research for some TV shows. It's life. That museum nevermore.
Best. Altenir

Alan Rubin link

9/6/2018 01:06:17 pm

It is always great when you can be up close and personal with performers. It takes me back to Gerde’s Folk City and the other small clubs in the Village in the late 50’s and early 60’s when you were usually no more than a few feet from the performer.

There is something so engaging about African music and rhythms.

In 2008 Sandi and I spent two weeks in the bush of Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia. Upon our group’s arrival at each of the four camps where we stayed, our hosts greeted us with native songs and dances.

The morning and afternoon safaris were always fascinating, but the mealtime conversations and evening tribal rituals around a roaring fire exposed us to a rich and fascinating culture. Their constant smiles were contagious.

George, you would like the album “Mali to Memphis”.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Magic Night: A Band Plays From the Soul

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