Les Nomades du Niger: Fulanis, Bororos & Touaregs

Here's a quaint item. In the mid-70s the ethnomusicologist François Jouffa compiled some recordings made in Niger by a certain Bernard Plassu and his Nigerian collaborator Moussa Hamidou. They were strictly of the “stick your mic in front of exotic musician and see what happens” kind, and they've been reissued as a CD by the French label Frémeaux. There's not a lot of point to this type of release anymore. The catalogues of Ocora, the Smithsonian Folkways and countless other august, academic labels groan under the weight of such recordings and the dull, minutely typeset, black and white booklets that accompany them. Furthermore, if there's one thing that the world music shift of the early 80s managed to achieve, it was to break away from the old ethno-musicological conceit of treating musicians and their music as some kind of natural phenomenon on a par with bees, beetles, locusts and tsetse flies, rather than as individuals with particular creative drives and ambitions. None of the musicians on this CD are actually named in the liner notes. They're just treated as examples of the sub-genus Bororo, of the genus Fulani, of the species Niger Nomads. (That's probably grossly scientifically incorrect – but you get the gist.)

What about the music then? Well, you just wish you were there among clapping chanting Bororo men, soaking up all the magic of the Cure Salée or Gerewol ceremony, or sitting in a Touareg nomad tent surrounded by 20 Touareg women chanting the tindé, led by some old matriarch with a mischievous smile. This music wasn't made to travel and it has the sad, displaced quality of some faded old exhibit in the dusty storerooms of an ethnological museum. Don't get me wrong. I love the music of southern Sahara, but I would much rather hear it played by groups such as the Touareg-Wodaabe band Etran Finatawa or Tartit Ensemble – in other words, by identifiable and purposeful musicians who possess and steer their own art – rather than on old recordings of musicians with no name.