Columbia's Kidjo Bares
Her Black Ivory Soul

By JILL PESSELNICK
March 9, 2002

LOS ANGELES - It's a long story, one filled with pain, emotional confusion, and ultimately, jubilation. West African singer/songwriter Angelique Kidjo just cannot explain the origins of Black Ivory Soul - a deeply joyful and always passionate expression of the kinship between African and Brazilian music, which is due in stores March 19 on Columbia - without discussing the history of her native Benin and her first exposure to the horrors of slavery.
The set is her seventh solo album and her first studio project for Columbia. It can be directly attributed to a day when Kidjo, at the age of 15, first learned about apartheid in South Africa. She recalls being in a rage of such force that she could not speak to her beloved parents for a full day. Still reeling from the knowledge that Benin citizens had been exported for years to Brazil as slaves (who were known among traders as "black ivory"), Kidjo did not know how to fully deal with her emotions.
"My parents were wise enough to let me go on and on," Kidjo says. "When I calmed down, they told me, 'We understand your feelings, but you cannot react like that. It's nobody's fault. It's the past. In the future, your duty as a human being is to make your life and work bring all human beings together.'
From early on in her career as a musician in the 1970s, Kidjo aimed to fulfill these goals through exploring how Africans impacted the music of the modern world. She also envisioned a trilogy of albums that would touch on the African Diaspora and the specific African/Brazilian connection, as well as the African link to Cuba, Haiti, and New Orleans. Her 1998 Island project Oremi, a mix of traditional Benin music and American-based styles (she collaborated with Cassandra Wilson and Kelly Price, as well as doing a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile [Slight Return]"), was part one of the trilogy. Black Ivory Soul is part two.
"Even though the project came very early into my brain, I knew I was not mature enough to do it," she says. "I needed still to deal with the anger I had in me. There is one thing that I don't want my music to do, which is to bring hate. I had to be in the mind-set to be able to enrich myself and not to improve the pain but to heal."
Kidjo, who now resides in New York after spending years writing in Paris, began crafting the Bill Laswell-produced Black Ivory Soul after a 1999 trip to Bahia, Brazil. As soon as she stepped off the plane, she says, "it smelled like my country. I was almost at my knees thanking my ancestors for keeping this music alive. From that moment on, I knew that this project was going to happen."
In Bahia, Kidjo began the process of Brazilian/African collaboration after she met singer Daniela Mercury. The pair ended up writing "Dara" (meaning "beautiful"), a song that appeared on Mercury's 2000 album, Sol Da Liberdade, on BMG U.S. Latin.
Kidjo soon teamed with Bahianese percussionist Carlinhos Brown, founder of the band Timbalada. One night on a Brazilian beach, they wrote six songs together, three of which - "Tumba," "Iemanja," and "Okanbale" - ultimately made it to Black Ivory Soul.
"Tumba," a rousing dance number named after the word for "congas" in Benin and performed in the African Fon language, is a song that Kidjo dedicates to the public.
"I was visualizing how I was going to bring this magic to them, how I'm going to thank them for taking the time to listen to me," she explains. "People work hard every day, and the only thing that can still bring all of us together is entertainment. That is how I started the song. Even if you don't want to dance, I don't want to know about it. But you are invited to dance. This song is yours. Grab it and make it yours."
The string-laden "Okanbale," perhaps the most personal cut on the album, explores Kidjo's relationship with her family. Sung in the African language of Yoruba, the lyrical song meaning "peace of heart" is Kidjo's way of thanking her parents for their everlasting support.
"It is absolutely, completely forbidden [to be] a singer or entertainer in Africa if you are a woman," Kidjo explains. "I had parents who stood by my side against the whole society, telling me, 'You can sing if you want to, girl.' My father produced my first show, and my mom taught me how to sing."
When Kidjo, whose songs are published by Aye Publishing/ASCAP, returned to New York from Bahia, she wrote tracks with Brazilian guitarist Vinicius Cantuaria ("Olofoofo," "Ominira") and with her husband, Jean Hebrail, and songwriter Tommy Farragher ("Black Ivory Soul").
While Kidjo's ongoing goal is to bring diverse people together through listening to music, on this project she also wanted her cast of musicians to reflect a range of ethnic backgrounds. Among the players were guitarists Joao Mota from Guinea Bissau, percussionist Abdou M'boup from Senegal, drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson from the R&B group the Roots, and bassist Michel Alibo from the West Indies.
Though many of the musicians were unable to communicate in English, the language of music guided the recording process. The recording session - Kidjo's first live studio experience - thus proved to be an eye-opening one for all involved.
"Do you know Alice in Wonderland? That is how I felt watching everybody with my big eyes open," Kidjo says. "At one point, one of the musicians comes to me and says, 'This is a hell of a responsibility that you put on our shoulders, because the music is beautiful. We cannot stay indifferent to what we are doing here. It brings us to ask questions ourselves. Even the Brazilians are saying that we never, ever thought about our music meaning so much to you guys in Africa.'"
The Brazilian/African concept had been explored earlier by Bahianese singer/songwriter Gilberto Gil, whose "Refavela" Kidjo covers on the project. She says that after Gil made a trip to Africa, he brought a different rhythm back to Brazil. The boisterous tune about poor neighborhoods in Benin uniquely combines African and Brazilian drumming styles.
A version of Serge Gainsbourg's "Ces Petits Riens," which Kidjo sings in French, appears as an example of how any language - not just Yoruba or Fon - can be used as a world rhythm. "From one or two words, he can make a whole song. That's why I picked up the song," she says. "To be able to use [language] upside down like Serge Gainsbourg does, very few people can do that."
She also performs in English, most notably on "Iwoya," a duet with Dave Matthews, a touring mate of Kidjo's for two years. Matthews, whose band is preparing for a series of U.S. performances throughout the spring and summer, has this to say of working with her: "If God had a voice, it would sound like Angelique."
"Iwoya," based on a Yoruba proverb that says, "You don't have to be old to be wise; a bird doesn't wait till he dies to fly," is an uplifting look at taking the time to pursue your dreams.
Kidjo has taken these words to heart, for she recalls that when she was 10 years old, she told her mother that she expected to be married with four kids by the time she was 20. However, through her family's encouragement, she started performing as a solo artist when her father was told she was too small to be seen on stage. By the time she was in her late teens, during the tail end of the 1970s, she had become a full-fledged professional singer. She soon moved to Paris to escape a deteriorating political environment.
Her debut album, 1980's Pretty (which was self-produced in France), linked African traditional sounds with American soul music, intrigued the international press, and served to establish Kidjo on the world-music scene. Her first internationally distributed album, Parakou on Open/Island, followed in 1990.
From there, she went on to release the Mango/Island projects Logozo (1991, featuring the popular single "Batonga" and including saxophone work from Branford Marsalis), Aye (1994; the video for the cut "Agolo" received a Grammy Award nomination), Fifa (1996, Kidjo's first album with English lyrics that also featured Benin-based musicians), and the aforementioned Oremi.
When Kidjo's contract with Island expired, she signed with Columbia, which released Keep on Moving - The Best of Angelique Kidjo in 2001. The project reached No. 10 on the Billboard Top World Albums chart. (Oremi peaked at No. 5 on the Top World Albums chart.)
Columbia Jazz and Legacy Recordings senior VP Jeff Jones knew that Kidjo would be the perfect first new signing for Columbia's jazz department after it came under his purview in 2000. "The mandate was to have a diversified roster of traditional and contemporary jazz, world, blues, and interesting electric music if possible, and Angelique is certainly one of the most important artists in the world-music community," he says. "Talking with her and meeting with her was really exciting. She has a remarkable energy and a commitment to working hard, being a great entertainer, and being socially relevant."
Kidjo is similarly excited about bringing her new music to international audiences. "I want to tour the whole world. I don't like the cold at all, but if I have to go to the Eskimos, I'm going to," she says with a laugh. She will tour 10 major U.S. cities surrounding the release date and will stop in various European locations throughout April and May. (The album will be released worldwide the second week of April.)
"One of the best parts of Angelique is her ability as a live performer," Jones says of Kidjo, who is booked by Brad Goodman of Los Angeles' William Morris Agency and managed by Peter Himberger and Ed Gerrad of New York's Impact Artist Management. "She wants to invite people in and make them feel good about themselves."
Jones is also pursuing an aggressive radio plan, which will include servicing the album to mainly college and triple-A stations, where Kidjo has been a mainstay for years. At Detroit's triple-A WDET, Kidjo is one of its top artists, because she transcends any type of niche as a world-music artist, WDET music director Martin Bandyke says. "She has that rare ability to write great lyrics that appeal to the fact that we are all one, that there is one world, and we have to live in it together," he says. "We will definitely be into this new album."
Kidjo is additionally a favorite on the Public Radio International show The World, a daily news program featuring a music segment that airs on public radio stations nationwide. The show's senior producer out of Boston, Marco Werman, says that when Kidjo releases an album, "it's an event of sorts, because she's unpredictable. For me, she is a spotted owl in world music, because she's a known name and she's a veteran, but she can bushwhack through uncharted waters.
"It is also intriguing to watch her, because she is an African musician who balked at Paris and moved to New York," he continues. "The whole African [music] infrastructure is based in Paris. She decided to challenge herself in a non-African music center."
Columbia is also putting together a retail component with a focus on price and positioning. The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Borders Books & Music chain, for example, is working on a listening-station program for the album. "She's definitely a Borders-type artist," assistant buyer Julie Senechal says. "I think her new album will do quite well for us. Her previous titles still sell steadily."
At Tower Records' downtown New York location, a listening station will also be in place, according to the store's world-music buyer, John Coughlan. "I'm very excited. Every album she has done is interesting and a little bit different," he says. "People who don't necessarily like world music might pick this up. She's definitely not one who will stick herself into a pigeonhole."
Other marketing strategies will include the creation of a Kidjo Web site, mailers to potential consumers, and possible 12-inch mixes of the tracks "Bahia" and "Tumba." The company has hired New York-based marketing company Giant Step to work the album at the club and grass-roots level.
Though Black Ivory Soul largely conveys its message in languages foreign to most Americans, Jones and Kidjo are not concerned about reaching a U.S. audience.
"The public has proved to me all these years that it isn't a matter of language - it's what they feel," Kidjo concludes. "I think that I achieved that goal and can bring them to realize that, 'Hey, we have one life.' After what happened Sept. 11, if a human being does not believe that, then he is in danger. We have to learn to live with each other. We have to learn to heal."

Interview with Angelique Kidjo
Angelique talks about her new album Black Ivory Soul

by Sean Barlow

Sean Barlow of afropop.org visited Angelique Kidjo at her home in Brooklyn, NY in early February. She talks about her new album Black Ivory Soul (Columbia) released this March.

Sean Barlow: Congratulations on your new album! The first one since '98. It has a real different sound, a real different instrumentation and feel. How would you describe this album?

Angelique Kidjo: This album is the 2nd part of my trilogy that I started with Oremi. Since a child I have always been attracted to covers on which you have black people that sing in different languages, because in school they never teach you anything about slavery. It's done on purpose for us not to think about that and not to know our history. I come to know about slavery through music because I started asking questions. I thought when you're black you live in Africa, right? Then I was fortunate enough to have my grandmother tell me about slavery. My first reaction was violent. I was like, how could we do that? How can something happen like that? I go on blabbing… My parents always let me do what I want to do. If I want to scream then I scream and then when I'm done, they say, now we can talk. Now that the anger is expressed, now we can talk to you, get your attention and get your sense. They always said to me that I have to be focused on what I want to do. Hate is not an answer. If I want to heal, if I want to better understand it for the global view, then I have to do something and go meet those people.

This album is between Salvador de Bahia and Benin and specifically my village where I come from because that's where you have one of the biggest communities of Portuguese that come from Brazil, in Africa. One of the first colonists to arrive in Benin was Francisco de Souza. He was from Brazil. He lived and died in that village. So, since I was young I have lived inside that music because my mom has Portuguese blood too. So the music, the food of Brazil, I have been into it. When I went to Bahia I felt at home. I have the same feeling in Bahia as when I land in Benin. The vegetation is the same. The smells are the same. The foods are the same. They do music all the time. So, I tried to build up the connections between my village, my country and Brazil. In order to do that I wanted a live album, an organic album where everyone would come together to play -- where people were mixing African-American, African, Caribbean, and Brazilian, and anybody else, because the music does not belong to me. It belongs to everyone. We just approach it in different ways. The overall of this album is basically the mixing and the mixture.

SB: Talk a little bit about the Brazilian musical elements you're using through out your new repertoire.

AK: The Brazilian part of it is much more guitar and percussion. What African music brought to Brazil was the rhythm. What African music meets in Brazil is the harmony and complexity of the classical music that the masters of the slaves were listening to. Also, on top of that there is the Indian music, which gives to Brazil the specificity they have to their music. In this album I also have a duet with Dave Matthews. He first said, "I'm not singing with you. You scare me to death." I said, "Come on, you can sing, I love your voice." I gave him the music tracks before I finished recording and then he came on board.

SB: Let's talk about some specific songs with that Brazilian connection, "Tumba" and "Refavela" specifically?

AK: In order to do this album I've traveled a couple of times to Bahia to get different artists involved because I could not do it without them. I wrote "Tumba" in Bahia with Carlinos Brown. We wrote six songs in an hour. That's how fast and good he can be. On this album we only have three from that writing: "Tumba," "Iemanja," and "Okan Bale."

SB: Can you recreate the scene there? How did that happen with you and Carlinos Brown?

AK: I went there and he has a swimming pool on the sea. It doesn't have walls, just wood, open like a veranda. He invited one of his guitar players, an old guitar player from Bahia. We start singing old songs. It doesn't feel like working hard. You have the sea, the breeze, the drink, and the food. I thought, we're never ever going to write a song because it's too cool to be working here. But before I realized, an hour had passed by and we already had six songs. That's the magic of music and that's the magic of inspiration. So, I came back home after that and he said digest. Do whatever you want. Make them yours. When I came back to where I was living in Bahia I sat down, and when I start playing the song, the lyrics just started falling into place. For example the song "Tumba," I was writing facing the sea. I was looking beyond the sea at the people who would listen to this album, come to the show, and buy the album. I wanted to dedicate this song to them because it was too good. I was having too much fun not to share with the public.

You have to realize that today it is very hard to get people to come to a show because there is so much to do at home. You can sit and do Internet and watch TV all day long without getting out of your house or doing something else like buying a CD or going to a show. So I said, this song will be for them. That is going to be the moment in the show where everybody gets up and dances and comes to life.

The song "Black Ivory Soul" was a song my husband and I wrote about 3 years ago. The idea of this song, after seeing an LP of Manu Dibango, where he was saying on the back of an album that people in America call his music Black Ivory Soul while in Africa they call it Makossa. So we just took the idea from that song. It's about what do we do to ourselves. I mean we have to think about ourselves. If we are happy we can make other people happy. And everyday it's our duty to ask ourselves what are we going to do that day to ourselves to be able to be positive in a global way.

"Refavela" was a song that was originally written by Gilberto Gil. It's the perfect song between the African percussion and the Bahian percussion, the way they blend together because the way he played has that African influence in there, and I emphasize it when I do it myself. I didn't understand what he was saying in his song, so I wrote my own lyrics. Refavela means Ghettos. Refavela is another way of saying the renaissance of the ghettos. We have to think about who are the first targets of ghettos? They are the ones we see in the streets begging for money. In that song I am saying when is it going to be time to stop talking and to act? What are we going to do for the future of the planet that rely on us adults to guide them and to give them hope for the future? If we don't do so, how can we call ourselves human beings?

SB: Which is the slow song? "Okan Bale?" Tell us about that one.

AK: That is the 3rd song I wrote with Carlinos Brown. I thought about my parents and how they gave me the education that could allow me to go everywhere and open my ear to a lot of different music and the world simply. I dedicate that song to them because it is strength to me to know that I have a family that loves me -- that I can call anytime. "Okan Bale" means peace of heart, because their love is unconditional for me. My brothers and my sisters are always going to love me for who I am. They're never going to judge me and they're always going to be there if I fall. And including the family that build as well. A lot of people don't think of artist as a person with a family. It's important as a person to be strong, have a background and stand on something, to be able to travel all around the world and give so much. If you don't have that strength, you can't give. If you're empty, all you can give is emptiness. "Okan Bale" is wishing for everyone to have that.

SB: Tell us about your band.

AK: Most of my band members live in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is full of musicians. It's amazing. We used to make a joke that if someone dropped a bomb in Brooklyn, half of the musicians in New York City would be dead. I hope it never happens, right? Brooklyn has a lot of good musicians. To have them around, we can get together to rehearse and make a few touch ups on songs.

SB: Your reputation as a performer is for being high energy, a dynamic dancer, and really putting on a hot show. So when you perform this material is this a different vibe? Is it a little more reflective? How would you characterize how you are performing this material now?

AK: It's always going to be energetic, because I still have those songs that I'm always going to play. But it has that acoustic sound that we have to emphasize on stage. I really want people to understand that energy can also be acoustic. Meaning you can sing, play guitar, use voice, play percussion and have energy in there. It depends how you bring it to people. More and more people like the acoustic part. They can discover songs in a different way, in the emptiness and beauty of it. If you cannot play a song acoustic, with voice and guitar, or instrumentation, then that means the song is not beautiful.

SB: Tell us about the song "Iemanja?"

AK: It's a song that wrote with Carlinos Brown and dedicate to Iemanja, the goddess of the sea, asking her to join us for the party, bring us her wisdom and her loving. We need that. We never can have enough of that, right? So if she's our mother, mother of party, mother of love, and mother of peace, it's time for her to show up because we need that definitely now. Come quick.