BADENYA LES FRÈRES COULIBALY - PERCUSSIVE FAMILY SHARES TRADITIONS OF AFRICA BY JON PARELES
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New York Times, BADENYA LES FRÈRES COULIBALY - Percussive Family Shares Traditions of Africa By JON PARELES , 08/20/01 >>
African drumming echoed off the glass and stone of Lincoln Center on Wednesday evening when Badenya les Frères Coulibaly, from Burkina Faso, played songs that carry venerable advice in a lattice of percussion. Badenya means family in the Bwaba language, and the group includes three brothers and their three nephews and a niece, all from a family of griots. Its songs have more rhythmic dimensions than the Cowsills or the von Trapp family could imagine.
Souleymane Coulibaly, the group's leader, composes songs with proverbial messages ("A good deed is never lost") and clear links to local traditions. The concert, part of Lincoln Center Out of Doors, featured songs from Badenya's "Seniwe" (Trace/City Hall), an uncommonly well-recorded traditionalist album. The group played the first half of its set wearing black-and-white, diamond-patterned costumes used by hunters from the Bambara tribe, which extends across the border from Burkina Faso into Mali.
The core of the music was a pair of balafons (marimbas), low and high, usually playing short contrapuntal patterns. Talking drum (tama) and larger drums kicked in from below; Souleymane Coulibaly's vocal lines unfolded above them, answered by the rest of the group. One song, "Wariba" (based on the saying "Money doesn't create happiness, but it contributes"), also used the n'goni, a hunters' harp similar to a kora. Mariam Coulibaly, the niece, sang an octave above her uncles and stepped forward to dance with flying feet and flailing arms.
A costume change brought the group back in purple, orange and yellow striped clothes, with four family members carrying djembes, hand drums with resonating metal flaps. Wearing tufted hats ornamented with cowrie shells, which are otherwise used for an annual celebration in the family's home village, they played annunciatory patterns in unison with martial precision. Then they barraged the beat with variations, using all the tones the djembe holds, a continuum from sharp, high reports played at the rim to booming tones from the drum's center.
Although its instruments are ancient, Badenya is comfortable with modernity. At one point Ms. Coulibaly danced with her feet matching every stroke of the djembe while she held a wireless microphone up to the drum. She sang a griot-style song in praise of twins — two of the brothers, Lassina and Ousséni Coulibaly, are twins — with the expansive Arabic- inflected phrasing that carries into the Senegalese rock called mbalax.
Her descant singing has Caribbean analogues in the reggae of Black Uhuru and the voodoo-rock of Boukman Eksperyans. And one balafon pattern was virtually identical to the piano vamps, or montunos, used in salsa. Badenya's close-knit musical family now reaches around the world.
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