Diali Cissokho & Kaira Ba is a group composed of native Senegalese griot musician Diali Cissokho, as well as numerous other North Carolinian musicians who share his love of music based on the Manding tradition. The group plays Wednesday as a part of Duke Garden’s Music in the Gardens concert series. Staff writer James Butler sat down with Diali Cissokho and percussionist Will Ridenour to talk about the band’s music and their philosophy on live performance.
Diversions: Obviously, the first half of your band name is Diali’s name, but what does Kaira Ba mean?
Will Ridenour: The word “kaira,” in Mandinka language, means peace or love. And “ba” is a suffix added onto the end of the word to make it great or big. So “kaira ba” means “the great peace.”
Dive: What are a few of you guys’ musical influences?
WR: The music we play is based around kora music from West Africa, which has hundreds of years of tradition behind it, so we take a lot of old traditional songs and reinvent them. We are definitely influenced by all the kora players we hear who play these same songs, but then we listen to a lot of jazz and blues and funk and other American traditional music.
But it is really hard to name specific influences. I would name Salif Keita, who is one of Diali’s favorite musicians. But there is also Youssou N’Dour, who is also really big from Senegal. But there really aren’t any American influences.
Dive: The majority of your band has backgrounds in rock or jazz music, how do you fuse those backgrounds into African music and make them mesh?
WR: Well, when we say jazz, we aren’t really talking about what jazz sounds like. We’re talking more about the theory and what’s behind the music of jazz. And in that sense, our guitar player (John Westmoreland) plays a lot of jazz, so he’s well versed in the meaning of the jazz standards. But knowing that has given him this lightness in his guitar playing that has translated well to African guitar playing. You have a set progression or a set riff, and you are repeating that riff a lot with variation. So that’s where the jazz comes into Kaira Ba, but we don’t sound like jazz at all, really.
We have a lot of improvisational stuff going on in our music, and a lot of our songs are controlled by what’s happening in the moment. So say if Diali wants to sing a few more lines than normal, we extend parts, and if he’s done singing, we shorten parts. And we give each other signals on when to move on to the next part. So it’s not set in stone. Our songs, they breathe a lot, they’re very flexible.
Dive: Where is your favorite place you have ever performed?
Diali Cissokho: My favorite is in Africa, when (the rest of the group) came with me to Africa because in Africa, not a lot of white people play African music. When we went to Senegal, my younger brother’s son had a birthday party, and it was a big celebration outside in the street. I was excited that my friends, my family and my community got to see these people play. That’s my favorite show that we played.
WR: I was going to say the exact same show. When you go to Youtube and you type in African music, often you will see some really crappy video of an amazing thing happening in the street somewhere. At these shows, people bring in lights, people bring in chairs and put them in a big circle, people bring in PA speakers, and musicians come and play at one end of the circle. And in the middle of the circle, people dance. It’s a huge, enormous cultural phenomenon there.
Music is in the street, it’s not up on a stage, it’s in the street. And every time I would see a video of that, I would really want to experience that someday. And when our band went to Senegal in 2011, we got to play a show just like that, and it was amazing.
Dive: Do you ever worry about having trouble finding an audience for this kind of music in North Carolina?
WR: We don’t worry about that because everybody who hears our music is touched by it. And we try to make our music as accessible to as many people as possible, just by making people happy. Because everybody has that need to be happy, we all get it in different ways.
DC: Our music, when we play, sometimes the music is very involved because there is that musical energy giving you peace. Anywhere we go to play, we don’t worry about whether or not we will have people to play to. First, worry about yourself. To make people come, first you have to have energy. So people can see the energy to come to. Kaira Ba have that energy.
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