By Blair Hornbuckle, Musical Director
[Note: Bush Mango has now been on stage thousands of times. What follows are a few recollections from our early days, archived here for historical purposes.]
I love the fluidity inherent in being a musician. It brings numerous opportunities to come together with so many different people, to celebrate being alive.
Do you have any memorable show stories you would like to share? Send them in. Here are a few of mine...
With Joliba as a guest artist for Sankofa's spring concert. April, 1992. I had only been playing for a few months with Karen Flynn. She had organized a drum circle at the Yoga Society of Rochester. Lansana Kouyate, an African guitarist, showed up practically right off the plane from Guinea.
Lansana's last band was Fatala of Holland. He'd met his wife-to-be in Toronto while touring with Peter Gabriel's WOMAD show, and ended up moving to Rochester.
So Lansana walks in while I was playing the dundun on the only tune I knew -- Lamban. B B B - B B B -| Pretty simple stuff. He says "Oh, dundun man! I neeeeeed you for my band!"
So Karen and I joined Lansana, and Senegalese guitarist Thierno Niang on stage for four days. Talk about getting thrown to the lions! Stephan Collins, then Sankofa's musical director, kicked my butt. He was furious when he found out I'd never been on stage before, but it was way too close to showtime to do anything about it. We had three tunes semi-rehearsed.
An hour before curtain on Friday night Lansana starts wondering what we should do if the audience wants an encore. So we're in the dressing room and he's teaching us all another song. I'm doing my best to take this in, but am a nervous wreck. I think I get a handle on the tune. Didn't really matter as you'll hear in a moment.
So we open up and do fine with our first song. And our second. I'm trying like heck to remember how the third song goes and I'm as certain about it as a nervous white guy trying to back up these professional African musicians could be. Especially a guy whose last experience as a music student was flunking saxophone in sixth grade. Despite all that, I'm consciously trying to relax and breathe.
As Stephan calls the break for the start of tune number three, and I'm about to start playing, I suddenly get the feeling that someone is holding back my arm. Just momentarily. And when they let go, and my stick headed for the dundun, something completely different than what was in my head starts coming from my drum. I'm freaking and looking at Lansana, who sends back a big smile. Moral of the story: the ancestors are always around. We just have to relax, and let them play through us. Of course it took me several more years to figure this out and really believe it.
So after our third and last song, sure enough, the crowd is screaming "Encore!" Or maybe Lansana just felt like playing another tune. So he gives us the sign to play one more. And on the break I start playing the new tune he'd taught us in the dressing room earlier. Stephan gives me a dirty look. Lansana is glancing sideways to figure out what's going on. I suddenly realize that they're playing our third song over again! I switch parts, everybody's smiling, and it's cool. Lansana speaks French, and I don't, so maybe there is some subtle difference in the translation of the word encore.
Anti-Columbus Day show at the Pyramid Arts Center. October, 1993. This was our first real performance as a community. Yette Sorte was our core piece (Kuku, Liberty, & Nimba), as taught by Karen Flynn after her return from Gambia. Karen had her newborn son Elijah tied to her back with a lapa. We had drama, lighting cues, a huge cast (15 plus?), and lots of rehearsals. It was a great show, but it practically killed our community. Some people quit coming to classes because they turned into rehearsals. A big learning opportunity for me! "Not everyone wants what I want! What a concept!"
A wrong turn somewhere left us eventually sitting in a four-lane highway turned parking lot. We inched along through the asphalt enhanced heat. No A/C, no tunes except for AM radio, with Laurie's big slobbering dog sleeping on my foot. We're long past bored when sax player Greg Newton, the hardest working man in the music business, jumps out of the van.
"Let's go!" Greg shouts. "Let's get some publicity out of this deal even if we never make it to the stage."
So he starts walking shirtless up the road, much faster than the vehicle is moving, handing out Joliba flyers to people in lawn chairs, people juggling, and playing soccer.
Greg's shouting "Catch us on the South stage at 2 o'clock!" What a dedicated guy. The rest of us sit there doing nothing except continue to be assaulted by the rap music blasting from a Jeep next to us. Lansana is proclaiming Greg as crazy and having a laughing fit over it. This goes on for half an hour when the Jeep stalls.
Laurie pulls right up behind them, bumper to bumper, and without asking pushes their car off the road. Now we can start moving a little. I'm realizing that she gets a little up tight when she's not doing better than 60.
Traffic starts picking up a little and soon we're rolling past Greg, which he doesn't notice for about 10 car lengths. We're looking back at him, and he's looking back down the ten more miles of traffic crawling along behind us. Laurie, who isn't even in the band, shows no signs of slowing down for the guy. This is amusing because she's Greg's friend who he brought along because she had a van.
Now we're picking up speed and it's 20 car lengths when he spots us. Greg is jogging at first, expecting her to slow down. Laurie is holding steady so he starts sprinting up the road, catching up in a long couple of minutes, red-faced and sweat-soaked, screaming through the window "Stop the fucking van! Let me in!" Laurie barely slows down enough for him to yank the door open and drag himself back aboard. I have no idea if they're still buddies.
So how about the show itself? What a blast! Huge stage, with hundreds of techs taking great care of us, rolling us and our gear around on wheeled risers.
Our music was very well received. We played after a bunch of hard rockers who blasted away through speaker stacks as high as a five-story building. A blistering hot day, with people standing stone still, getting fried and blasted all at once. No foot tapping. No finger snapping...
Until the African tunes began. We started with a drum number. Lansana and I played Kassa, with the rest of the band improvising. Then our Joliba standards, the names of which I can't think of now because it seems like I never saw a written set list. Just rely on those ancestors!
After our 30 minute set I heard lots of praise from the professional roadies who had come from all over the world to work at Woodstock. Lansana's music definitely turns heads.
The real sign of success though on that scorching day in July, 1999? The way people immediately jumped up to dance, as if our traditional African music became a cool breeze blowing across a sea of 80,000 now smiling faces.
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