Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band
One of the wonderful things about covering music and conducting interviews is that you may find yourself dropping into delightful little moments in musicians’ lives. Sometimes it’s weird, like a conversation with an alt-rock hero that took place while they were cleaning up after a friend’s dog; sometimes it’s hilarious, like when an Americana icon had to pause in the middle of a phoner to literally tell a bunch of kids to get off his freshly fertilized lawn. And sometimes, it’s low-key and beautiful: When I reached a representative of Burkina Faso’s Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band, they were enjoying a beachside lunch break on the Pacific leg of a tour that brings the group to The Blue Room on May 18.
“We needed to get out of the city and then have a meal,” says Hisham Mayet with a laugh. Along with Sun City Girls’ Alan Bishop, Mayet is a co-founder of revered Seattle indie label Sublime Frequencies, which released the group’s three albums including last year’s Sonbonbela, and he is the band’s travel companion. French is the official language of Burkina Faso, and the main language spoken in the group, so Mayet and I talked instead. “So, an improvised picnic somewhere north of Santa Barbara is what’s happening right now.”
Bands have lunch on tour all the time, but there is something beautiful about an ensemble from a landlocked country half a world away, a week into their first American tour, just chilling on the shore and taking in the scenery. It is an image of peace that stands counter to the frenetic pulse of Baba Commandant & Co.’s music. Focused on singer Mamadou Sansou, aka Baba Commandant, his donso n’goni or “hunter’s harp” and his Lemmy-like knack for growling earworms, the group makes kinetic music blending ancient traditions of West Africa’s Manding people, comparatively recent innovations like Afrobeat, and contemporary musical visions.
“They arrived almost a week ago,” Mayet says, “then we drove down to Tijuana, Mexico, across the border and spent two days in Tijuana, which were glorious. We had a killer show there at the Tijuana Jazz Club, which wasn’t a big place. But it sold out, over a hundred people, and they went bonkers.
“You don’t see bands like this touring, and musically, they kind of don’t really sound like anybody else. ’Cause they’re mixing this traditional instrument with a rock backbeat with, like, psychedelic guitar. So in Tijuana, they were just kind of overwhelmed. It was incredible.”
Guitarist Issouf Diabate is easily one of the world’s best six-string players. With wild fretboard runs like Ernest Ranglin and on-a-dime turnarounds that invoke the cutting edge of Adrian Belew’s ’80s work, Diabate’s guitar dialogues with Sansou’s n’goni in mind-spinning microbursts of melody.
The strings in turn communicate with the rhythm section, weaving melodic ideas into the polyrhythmic fabric created by drummer Cheick Abbas Kobare, percussionist Nickie Dembele and bassist Wendeya Jessie Josias Ouedraogo. It is a torrent of sound that never loses focus, never gets bogged down in its own jaw-dropping musicianship.
“You can imagine how many bands we see and scout,” says Mayet. “For me to be able to invest so much time and effort, the band has to be something utterly phenomenal and sound unlike anybody else.”
When label personnel start throwing around phrases like “utterly phenomenal,” the instinct is to take it with a grain of salt, even when you hear that shift in timbre that denotes music-nerd excitement. But it’s a bit different with Mayet and Sublime Frequencies, a cultural enterprise launched in the early Aughts that spotlights snapshots of music scenes from around the world and has taken up some sizable real estate in this author’s record collection.
The Sublime Frequencies mission plays the long odds, making a rather huge gamble that the fringe of Western music culture can and will embrace music that’s central to — or on the fringes of — other music cultures. For two decades that gamble has paid off in some of the most thrilling, far-out sounds on record-store shelves, creating a listening world that embraces humanity’s most important ideas. “Country Riddim” this ain’t.
“[Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band’s music] is just different subject matter: dealing with human condition, growing up in a rural area, dealing with urbanization,” Mayet explains. “There’s a mystical tradition that comes from the donso hunters. They live out in the woods. They’re known as medicine men — everything is sourced from nature.”
From the guitar wizardry to the hill-country mysticism, Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band sound less like a group from around the world and more like one from around the corner. The ultimate universality of our experiences as listeners, the commonalities between performers and fans, are more important than just about anything.
“You know, we’re just sitting on a sunny beach in Santa Barbara, looking at oil rig platforms, fighting off seagulls who are waiting for us,” Mayet says, laughing again. “Well, there’s one puking right now, right on the water fountain.”
Beautiful moments, folks — that’s what it’s all about.
