Ibro Dioubate and Jeff Coffin
Get your listenin’ ears on and clear your schedule, because Friday’s celebration of West African music at the Nashville Jazz Workshop is going to demand all of your attention. Featuring a stacked lineup of in-demand local instrumentalists — centered on the collaboration of Djembefola Ibrahima “Ibro” Dioubate and saxophonist, educator and indie label head Jeff Coffin — the show is a dive into one of the world’s deepest musical wells.
The event is organized by AfricaNashville, a nonprofit co-founded by Coffin and local dancer and artist manager Windship Boyd to bring African music to the schools and stages of Middle Tennessee. The gig is as much a celebration of music traditions that stretch back thousands of years as it is a statement about our future and the future of music. The cross-cultural collab connects the most ancient and fundamental of human beliefs — namely, “drums are awesome” — to Nashville’s contemporary music scene.
“Listen, listen, listen, listen, practice, listen, practice,” Dioubate tells the Scene. He released his debut album Kossa Kassa on Coffin’s Ear Up Records last year. He is from a lineage of players that goes back generations, his family tasked with maintaining musical and oral storytelling traditions of his native Guinea that reach back to time immemorial. “Listen, practice, repeat. And then dance, dance … dance together, and sing too.”
It’s a musical pedagogy that stands in stark contrast to Western music education — raise your hand if you ever got kicked out of band class for fidgeting too much! But that’s exactly why it connects, why kids and adults fall for this music head over heels.
“There’s a lot of different Nashvilles,” explains Boyd. “When we go into different schools, between a Montessori and a private school and a public school and the inner city, you’re just going to have really different audiences. But everybody responds to the drum. Everybody responds to the music. It’s really universal because it’s the origins of [all of] our music.”
The band for Friday’s NJW performance underscores Boyd’s “a lot of different Nashvilles” point. Led by Coffin — who has performed with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones and Dave Matthews Band in addition to releasing more than 25 solo albums — the group features heavy hitters from the worlds of rock, jazz, pop and country.
Keith Carlock has played drums with Steely Dan and Sting. Trumpeter Emmanuel Echem is a local mainstay who’s played with Kirk Franklin and Ivan Neville’s Dumpstafunk. Guitarist Bob Lanzetti has pushed fusion into the 21st century with Snarky Puppy. Nashville native Jon Estes has laid down the bottom end with Kacey Musgraves and Dolly Parton. And because you can never, ever have too many drums, Guinean drum maestro Fode Sylla rounds out the ensemble.
“It’s a music that unites — and to me, we need a lot more unity,” says Coffin. “And this music brings great joy. And I always tell my students, ‘Bring the joy when you’re getting ready to hit the stage.’ And Ibro and Windship and myself — and Fode and all the musicians, Keith and Bob and Jon — I think that we all have that similar spirit in that we want to uplift. We want to lift the bandstand and we want to bring the joy.”
While it may be a recent addition to the sound palette of Music City, this music has seen war and peace, famine and feast, hard times and good. It resonates with our times because it has transcended time.
“People really feel it,” says Boyd. “It’s amazing. It doesn’t matter if we’re at the Girl Scouts in Franklin, or the Country Music Hall of Fame. It doesn’t matter where we are, people feel it. And that’s why it’s so powerful.”
