The Wild Reed: Daby Touré: “African Music Is Everywhere”

Friday, August 21, 2020

Daby Touré: “African Music Is Everywhere”

Something very special this evening for “Music Night” at The Wild Reed – Africa Channel's 2015 interview with one of my favorite musicians, Daby Touré.

In this 9-minute video, Daby talks about the role of music in his life, his musical inspirations, and how music from Africa is at the roots of genres such as Blues and Jazz.

“African music is everywhere,” says Daby. “It travelled a long, long time ago when the slaves from Africa [were brought] to the United States. And what they did was the Blues. That's African music. Rock'n'Roll is African music. Most of the time we forget that. . . . [Their traditional music] was mixed with the music of Europe and something amazing happened. . . . Inside of their suffering, inside of their really, really difficult story, something really amazing came out. And it was music: the Blues and then Jazz . . . And that's what Africa brings to the world.”

More beauty and wisdom from Daby . . .

• [As musicians] we have a responsibility to society. . . . We're not supposed to do hits. We are not supposed to be rich. . . . We are supposed to listen to people, their joy, their sadness, their problems, and just try to transcend this and give it back to people who can [then use what we've created] to organize themselves.

• Music is my politics; harmony and what music can make you feel. At that moment you open and can hear the message. And the message is talking about human beings . . . about their past, their story, and about what happened in Africa; what really happened in the beginning [of the colonial era] and why things are like [they are today] and why there is division and hatred [in the world].

• It's a time for all of us in the world, for human beings, to understand that we all are the same, and we all come from the same place, and we are all going to the same place. And it is time for us to understand that we have to live together.

Perhaps no song of Daby's explores more directly this imperative to understand and live together than “Oma,” the lead single from his 2015 album, Amonafi. And as you'll see below, the official music video for “Oma” also powerfully conveys this imperative.

About “Oma” and its parent album, Amonafi, Marco Werman and Steven Davy write the following.

Singer-songwriter Daby Touré's latest album, Amonafi, is sonically compelling [and] thematically is for our time. A lot of the songs on it are about displacement and address many Africans' desire to go to Europe to seek a better life.

But, there’s one song though called “Oma” that suggests Europe is not all that it’s cracked up to be. So we wanted to know what Touré thought as the world witnesses thousands of migrants and refugees pouring into Europe right now.

His home base is Paris, and he meets many people who've arrived there from far-flung crisis spots around the world. This is the starting point for “Oma.”

“I wrote this song because I was seeing people every day outside,” he says in an interview at Berklee's Café 939 in Boston. “And there was this woman down on the street . . . I would always say hello and we would talk a little bit. And one day we had a really good talk. She told me about her life and the difficulties she has with her children – and the fact that she’s homeless. What surprised me was [how] everyday we pass in front of these people and we get used to it.”

Touré, who is from Mauritania and Senegal in West Africa, says he really wanted to write a song and talk about her story.

“It wasn’t easy, but I did it because I was seeing these people coming out from everywhere – from all the poor countries and from Africa of course,” he says. “What is really interesting to see is how people are reacting in front of these refugees coming out from Syria. Everybody is scared and we don’t have to be.”

That woman he met on the streets of Paris, along with the refugees and the migrants who are coming over to Europe right now, seem to echo Touré's own story of displacement.

“My story is the same,” he says. “When I was 2 years old, my parents got separated and my father started to send me everywhere: Senegal, Mauritania, to his mother, to his uncle. For him it was important for me to learn life earlier.”

Touré says that because he was largely on his own, he had to learn to communicate with people and understand the differences between the communities he was dropped into and himself.

“Every time I had to find a way to make myself like ‘I’m part of you, can you accept me?' And so this is how my life started,” he says. “So I can really understand these people I can feel exactly what they feel.”