11-11-06
A few nights ago, a lady friend asked me to go see/hear “Ghanatta Internationale”, an African band. The backdrop of the medium-sized theater (the one in UMSL’s newish Millennium Student Center) was a lobby area and meeting room, where a very cool looking buffet was laid out–weird stuff, mostly, but a lot of it quite good. I’d review the effects on my palette if I could remember the words.
A speaker rose to speak as we all finished eating, and laid on a foundation for the few of us who where newcomers:
Nigeria, population 65 million, is handily the biggest country in Africa, pretty much dead center, slightly north, on the continent. That makes it about 9th or 10th largest in the world, containing 20 million or so people more than South Africa.
This was the 22nd annual Nigeria Day in St Louis — a large number of people, apparently, came here (and to Chicago) during the late 70’s/early 80’s.
The band (Ghanatta) was intense. Four brass instruments (2 trombones, two trumpets) stood front center, the singer off to the left, the lone white player was a heck of a bassist, always with his back to us and facing his drummers (2) and the set was rounded out with two guitarists. One of the drummers I was quite grateful to be able to talk with for awhile was by far the youngest of the group, perhaps 20 or so…I was quite ready to adopt him. He began touring with the band a few months ago, and thinks he’s going to stay on with them.
The opening set started with a procession of ladies in brilliantly colored dresses, each holding two white silken cloths, moving and swaying to the African drumming, which shortly was added to by “shake” guitar feedback. In my years I’ve not had the pleasure of hearing such a sound.
About 4/5 of the lyrics weren’t in English, but the rhythm really moved all ages, and this was one of the very COOL kinds of concerts where chairs kept being moved back to accommodate the growing number of us dancing. The language gap didn’t bother me; it was cool to see all the people singing along, from those who were college-aged (a few, anyway) to my parents’ age.
This was GREAT dancing music! I wish I could describe it better, and my date was awesome company–there were places to go where we could hear each other talk and drink tall cold bottles or beer-like stuff (I forgot the name—they, however, did NOT cause hangovers in either of us!).
The band played for a long time–from about 8:45 to about 1:15 am or so. Most of them, I found as the night wore on, are from a Chicago near-suburb, so they agot into their van after saying their good-byes and drove off into a nasty drizzling rain that they faced on their trip home.
phil baker
11-06
