“N’dija nha África” is the new single from the debut album of the same name by Mira Kendô, which will be released by Gris Gris Records on November 8th.
We missed playing together, among friends and family. “N’dija nha África” embodies this nostalgia and feels like a hug that transports us back to our roots. The place where the heart beats stronger. Each chord of the Kora – a complex musical instrument with an irresistible sound – finds in this theme an audience that listens, feels, and dances, cradled by the sweetness and flavour of our land. “N’dija nha África” is more than a melody; it is a fruit that carries the essence and soul of Africa, the joy and longing that inspires us and that we want to share with the world so that it can be appreciated and celebrated.
Braima Galissá was born in Guinea-Bissau, growing up in the family tradition of griots, intimate figures of the cultural and identity history of the Mandinga people. For years, he dedicated himself to exploring the depths of his heritage, practising the art and craft of the Kora.
The story of Mira Kendô begins in the studio of Jori Collignon when Braima was introduced to him by a mutual friend, Francisco Sousa (Fininho). As soon as Braima began to play the Kora, wonderful compositions emerged. Instinctively, Jori grabbed his drum machines and started adding layers. It all felt very natural as if we were conversing through music. Despite having such different musical references, we immediately began composing together.
Producer, keyboardist, and electronic musician, Collignon sees himself as a lover of traditional musical roots, which he uses to weave, in his identity weave, the sonic bridges that connect different peoples, origins, and generations. For the Dutch musician, it was a deep immersion into the rich musical heritage of Guinea-Bissau. “I have always been fascinated by traditional music and the way it travels, evolves, and transforms around the world,” shares the musician. When Jori and Braima talk about traditional music, they do not refer to something trapped in the past, but rather to a living genre, in constant mutation. It is about understanding the place of music in the world. Authentic music is not just a performance; “it moves, transforms, has a function, and provokes us.”
Along with the renowned guitarist from Guinea-Bissau, Eliseu Forna Imbana, and the drummer of Selma Uamusse, Gonçalo Santos, they came together to create something truly special, mixing diverse influences and a common passion for music that transcends borders. This music is a testament to the power of collaboration and the beauty that arises when different cultures and traditions meet and engage through sound.
Braima Galissá: “The Unlikely Hybrid”
Text by Fininho Sousa
I got to know Braima Galissá slowly. Not at a specific moment, but over the years. When we became close friends and began working together, we were already unable to trace the exact origin of our friendship. Braima is a figure of crystalline talent, placed before a sour ambiguity. On one hand, he is a disciplined and meticulous artist, who has achieved a rare level of performance, collaborated with some of the biggest names in national music like Sara Tavares and General D, plays Kora every day for 55 years, and imposes a particularly technical, sophisticated style, absorbing all the valuable musical languages around him. On the other hand, the architecture of European cultural customs has outlined limits that he has always rejected but are impossible to ignore. Countless times, in his representation before the more or less formal interest of labels in recording and releasing his themes, we heard proposals or already definitive pre-production plans that consisted only of Braima, alone, playing his themes on the Kora, singing. Without a metronome, without effects; “Pure.” And without interest in hearing the artist himself, who repeatedly asserted in various languages and through grammatical variations that his music was for dancing, created for a band of at least five members. These independent labels, well-versed in the obscure names of Jazz, never realized the arbitrariness of that arrogance; would this paternalism also be calmly explained to disciples of the Weather Report? The historical identity of Djidiu as a storyteller and his historical training as a composer for Kora and voice is undeniable. What is doubted is the traditional Guinean musician exclusively as an agent of the past, static in time, a representative of imagined cultural purity. The Kora, like many other instruments developed over centuries, has evolved. Braima, like any Guinean musician, plays Salsa. The Gumbé, whose Guinean version is the national pride of Guinea-Bissau, has had many lives and has many distinct versions across West Africa. The Cape Verdean Morna, as Vasco Martins argues, has strong influences from Argentina, via the island of Boavista. Modernity is not an exclusively European project, and it is a waste that musicians associated with territories (wrongly) seen as alien to modernity constantly have to prove they also belong to the club of “cosmopolitans.” Let the Tabanka Djaz say so.
On June 8, 1998, returning to Guinea-Bissau after performing at two concerts, he saw his flights cancelled upon learning that Ansumane Mané had gathered troops to depose Nino Vieira in Bissau, starting a Civil War. Braima then found himself inadvertently stranded in Portugal, and a new life took shape. A new country for an uncertain time, with new musical traditions and forms of communication, and many admirers with open arms. One of the biggest differences Braima reports finding in Lisbon was being able to collaborate with conservatory musicians. These musicians, experienced in collective composition, imposed a method and structure, both in compositions and rehearsals, which made him rethink the possibilities of Kora and voice in the studio. Everything, after all, was possible. I remember in certain periods of openness and inspiration, hearing on WhatsApp almost daily experiences that Braima was having with musicians from all angles. From the Kora in a loop and under effects, intertwined in a blanket of textures of experimental electronics, to a theme where the Kora seemed to drag, distorted, in a blues language or, frequently, the Kora playing over a drum machine. The desire to absorb the astonishing diversity of musical traditions in the metropolis, however, did not influence one of the fundamental pillars of his art. Braima represents a rare artistic form among the cultural elites of contemporary big cities: he carries his art as a purpose that demands discipline, repetition, rigour, and patience. The Kora requires constant tuning, maintenance, and typically a learning period of several years, incompatible with the contemporary artistic era of expectation of immediate results. Braima does not see his career as a musician as a form of escape or freedom of expression, but as an inherited responsibility, honourable and important to fulfil fully.
My generation, born shortly after April 25 in Portugal, was completely dominated by the culture of the US-UK axis. This preponderance, which I addressed in a youthful but energetic way in the pamphlet “Voluntary Cultural Colony,” has as one of its consequences the immediate marginalization of music from traditions distant from that axis. Electronic dance music without Detroit, Chicago, London, and Manchester loses weight and transforms into one of two possibilities: an irrelevant parrot, or an imperceptible novelty to the overwhelming majority of educated, traveled, and democratic urban Western populations. The doors of acceptance are always, for many reasons, opened by projects from the same metropolises: New York, Paris, London, LA, and Berlin. World Music as a unified project (which is increasingly less) showed “the other side” pushed by the counterculture and by the cooperators who have since returned. That side, today, is exhausted because it carries essentialist perceptions that the new enthusiast no longer sponsors: genuineness, simplicity, and primitivism.
Braima, continuously evaluated by European editors as only a representative, has repeatedly revealed to those who have listened to him throughout his long career, all the qualities of a traditional composer in constant evolution, as well as those of an unwavering urban experimenter. However, these frequencies have remained unheard of by the same elites who, in the 80s, warned Youssou N’Dour not to degrade himself by making sophisticated music. This album, by nesting around his compositions while seeking a hybrid and homeless sound, shortens distances and finally brings Braima’s art closer to the arduous body of work that creates new poles, new mixtures, new risks, new alternatives to the same urban centres that still dictate our taste today. It is in this work of slow refinement that culture is created: a radical intercultural flattening that generates an equivalence and familiarity, facilitating the exchange of musical arguments to the point that fusions seem, after all, natural.
Thank you Braima and Gris Gris
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