Bachelor concerts at Global music department of Sibelius Academy have two stages. On the second year of studies one gets to perform a smaller concert of 30 minutes. That concert I had in spring 2018 after my first field trip in Cuba. That concert included five songs of batá, Haitian songs and one Bougarabo song from Senegal. I chose the band members from my class because it was an easy way. We were able to help each other in our concerts on the day that had 8 small concerts in a row at Black Box of the Music House. The biggest issue was the lack of time with the sound checks. Otherwise everything went well. Only the bass player was not from my class. Lauri Salokoski teaches at Global Music department and he has been the most important help for me when arranging my material.
In the autumn 2018 I started gathering a band for the bigger bachelor concert held in spring 2019. The winter before the concert I would spend five weeks in Benin collecting more material of Vodoo songs. Half of what I needed I had already from Santiago de Cuba. This band I wanted to be bigger but I could not pay the musicians for motivation. So I asked early my fellow students at the Global Music department. From there I got three percussionist, the only brass instrument (trumpet) of the department, piano and a lead singer. Lauri Salokoski was again the bass player. I needed one more percussionist and Aapo Vatanen, with whom I have played Afro Cuban rumba for a decade, came in. When planning the trip to Grand Popo of Benin I heard that guitarist Petri Kautto was on a project there at the same time. I contacted him and got him into my project also. With Petri I had a duo in 2007.
I wanted dancing to be part of the show also. I asked Jesus La Rosa, a dance tearcher and musician from Santiago, to do the ” hot shoulders” zombie dance for the song Mayizepol. In Benin and Cuba music does not exist without dance. Chirtopher Small talks about this in his book ”Music of the Common Tongue”. He notes that in most parts of Africa, music ”hardly exists as a separate art from dance, and in many African languages there is no separate word for it, although there are rich vocabularies for forms, styles and techniques” (Small, 1987, p. 24). Noël Saïzonou has confirmed that this is the case also with his two strongest languages, Goun and Fon.
First problem when starting to teach the material to my band was finding enough common time and to get people answer a doodle calendar. I worked separately with the percussion group and singers. The rhythms go mostly in 6/8 and are highly syncopated. That took a lot of time from half of the musicians, inexperienced with African based music. At some point the challenging rhythms put me thinking to substitute some of the musicians but that did not feel right. It was a school project still, though an ambitious one. This kind of music is in call and response form, lead singer and choir, and there are parts from A to I in many songs. The difficulty is that many parts have circles of 9 or 11 bars. If one is not very familiar with the song it’s easy to miss the part transitions. Many music genres around the world have circles of 4 and 8 bars and one gets used to it after playing music a lot like that. Other main problem was the variety of phrasing the rhythms. The African way feels to me very forward leaning and when half of the band was not experienced with that pharising it took a long time to get adjusted. Also these musicians had simultaneously other shool projects.
For me it was clear that we are not trying to do a ceremony on the stage. I wanted to make a beautiful music performance and the material was good for it. The context was very different to how and where this material is originally performed. But what is the purpose of music? I like what Noël Saïzonou says in a documentary ”We are together” (Leevi Lehikoinen and Chrysa Panagiotopoulou, 2018): ”Music is a universal language. It has no racism in it. When two musicians meet they want to exchange their knowledge. After they want to perform their collaboration to people, to unite and make them happy. How I feel music is the way I sing” (These were not his exact words, but I think it is close to what he ment.)
The concert felt exellent. The hall was full and I managed to lead and do my own part well. I had really similar experience to Halonen’s. ”Naturally I needed to put quite a bit of extra effort into learning all the arrangements by heart, since besides playing, singing and talking to the audience, I also needed to do a lot of signaling to the band. That left me with a feeling after the concert, that if only I could get to do this few more times, the flow would be perfect and we would ”nail it”. (Halonen, 2018, p.22).
I got great feedback from both the audience and the judges. Bringing this material from far away, arranging it with new flavour, teaching it forward and leading a band on the stage I could not have done better. Next step would be composing my self and trying to dig out the artist in me more. I was not happy on the mistakes on endings and part changes. Also the phrasing never got to level I required. But there was not enough time for rehearsals and the difficulty level of the music was high. The difference to be a supporting musician in a band or the leader is now clearer to me and I enjoyed the path a lot.
This concert was held in May 2019 and we had another concert in Juttutupa in November 2019. There we managed to play more relaxed in the tempo but we had the same difficulties with endings and phrasign.
