MUSIC: A Family Affair - The Sons and Daughters of World Music

Julian Lennon was never forbidden from playing music by his father and enrolled into the army against his will. If Arlo Guthrie was ever reduced to herding cattle for a living when Woody died, praying that drought would never return, history doesn’t record it. When Frank Zappa passed away, no one was asking whether his heavy metalling son, Dweezil, could assume the role of musical visionary. Instead, these stories belong, respectively, to Vieux Farka Touré, the Zawose Family, and CJ Chenier.
The WOMAD festival doesn’t simply shine a light into previously darkened corners of song, providing sharp relief from a UK music scene seemingly content to churn out inspiration-free facsimiles of all that has passed before; it introduces whole new chapters to the well-thumbed, learnt-by-rote Book of Musical Folklore. What follows is a brief overview of the one entitled ‘A Family Affair’.
It’s the one that tells the tale of how the son of Malian blues legend, Ali Farka Touré, was finally able to join his once disapproving father onstage: “It meant so much,” says Vieux, “that nobody, not the greatest writer in the world, NOBODY, could ever put into words what I felt. Not even me.” It also details the travails of the Zawose Family, famously joyous evocates of Tanzanian Wagogo music, whose lives were thrown into flux by the death of the man who – to Western eyes - personified the form: their father, Dr Hukwe. “My father had seven wives,” says his daughter, Pendo. “I have so many brothers and sisters it can be difficult now to decide how to share what little we have. To simply feed everyone is very difficult and sometimes we are hungry.” CJ Chenier’s inheritance from his father, the widely acknowledged ‘King of Zydeco’, Clifton Chenier, was a welter of expectation and an equally ubiquitous tag: ‘Heir to the Throne’. “I really don't look for the crown,” he admits, “because I don't think anyone can take my dad’s place.” And finally, also from across the Atlantic, Ben Taylor has had to come to terms with following in the multi-million selling footsteps of both pater and mater: sweet father James, and Carly Simon. “With most people they’ve played thousands of shows before you ever hear them; with people like me, the first time you’re onstage the press tends to be there. It’s weird.”
For musicians born into a song-making dynasty, such pressure can sometimes begin a little closer to home. Rufus Wainwright – son of singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III and folk ace Kate McGarrigle – once told me about the time when, aged 17, he first played some songs to his mother: “She told me they were all crap and that I really should have more respect for my listener.” He defended her remarks as “shooting an arrow of reality.” Was that your initial response, though, I asked? “No, I was devastated,” he admitted. “But I have a sense of not believing the bullshit, and my mom is responsible for that.”
Ali Farka Touré, as we have seen, took the ‘tough love’ approach a whole step further by forbidding his son from playing music altogether. Vieux openly defied his wishes by enrolling in the National Arts Institute in Bamako. It was there that the kora ace, Toumani Diabaté, brought him into his performing ensemble and entreatied that his father recognise a burgeoning talent. Like Wainwright, time has taught Touré to appreciate his parent’s hardline methods. “I am only now realising why my father didn’t want me to go into music professionally. He had already seen what I am seeing now: what hard work it is to survive in the world of music. He didn’t want me to take a fall, and just wanted to try to make sure I had an easier path than he did.”
Clifton Chenier was another insistent father, as his sax-playing, funk and jazz-loving son quickly discovered when he joined the accordion-centric family business. “At first I thought there could be a place for the accordion as a secondary instrument,” recalls CJ, “but my dad quickly ended that thought by saying, ‘It's got to be first - you either play it or leave it alone’. That helped me make up my mind. As time went on, my love for zydeco music grew. [Before he died] it was already in my and my father's mind that I would continue. The only pressure I ever felt came from inside myself, and that was the want to do my dad proud.”
When Pendo Zawose’s father passed away, the realities of life in desperately poor Tanzania brought forth pressures of another kind altogether. “He would earn a lot of money abroad and that money no longer comes to us. We cannot choose what we want to be here; we are musicians and that is what our family do. We also make money from herding cattle, but things have changed and we no longer can rely on such activities; when drought comes then the cattle can die.”
The Book of Musical Folklore adopts a mocking tone when describing how traditional folk grandee, Pete Seeger, threatened to cut Bob Dylan’s electrifying cables at the 1965 Newport Festival. In this new chapter, however, it becomes clear that the times-they-mustn’t-change dictum of the purist can, on occasion, be of critical importance. “Our father taught us to be true to our traditions and what our ancestors taught us,” explains Pendo. “We have tried hard to make money from our music here in Tanzania, but people are not so interested - it is too traditional and the people want to listen to Bongo Flava [East African hip hop], imported styles from Europe and America.”
All of which explains why she bursts into laughter when asked if she enjoys playing in the UK. “You do not understand! The audience there are so so so interested in traditional Tanzanian music and give us so much respect. We rely on our music and on people listening to it. When we played at WOMAD in 2003 the audience were crying at the front of the stage as we were displaying so much energy in our dance. I can’t wait to go back, really.”
Wondering whether the Zawose Family’s musicality should be attributed to nature or nurture draws a similarly bemused response. “It is funny, as for us this was never really a question: we just knew it, it is in our blood. Music is not just something that we listen to on tapes, it is a part of our everyday life. My mother sings as she works in the fields and we sing as we cook, it is natural for us. I could sing and dance before I could talk and walk.”
It’s an upbringing wholly understood by Vieux Farka Touré. “In Africa, it’s always like that, to follow in the steps of greater ones who have come before. I’ll continue to do as [my father] did, united with him, carrying on the tradition and everything he wanted, if God wills it. But now it is up to me to try to do even better…”
For Ben Taylor, the journey along a musical path wasn’t quite so pre-ordained. He didn’t take up the guitar until the age of 11 and was, perhaps surprisingly, self-taught (“Well, you could say my dad taught me, because I learnt to play all his songs”). Until well into his teens, he considered his likely career path to involve either farming or gardening. “I think a lot of kids who grow up in households with successful musicians understand very quickly that it’s not as glamorous as the illusion would have you believe,” he explains. “We tend to be witness to a lot of arguments with managers and A&R people over the phone, people complaining about booking, overheads – it seems a lot more blue-collar from the first-hand perspective.”
Nevertheless, it seems both nature and nurture eventually pulled him towards a life in music. “I’ve drawn from my folks in attitude and style, plus other things I wouldn’t even know. They’re my archetypal influences as human beings, more than just as musicians, so I think maybe it’s a deeper cellular level – my character, physical attributes, etc - that reflects itself musically as well.” Ultimately, he concludes, “I wouldn’t have gone into it if it hadn’t been the family business.”
Finally, even in the most traditional of forms, the new generation are mapping out their own distinct musical direction. The late Dr Hukwe Zawose, says Pendo, “was very strict with the music, and sometimes we would not be allowed to play certain instruments. Now we have a new amount of freedom, while still respecting what he taught us. My father was the first Wagogo musician to mix his music with Western instruments [in collaboration with Canadian guitarist/producer, Michael Brook, he recorded ‘Kuna Kunguni/The Bedbugs Bite’ for the Real World-released AIDS benefit album, ‘Spirit of Africa’]. So we will also add new things to our music, and our children will say ‘Ah yes, that was my mother's idea; that was her way to develop the music’. Each generation should adapt and change, should it not?”