You can make a lot of music with five notes. From East Asia to the Andes, British folk to the blues: pentatonic scales form the bedrock of musical traditions all across the world, each imbued with their own cultural personality. For two guitarists from opposite ends of Africa, five notes are all that are needed to create an all-new pan-African sound that aims to change how music is made across the continent.
Alhousseini Anivolla is a Tuareg guitarist and singer from Niger, best known for his time with pioneering Saharan group Etran Finatawa; Girum Mezmur is the go-to jazz guitarist in Ethiopia and the director of Addis Acoustic Project. Both Tuareg and Ethiopian music are unmistakably distinct and immediately recognisable, but both share the use of pentatonic scales. After a series of chance meetings and revelatory jam sessions, Anivolla and Mezmur unite the styles separated by more than 2,500 miles of desert. With a debut album, Afropentatonism just released, their journey has only just begun.
The roots of the Afropentatonism project go back to 2005, to the Afrika Festival in Hertme, the Netherlands. Anivolla was there with Etran Finatawa and Mezmur was performing with legendary Ethiojazz singer Mahmoud Ahmed. Watching each other play, there was shared amazement: it was the first time either had heard the music of the other and both were struck by the uncanny parallels between them. “We were stunned by the similarity of the cultures,” explains Mezmur. “Like the usage of the pentatonic scale and how similar all that is. We could easily relate to that.”
The excitement of that co-discovery made a long-lasting impact, but it was another 12 years before the two would meet again. At a gig in Addis Ababa in 2017, Anivolla’s trio Anewal invited Mezmur on stage for an impromptu set; afterwards, in a meeting together with mutual friend Sandra van Edig, the foundations of the long-pondered collaboration became a real prospect.
Over the next two years, meetings and discussions took place alongside the unavoidable jam sessions (“Whenever we meet, we just pick up our guitars and start jamming,” says Mezmur) and soon the realisation of even more links. A crystallising moment came as the musicians bonded over the music of Ali Birra, an Oromo musician from the Harar region of Ethiopia. “When he plays acoustic guitar it is so similar to how the Tamashek play acoustic guitar,” says Anivolla. “When we listened to Ali Birra, it was very easy for us to blend our styles.” The project was well and truly underway.
Around the core of the two guitarists, a band was handpicked from the best of musicians from Addis: Habtamu Yeshambel on one-stringed masenqo fiddle, Anteneh Teklemariam on bass krar (lyre), Misale Legesse on percussion and 78-year-old Swinging Addis veteran Ayele Mamo on mandolin. As a six-piece, the road led them to concerts, workshops and residencies in Ethiopia, Niger, Djibouti and Kenya.
Neither guitarist is a stranger to cross-cultural collaboration, each having played with many musicians of many different styles from across the world. Finding common sounds across cultures was also at the heart of Anivolla’s Etran Finatawa, a musical meeting of Tuareg and Wodaabe musicians. But there is something different about playing together as Afropentatonism. “The Tuareg and Wodaabe, we live very close together, our campsites can be right next to each other,” Anivolla describes, “but Tuareg music is much closer to Ethiopian music than Wodaabe music. I feel my own musical heritage when listening to different Ethiopian styles. There is a dance there that is the same dance we do. It’s as if there is one origin, one root with different branches.” Anivolla’s face lights up whenever he talks about playing with Mezmur. It’s obvious that there is something special in this collaboration.
The music they make together is a seamless blend, as heard on the album recorded live during their concert in Nairobi. Rolling rhythms play host to endless, circular riffs that spiral out into passionate solos, or groove-laden sections where multilingual conversations are enacted through reverberating strings. Most of the time it is impossible to pinpoint the fusion – to say which element comes from Ethiopian music and which from Tuareg. Each musician brings the whole force of their tradition behind them, as well as, crucially, a real empathy and understanding of the other’s.
The connection between the two cultures wasn’t just felt by the musicians. A special moment came during their time in Niamey, where Yeshambel became the unexpected star of the show. His masenqo is similar in many ways to the imzad, the Tuareg’s own one-string fiddle, which serves an important role in traditional Tuareg society. “The people in Niamey got crazy about the masenqo!” Annivola chuckles. “They wanted him to play all the time! They were shouting and crying, it was like the sound of the masenqo went directly to the soul of the people.”
In touching the souls, the musicians are also hoping to touch minds. The project’s Afrocentrism runs much deeper than its sound; it is built into the way that the project is run. Often cross-cultural collaborations are curated by world music industry figures to culminate in a record or a big European tour, with the money coming from the West and the music therefore geared towards Western ears. Afropentatonism is pan-African music made for Africans – and with African money.
It is often easier for African artists to gain funding to tour across Europe than it is Africa. A series of crowdfunding campaigns, however, freed the Afropentatonism project of the need to please a single rich donor and opened up more unorthodox performance avenues. “It came in bits and pieces,” says co-creator van Edig, “and we were really proud because over 50% of the funding came from Africa. It was so important that we were creative and that’s how we were able to travel in Africa.” By finding other funding options, Anivolla and Mezmur have brought their cultures to audiences that would otherwise have never had that contact – and in doing so, make music not solely beholden to European tastes.
The hope is that the initial success of the project can inspire a new generation of African musicians to do things their own way, looking beyond the restrictive power structures of Western funding and leading to wider audiences and increased creative freedom. It was a message the musicians stressed during workshops in each country. “This is what we promoted during the tour,” van Edig explains, “encouraging young artists not to wait for big funding, to go and try being creative. It was so authentic because we weren’t coming with big funding.” That the group even existed and could travel to spread this message was proof in itself that another way was possible.
Afropentatonism isn’t just a one-time experiment. The live album is a successful proof-of-concept, evidence that after just a few meetings, the musicians are capable of mining a deep seam of continental connections. With more and more experiences under their belt, the more those connections are explored, and the more the music percolates into one heady, unique sound. More tours are in the works, to other African countries – Sudan, Tanzania and South Africa have been mentioned – as well as Europe, and studio albums will surely follow. Together, Alhousseini Anivolla and Girum Mezmur are bringing people together over thousands of miles, all while forging new African music and new ways of making African music, five notes at a time.
Photo: Girum Mezmur and Alhousseini Anivolla, by Sandra van Edig.
