JAZZ COSMOPOLITANISM IN ACCRA

to prevent piracy
and protect this
intellectual property,
please
do not circulate or
forward this pdf.
delete it when you
are done with it .
European and American modernist paintings
and photographs have long evoked jazz and
cosmopolitanism as night in the city, as dark
shadowy buildings beaming the energy of
bright lights into moody urban streets and
skies. The vibe is not dissimilar in globally
Afromodern Accra. Here, telecommunication
towers now burst into night like the shim-
mering strings and swinging ostinatos of a
seprewa, the Ghanaian harp. ‘‘Reach Out,’’
‘‘Stay Connected,’’ ‘‘Pay As You Go,’’ ‘‘Powerful
Delivery,’’ say the ubiquitous cellular ads, mix-
ing consumer urgency and religious resonance.
The words of the common obituary announce-
ment, ‘‘Home Call,’’ are simply flipped on the
signboard of my local mobile phone kiosk:
‘‘Call Home.’’ Jazz cosmopolitanism in Accra
is a collusion of chronotopes, the time-space
of the sky, of the road, and of the sea joining to
sound an unending Black Atlantic musical mo-
tion, where older ancestral connections meet
newer diasporic intimacies.
STEVEN FELD

Five Musical Years in Ghana

JAZZ
COSMOPOLITANISM
IN ACCRA

Duke University Press Durham and London 2012

∫ 2012 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on
acid-free paper $
Designed by C. H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Arno with Din Schrift display
by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

Publication Data appear on the
last printed page of this book.

The 2009 Ernest Bloch Lectures in Music

University of California, Berkeley

Frontispiece: Accra Calling, photograph

∫ 2010 Steven Feld.
 FOR ANITA AND BOB FELD

AND IN MEMORY OF MICHAEL BRECKER

The artistic will to polyphony
is the will to the event.
M. M. BAKHTIN
 SET LIST

OPUS xi
FOUR-BAR INTRO
‘‘The Shape of Jazz to Come’’ 1

VAMP IN, HEAD

Acoustemology in Accra:
On Jazz Cosmopolitanism 11

FIRST CHORUS, WITH TRANSPOSITION

Guy Warren/Ghanaba: From Afro-Jazz
to Handel via Max Roach 51

SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

Nii Noi Nortey: From Pan-Africanism
to Afrifones via John Coltrane 87

THIRD CHORUS, BACK INSIDE

Nii Otoo Annan: From Toads to
Polyrhythm via Elvin Jones and Rashied Ali 119

FOURTH CHORUS, SHOUT TO THE GROOVE

Por Por: From Honk Horns to Jazz Funerals
via New Orleans 159

HEAD AGAIN, VAMP OUT

Beyond Diasporic Intimacy 199

‘‘DEDICATED TO YOU’’ 245

HORN BACKGROUNDS, RIFFS UNDERNEATH 249
THEMES, PLAYERS 299
SECOND CHORUS,
BLOW FREE

Nii Noi Nortey

From Pan-Africanism to Afrifones
via John Coltrane
26. Nii Noi Nortey. Photograph ∫ 2005 Steven Feld.
‘‘We could hear our struggles when Coltrane screamed. We could
hear the other side when he played so cool and meditative, reflective. He
captured the extremes of our struggles as African people. I’m sure he
didn’t go out to do that, but that’s what struck us. This is somebody
whose music is relevant to all that we’re doing. This is a music that will
strengthen us. It’s like a hymn, you know, for Christians they have their
hymns, and for other people they have their devotional songs. For me,
who was just a pedestrian of some sort, not really religious, I found in
Coltrane a real alternative to received religions and received practices.
Coltrane offered me a whole new musical world.’’
That was how, in May 2005, Nii Noi Nortey opened the first of the
video conversations we recorded over the course of three years while
working on Accra Trane Station projects. Principally about John Col-
trane and diasporic music history, the conversations also cover his times
based in London in the seventies and eighties, his life in Accra since 1989,
his travels in Europe and Africa, the invention and practice of his afrifone
instruments, his sound sculptures, and his thoughts on connections be-
tween music and art. And through these topics, what was always evident
was Nii Noi’s constant concern with the culture of politics and politics of
culture in Ghana. We also talked about his experiences working with
Ghanaba, with Nii Otoo Annan, and with the Por Por band, musicians
and musical worlds close to his own, and those into which he led me.
Clips from some of our video conversations, along with clips from re-
hearsals and recording and performance sessions in Ghana, Italy, and the
United States, comprise the film Accra Trane Station: The Music and Art
of Nii Noi Nortey.
Now juxtapose Nii Noi’s opening video statement with one from the
tail end of our very last video conversation. That moment is Nii Noi’s
response to me, asking, in May 2008, just as I had recently asked Gha-
naba: ‘‘Can I call you a jazz cosmopolitan?’’
 ‘‘Yeah, I think the word ‘‘cosmopolitan//s//m’’ . . . cosmopolitanism
was introduced by you because it’s so so big a word for me to use!
[Laughter.] But at the same time I think that it embraces the same
concept, you know, of going beyond your little horizon. And hoping that
outside of that little horizon of yours there’s still sense and meaning. And
I think in that respect the music we play is cosmopolitan, you know,
cosmopolitan because it borrows from many traditions and experiences
and people.
‘‘If Coltrane came alive today, he will see aspects of his music in our
music, definitely, that’s being cosmopolitan, I think. If Beethoven—I
don’t know much of his music, but because, you know, he’s one of the
most famous classical musicians—if he comes today, and hears our mu-
sic, I think he will recognize certain fragments here and there, melod-
ically, you know, which we probably didn’t borrow directly from him, but
they probably came through Coltrane and from somebody else and
through somebody else, you know, that way I think, too, he will recognize
the music that we’re doing. Now if Osei Tutu, the great Asante poet and

27. Accra Trane Station, dvd cover painting.

Art ∫ 2009 Nicholas Wayo.

90 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

drum composer comes today and listens to our music he could also
recognize certain aspects of his legacy. And I think that is also extending
this very tradition of this century back into the seventeenth century; that
is showing a certain common linkage which is universal, you know.
‘‘Because we borrow from these various traditions and we tend to
extend this borrowing into the future, I think we are really premised to
call ourselves a cosmopolitan musical group, you know. We travel around
the world and the effect of our music in Italy or in the States or in Accra
or in London is almost the same, the effect is the same. We may not play
to a very large audience in Accra and we may not play to a largely African
audience in Accra, but still we get a good appreciation from the little
African audience that we get, you know. Because they may be artists, they
may also be aspiring musicians, they may probably have copped out of
that because it’s not commercially viable, so they decide to be something
else. So when they hear your music, it rings a bell, you know, it rings a
bell, they see the approach you’re taking. In our music we’re using re-
sources and ideas that the artists too may be using in painting their
things and conceiving their concepts, you know. We’re all sharing the
same things, both as musicians and artists, you know.’’
In the Accra Trane Station film, that comment is book-ended by clips
from musical performances. What you see and hear before and after Nii
Noi’s answer are segments filmed live during concerts at Albuquerque’s
Outpost Performance Space in October 2007, when Nii Noi and Nii Otoo
Annan came to the University of New Mexico for a teaching residency.
The segment before Nii Noi’s cosmopolitanism riff comes from the
opening tune of the evening’s first set. The piece is titled ‘‘All Aboard,’’
and it originally appeared as the first track on Another Blue Train, the
Accra Trane Station cd project we recorded as a trio in the first half of
2007 to coincide with local celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of
Ghana’s independence. Nii Noi had long been struck by 1957 as both the
year of Ghana’s independence and the year of John Coltrane’s classic lp
Blue Train. His cd idea was to improvise a train ride, one whose acoustic
moods could evoke new links between Coltrane’s 1957 lp of minor blues
explorations and the sound world of Ghana’s freedom. Nii Noi’s train
ride through the blue diasporic night called jazz exploits titles for narra-
tive mood, following Coltrane’s practice in his later period.∞
The instrument you see Nii Noi play in that initial moment is uniquely
his own and homemade, built up from a shenai purchased from an Indian

NII NOI NORTEY 91

28. Nii Noi playing his soprano afrifone.
Photograph ∫ 2007 Steven Feld.

merchant in Birmingham, England, later retuned, its double-reed re-

ceiver modified to accept an American clarinet mouthpiece, homemade
ligature, and modified plastic reed. The body was then leathered in
northern African style by a Hausa craftsman in Accra, the added bell said
to be Tibetan by the London pawnshop owner who sold it. Nii Noi calls
this his ‘‘soprano afrifone’’ and the sound he strives for evokes that of the
Afro-Islamic Sahelian double-reed alghaita, an instrument equally con-
sonant with the northern and southern Indian shenai and the nagasvara
and the zurna of Ottoman and Romany crossroads. This sound arrives
through the intermediary voicing of John Coltrane’s soprano saxophone,
whose shenai- and nagasvara-inspired timbres derived from his mid-
1960s engagements with Indian music.
Nii Noi’s idea for this ‘‘All Aboard’’ piece is to suggest the West African
train station as a place of multiple cultural goings and comings. He put it
this way: ‘‘The train station proper in Accra is a rallying point for market
traders and travelers, people traveling different ways for hundreds of
miles, going to specific market centers on specific days. It means there’s a
lot of traffic when you go to train stations in the mornings or in the

92 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

evenings. The interaction of buyers and sellers also is very, very interest-
ing at a train station. It’s just like the audience and a performer. What you
see on a concert stage, the interaction between performer and audience,
is what you see between sellers and buyers and travelers and drivers, and
that type of thing. And also, it’s interesting that we use a train station,
because early in the sixties, when they phased out the steam trains, they
were replaced by a new type of train called a ‘blue train.’ ’’
Nii Noi’s train ride is articulated temporally through the rhythm lo-
cally called Afro-Beat and associated with Fela Anikulapo Kuti, a rhythm
package built from percussion layers of fifty years of interchange in
Nigerian and Ghanaian popular dance musics. It is articulated spatially
through the soprano afrifone sounding an African North reaching South,
and a jazz West reaching East. These cosmopolitan space-time routings
are crystallized further by suggestion of the high-priest ancestors Fela
Anikulapo Kuti and John Coltrane meeting down by the sonic cross-
roads where music simultaneously embodies spirituality and an ethical
politics of rights.≤
In one of our later video conversations, also in the film, Nii Noi men-
tions how impressed he was by the way Coltrane’s A Love Supreme put
together what he called ‘‘the torrentials and the sublimes.’’ For Nii Noi
the ‘‘torrentials’’ refer to the timbre of passionate cry of Coltrane’s late
period, what many listeners and commenters heard as the searing voice
of wrenching anger and reaching hope in 1964–67 black America. It was
the voice that took the saxophone to new acoustic heights and depths, to
new multiphonic and microtonal interiors. That is the voice that Nii Noi
studied seriously, learning circular breathing, altered embouchure, and
extended fingering techniques both on the saxophone and on his own
afrifones, all to reach for the ‘‘torrentials.’’
That’s the sound of the second piece book-ending Nii Noi’s com-
ments, taken from a later Outpost set where Nii Otoo’s African Percus-
sion Kit was juxtaposed to Jefferson Voorhees’s trap set and Nii Noi’s
afrifones to Alex Coke’s saxophone. The piece is called ‘‘Black Heat’’ and
its cd version appears on the quintet release Topographies of the Dark,
seven pieces in dialogue with sculptural paintings by Virginia Ryan, a
visual artist who promoted Nii Noi’s sculpture during her tenure as
codirector of the Foundation for Contemporary Art–Ghana.≥
Ryan’s Topographies of the Dark are fashioned out of thousands of pairs
of washed-up flip-flops collected from Accra’s beaches. Machete-cut and

NII NOI NORTEY 93

sculpted into triple layers, they are covered with a gluggy mix of glue,
sand, bitumen coal tar, and dull and shiny black paints. Inspiration for
this work came equally from the local aesthetics of working with recycled
materials, from a New Yorker article by the architect Rem Koolhas de-
scribing aerial viewings of a Nigerian coastal oil slick, and from the power
crisis that gripped Accra in 2007, when residents experienced twelve-
hour electricity blackouts every second day.
‘‘Black Heat’’ is the hottest track on Topographies of the Dark. The
video clip from the live version offers a sustained swell over densely
driving percussion, the late Coltrane torrential outpour of extended-
range multiphonics intertwined on tenor sax, played by Alex, and by Nii
Noi on tenor afrifone. Nii Noi’s instrument is a hepta-retuned and leath-
ered bell-optional pvc breakdown of a Rajasthani flute to which a tenor
saxophone crook and mouthpiece are affixed. The sax and afrifone voices
disappear into each other, leap out and become distinguishable momen-
tarily, then burst back into Trane Station embrace.
This enactment of cosmopolitan aesthetics across the bridge of Col-
trane’s ‘‘torrentials’’ takes us to Nii Noi’s thoughts about cosmopolitan-
ism as a way of ‘‘going beyond your little horizon.’’ Nii Noi first cites John
Coltrane, moves to Beethoven, then comes back to Africa and Ghana
through Osei Tutu. In each case he suggests that if they came alive today
they would recognize a thread connecting Accra Trane Station’s music
with theirs. In less than three minutes Nii Noi’s cosmopolitan imagina-
tion sews up his own work with the spatial thread of diasporic black
America, Europe, and Ghana, and the temporal thread of twentieth-,
nineteenth-, eighteenth-, and seventeenth-century musical, cultural, and
political legacies. Big. I’ll start where Nii Noi ends.
Osei Tutu was a founder of the Asante empire, ruling as Asantehene,
the king of all Asante, from 1701 through 1717. Through conquest, expan-
sion, and revenge he tripled the empire, consolidated its power base in
Kumasi, and gained equal reputation for diplomacy and militarism. He
established an annual celebration, Odwira, a festival for all Asante, a
grand articulation of poetry, music, dance, costume, and theater, bring-
ing festival into political process along with religion. As the largest group
of Akan, or Twi-speaking people, the Asante were at the center of trade
and dominant in gold and kola. From 1701, military prowess brought the
inland Asante to the serious attention of Europeans on the coast, in-
creasing potentials for trade alliance.∂

94 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

 29. Topographies of the Dark, cd cover. Art ∫ 2007 Virginia Ryan.

Here’s Nii Noi: ‘‘Osei Tutu’s legacy is celebrated and admired as disci-
plined rule,’’ he told me, ‘‘but also as caution. He died in battle due to
arrogance, leaving his amulets behind, because he miscalculated the
deviousness of his enemies. So, you know, just when he let the spiritual
lapse, his political astuteness failed him.’’ And the enduring lesson of this,
as Nii Noi emphasized, is that there can be no exercise of political skill
without concomitant attention to spiritual practice. This story is at the
heart of the narration of the greatness of the Asante nation, and also at
the heart of contemporary culture in Ghana, where prayer and spiritual-
ism pervade political action and every dimension of its interpretation.
This is not, as knee-jerk Western liberal journalists would have it, about a
failed separation of church and state. It is about a historical distillation of
political agency that is informed and performed spiritually at the level of
everyday habitus.
Nii Noi was only four years old in 1957, when Ghana became indepen-
dent, but he said that the moral of the Osei Tutu story was presented
directly to him as a child and has stayed with him all his life: watch your

NII NOI NORTEY 95

back spiritually; vulnerability accompanies the exercise of all strength
and power. Growing up in Ghana in those years as the middle-class son
of a nurse administrator and distinguished economist-accountant who
was also marketing advisor in the first Nkrumah government, later to
serve twice as a member of parliament, Nii Noi described himself, mod-
estly, as a ‘‘bookish’’ child; his father more proudly recalls him as having a
youthful gift for mathematics. Sending Nii Noi to London, his father
imagined that his son would return as a nation builder, a college-degreed
economist, ready for government service or a post with the World Bank.
Nii Noi recalled his 1972 move to Britain, aged nineteen, this way: ‘‘I
went there to study economics, but I did more politics, more sociology
than economics. . . . I was good in public policy and special economics,
the more human-related things. I wasn’t too much into the finance. Later,
I realized music was more liberating than going on to do economics. So I
had no option, you know, because I noticed the liberating factor in the
music, because I became more informed about the cultures of the world
through music than through economics.’’
A moment later he elaborated:
‘‘We used the libraries a lot because we were all discovering ourselves
and because it was a period not so long after the sixties and black power;
there was still enough energy in the youth community which I went to
meet. I think that formed me a lot and affected my direction, socially
speaking. My consciousness, I think, was heightened by the many books
that reflected the struggles of African people around the world at the
time. I stayed there in London for a little while and then moved on to
Birmingham for about two years. And there too, because it’s provincial,
you had a lot of time for yourself. There was enough time there to read
and use the public libraries extensively. And they were well equipped.
There were books on African culture. There were books on jazz. There
were books on history and politics, the whole body of works that influ-
enced the social struggles of the sixties and the seventies.’’
During the period 1972–79, Nii Noi read ravenously about the strug-
gles of African people on the continent and in the diaspora. This is where
he first seriously encountered jazz music, reading Pan-African history
and politics.
‘‘Yeah, man, I was never a musician at home, never did anything musi-
cal. I was just into my Jimi Hendrix, you know. But I was impressed when

96 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

I read Malcolm X, how he knew his Charlie Parkers and Billie Holidays
and John Coltranes. That really said something to me.’’
So Nii Noi began listening to jazz music in the context of Pan-African
political conversation with East, West, and South Africans, and with
people of Caribbean origin, first in London, and even more after he
moved to Birmingham. His love for Coltrane’s music led him to work in a
factory long enough to get the money to pay for a saxophone and lessons.
But Nii Noi’s musical world was not limited to nor principally centered
around jazz. Jazz was part and parcel of a larger set of Afro-diasporic
dialogues and experiments, and his percussion and instrument work
with the Pan-African poetry group African Dawn∑ brought him into
contact with diverse East, South, and West African conversations routed
through the black British experience. Another refinement developed
through Dade Krama, a contemporary African cultural group emphasiz-
ing interplays of ancient and contemporary musical, political, and poetic
knowledge. And while Nii Noi’s Pan-African politics percolated through
Coltrane and these converging African conversations, he also took note
of the more obvious populist synthesis that was taking the black British
community by storm: reggae.
‘‘What was so strong,’’ he told me, ‘‘was how reggae music popularized
all the history and politics that we were reading and debating. I liked
books more than dancing, you know. I liked Jimi Hendrix and John Col-
trane’s music because they were the intellectual equivalents of Malcolm X
and Kwame Nkrumah. But I had to find a way to bring my high-minded
Coltrane-type music into the story. You know, I had to convince people
that I could hear in Coltrane what they could hear in Bob Marley.’’
Nii Noi found his opportunity in an opening for a saxophone player in
the black British reggae band, Misty In Roots.∏
‘‘I joined in 1982 just as they were due to travel to Zimbabwe,’’ he
reminisced. ‘‘They had been invited to play at Zimbabwe’s first indepen-
dence anniversary. The reason being, the group had played many benefit
concerts for Zimbabwe during the liberation struggles. After indepen-
dence, they saw it fit to invite a group to play in Zimbabwe. And it was
good. It was well supported by the government and we traveled widely.
We played stadiums, to packed capacity. We were taken care of. We were
also initiated into the culture of Zimbabwe. But it was just after the
struggle. So, there were energies, you know, ancestral spirits were still

NII NOI NORTEY 97

30. Nii Noi (right) performing in Zimbabwe with Misty In Roots, 1982.
Photograph ∫ 2010 Anyaa Arts Library Collection.

lurking around. [Laughs.] They had come from the shade to see the
fruits of revolution, and we partook in that. It was nice. We associated
with the fighters who had just come from the bush. They were settled in
Harare, and that was where we all met. It was good to interact with
people who had just fought for their independence and who could artic-
ulate to you intense things that happened on the battlefield, first hand,
and that affected one’s growth.’’
‘‘Yes, the Zimbabwean experience was eye-opening,’’ he continued af-
ter a reflective moment. ‘‘I mean, sometimes I felt very Zimbabwean
because I was there at a very crucial time in their history, when they were
forging their identity, and that also rubbed off, because we were also
there searching, and to be in the midst of a searching people, you can’t
help but be affected. So we also took some of that grace, some of that
whatever-that-is that came from the ancestors. For me, personally, it was
my most spiritually intense time, because I wasn’t very particularly spir-
itual. My political understanding of things didn’t make me very spiritual.
I was an ideologue, you know, dogmatic. I didn’t spend too much time

98 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

reflecting on the spirit. It was in Zimbabwe that I was struck that there
was need to reflect more on the spirit, because there was a spirit of a
nation assessing itself, a whole nation was assessing itself spiritually, so
how could you as an individual not be affected? So I think from then on, I
realized my music was going to be more serious and important, because
it was going to have a strong spiritual base.’’
Apart from its critical place in his ideological and spiritual develop-
ment, what was most musically remarkable about Nii Noi’s years of work
with Misty In Roots is that he managed to get through them barely
playing a lick of straight reggae sax riffs as accompaniment to the band.
Rather, during rhythm breaks and specifically during down times for the
singers, he would accompany the rub-a-dub riddim drumming and bass
on alto sax, playing in a free jazz improvisation style that went from
boiling to explosive on the Coltrane-Ayler vu meter,π working the crowd
up to a frenetic and exuberant dance high for ten or twenty or thirty
minutes at a time before the refreshed singers would come back onstage
and take over with their next round of songs.
‘‘That was all I could do,’’ he said. ‘‘I could do it on top of the reggae
beat, and it was exciting. And the people with me didn’t know about the
Albert Aylers and the John Coltranes, they just knew their reggaes. So
when I started blowing those things, it freaked them out! [Laughs.] It was
good. All of us, in Zimbabwe, Zambia, into Europe, it was that summer. I
think it was my contribution to Misty In Roots. I think my brothers in
Africa identified with the group, because we were African-minded. I
always wore my African clothes, talked my African talk. I wasn’t too much
into the Jamaican thing. But we coexisted nicely. We were all friends and
comrades. And I was accepted in the band like a real member.’’
Nii Noi’s early association with black British reggae royalty produced
lifelong friendships. While he did not adopt Rastafarian religious or
speech practice, he became associated in other ways with its package of
style and consciousness, like his adoption of dreadlocks and associations
with the strong community orientation in the Rastafarian dimension of
Misty In Roots.
Situating himself in that milieu, he reflected: ‘‘Personally, I’m not a
Rastafari, I’m not of the faith of Rastafari. But I have been influenced
culturally by the movement, because I live in a small closed environment
and am surrounded by Rastafari. And to identify yourself in your com-
munity it means specifically that you have to embrace currents in your

NII NOI NORTEY 99

community. So embracing Rastafari or Rastafarians doesn’t make me
especially Rastafari, but I’ve accepted the community around me. I think
they influence our cultural consciousness, they offer an alternative to the
white mainstream. They underlined black consciousness, basically.’’
‘‘How did that connect with what you were reading at that time,’’ I
asked, ‘‘with the ways you were bringing the music and books together?’’
‘‘What reggae did really was to popularize the consciousness that was
in books, you know. Those of us who had access to books and read
African history and Caribbean history and African American history had
a lot of information at our disposal. But it was reggae, really, that made
this information available to people who didn’t have access to books. In
which case, consciousness flooded the African community more after the
reggae thing, yes. And it affected everybody, because you could see your
people changing as a result of new information. So, whether or not you
were Rastafari, you were affected by Rastafari culture, because it’s your
people. Whether or not you liked reggae, you were affected by reggae.’’
But it was more than reggae that drew Nii Noi into black Caribbean
and diasporan discourse; he became personally more intertwined when
he married Paula Efua Grant, a teacher from a family of distinguished
educators who came to Britain from Guyana in the mid-1960s. Efua’s
father was the schoolmaster and writer Eric Grant, whose works include
the biography of his son, and Efua’s brother, Bernie Grant, a trade union-
ist who rose to become one of the first black British members of parlia-
ment. Bernie Grant was a well known if much contested thorn in the side
of British politics, foremost a champion of workers, and an advocate for
dignity in civil rights and cultural diversity. An arts center in Tottenham,
his London constituency, is named in his memory.∫
Telling me the story of meeting Efua, Nii Noi connected it, through
Misty In Roots, to another key aspect of his experience of Zimbabwe,
introduction to and study of the Shona mbira: ‘‘My wife comes from
Guyana, and I’d given my mbira to a friend who had lived in her house.
My friend was now living in Zimbabwe. So when I asked him for my
mbira, he said, ‘Go to this address, I left your mbira there.’ I remember it
was on Easter, Easter holiday. And I thought, ‘OK, on the Easter holiday
I’ll go pick up my mbira.’ And I was given the name of the person who
had the mbira. I spoke with that person on the telephone, ‘I’m Nii Noi.’
‘Hello, I’m Rosemund.’ ‘I spoke to Bupe, and Bupe says my mbira was
with you, and I’m coming to pick up my mbira.’ ‘Okay, come pick up your

100 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

mbira.’ So off I set to pick up my mbira. Just when I got on that main road
where the address was, I noticed there was a woman coming towards the
same address from the opposite direction. And I thought, ‘Oh, this is a
woman I’m going to see.’ And we all slowed down a little bit to see
whether in fact we were going to go in the same house. But she entered
before I did. So she went into the alley, opened the door, didn’t shut it,
just stood at the door, thinking I was going to come in there. And then I
walked in, knocked on the door and she opened and said, ‘Yes, who do
you want?’ I said, ‘I want Rosemund.’ ‘How do you know Rosemund?’
(Because she’s the junior sister of Rosemund and she thinks she knows
all Rosemund’s friends.) ‘Where are you coming from? You’re not Rose-
mund’s friend.’ ‘Well, I’ve been sent to collect something from Rose-
mund.’ And then she opened the door for me.
And I sat, waiting for Rosemund to come. Then a friend of my wife-to-
be came and they were all studying economics, I think. So they got into
some argument about economics. And I thought, well, let me wield my
old economic ax. [Laughter.] I spouted out some theory which was
convincing, you know, and probably struck them, ‘Oh, he’s an intelligent
guy too.’ Anyway, later Rosemund came, we spoke, I got my mbira, and
I’m done. And then later I phoned the house, you know, ‘Thank you for
my mbira. Hi to your little sister!’ And it started from there on. So mbira
has been kind to me. It’s given me a wife and two beautiful boys.’’
Circling around his Ghana-Caribbean-U.K. stories, or making points
of connection between them, Nii Noi always came back to Coltrane in
our conversations, consolidating intersections first announced to me in
his family shrine, the little globe with his sons and Efua, positioning his
own travels, readings, listenings, acquisition of knowledge, and experi-
ence on a Coltrane time line.
‘‘Myself, I came to Coltrane from the tail end. I came to Coltrane
focused on his last years, and what I heard in that listening was more of
the rhythmic things, the way he was playing with Rashied Ali and just
before that with Elvin Jones, when Elvin was still with the quartet. That
musical period attracted me more, because I could hear the interplay
between Coltrane the saxophone player and all the drummers.’’
Nii Noi’s plural phrase ‘‘all the drummers’’ here relates to the way he
hears Coltrane’s classic middle period quartet, roughly 1961–65, with the
pianist McCoy Tyner and bassist Jimmy Garrison and drummer Elvin
Jones, as a rhythm section of interlocked drummers. The more we lis-

NII NOI NORTEY 101

tened to those recordings together, the more he suggested that the music
was a multilayered percussive ground against which one heard the voice
of Coltrane’s saxophone. He expanded that idea when referring to Col-
trane’s last two years, 1965–67, and the groups that included Alice Col-
trane on piano, Garrison on bass, and Rashied Ali on drums.Ω
‘‘And the drummers, all them drummers, were playing something
nearer to what I heard in Africa, in terms of complexities and tonalities
and all kinds of things. I heard more of the African things in these
drummers. I heard the drums overlapping and hooking up like our drum-
mers do, and over that I can hear Coltrane as a drummer playing the
saxophone, working his rhythms too. I heard more of the African things
in these drummers. So Coltrane’s music for me is just a sound he projects
and the image that we get of Africa in his music, first and foremost, before
the sheets of sound. I hear the sheets of sound rhythmically. Others may
hear it harmonically. I hear it as the drums overlapping each other, I see
Coltrane as a drummer playing the saxophone, in which case I see him
shifting his rhythms. Some may say harmonic progressions, I say that’s
rhythmic progressions. Because all rhythms have their melodies, and
kinds of harmonies, too. Once you approach your music rhythmically,
then all these things follow. So I think the basis of Coltrane’s music to me
is rhythm, not so much the many chord changes he brought into the
music. He stopped playing all those chord changes and reduced them to
one or two, which also is very African, because we tend to work more at
that level of keeping the music simple.’’
It was that way of hearing the sound and the rhythmic power of
Coltrane’s concepts that animated additional dimensions of Nii Noi’s
conversations with his own Ghanaian musical heritage and the larger
study of musical instruments on the African continent. From the West-
ern saxophone and flute, he first went into the study of Ghanaian percus-
sion, flutes, and winds, then strings. The trip to Zimbabwe with Misty In
Roots in 1982, which got him hooked on the Shona mbira dza vadzimu,
later brought him to look into other forms of sanza (lamellophones) in
West Africa. And to put his African musical experiences together not just
through instrumental but also intellectual exploration, he took up the
self-study of African music and wrote about the symbolism of instru-
ments and the insights of music ethnographies like Paul Berliner’s The
Soul of Mbira and Charles Keil’s Tiv Song.∞≠
‘‘Reading those books in particular was revelatory,’’ Nii Noi told me

102 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

(well before he knew that their authors were both personal friends and
professional colleagues). ‘‘I knew that Africa could bring out the best in
anyone searching for music’s power. But those two books really im-
pressed me, you know, because they showed the complexity of how
Africans thought about music, made it clear that we too had our Beetho-
vens and Coltranes, even if they were living in villages.’’
A few days later, taking a pause from our recording sessions for Accra
Trane Station’s Tribute to A Love Supreme recording project, Nii Noi and
I watched a dvd, The World According to John Coltrane,∞∞ on my laptop,
together with Nii Otoo Annan, Agazi, and Nii Yemo Nunu, respectively
drummer, engineer, and photographer on the project. The dvd features
a studio performance of Coltrane’s commemorative piece ‘‘Alabama,’’
originally recorded on the 1964 lp Coltrane Live at Birdland.∞≤ For Nii
Noi it revealed an explicit link between Coltrane and contemporary
Ghana.
‘‘What we all saw on that video was a man from our own definition, or
from our own perspective. Here is a man playing a horn, playing a funeral
dirge, and behind this funeral dirge, there was a man playing his atum-
pani drums. And these are cultural references in Ghana that I’m making,
because when somebody dies here, if it’s a great person, a king or a chief
or a noble, you know, some great person who’s achieved much in society,
when he dies, it may be accompanied by flute and horn dirges with drum
accompaniment, not unlike what Coltrane and Elvin Jones did on ‘Ala-
bama.’ And as I explained to my people, this was a case where some four
black girls were bombed in a church in 1963. Once they got the story as to
how the whole thing unfolded, then the music becomes even clearer.
From then on, we could even hear voices in Coltrane’s playing, we could
even put in Ghanaian words in his playing: ‘Oh, how sorry, man. How
sad that all these little children have been bombed.’ It was a lamentation,
and lamentation is universal, I think. And we could hear the lamentation
in his playing. So I’m so aware that we could even substitute African
mourning styles into that playing, and it’s not so far-fetched, really, be-
cause Coltrane was doing what an African dirge player would do, and
Elvin was doing what an African ceremonial drummer would do on
occasions like that.’’
Interestingly, the ‘‘Alabama’’ introduction is played not by Coltrane’s
tenor sax and Jones’s drums but by sax and piano. Elvin Jones lays out on
the head of the song; the percussion sound that accompanies Coltrane’s

NII NOI NORTEY 103

dirge-like spiritual recitative melody is a rolling left-hand piano drone
played by McCoy Tyner. I asked Nii Noi if this made any difference to his
comment that ‘‘Coltrane was doing what an African dirge player would
do, and Elvin was doing what an African ceremonial drummer would do.’’
‘‘Oh! You see!’’ he responded, excitedly. ‘‘It’s just like what I told you
before. It could have been any of the drummers or all of them with that
rolling sound. It could have been Elvin with his mallets on the tom-tom
or Jimmy Garrison with his bow on the bass or McCoy Tyner on the
keys. They are all drumming, all drummers, and it is that sound, that way
of linking up the horn to the drums, you know, that way of accompanying
the voice of the priest or voice of the conch shell or voice of the atenteben
flute or the voice of the saxophone. That is the universal side of lament,
that way there is some thunder sounding under and all around the sad,
crying voice. So in Coltrane’s case, it makes his approach more African,
yes, more African that he can use any or all of his drummers to bring out
that sound. He is really speaking an African language that way.’’
‘‘Tell me about the language part,’’ I asked. ‘‘Are you hearing the melody
like African dirge melodies and the sound of wailing voices here, with
special language or poetic phrases?’’
‘‘In Coltrane’s music you can hear the various African language groups,’’
he said. ‘‘And it’s not surprising that when Coltrane vocalizes, it seems to
fall in this language group area here, because first and foremost it was
probably taken from here, all his ancestors were taken from here to the
Americas, or also probably he studied African music in the libraries,
listened to it in the libraries. So obviously he was making a conscious
attempt to do what an African would do. So even if he couldn’t speak an
African language, he tried as much as possible to vocalize it in his instru-
ment. I think Coltrane was speaking an African language. Coltrane leapt
from the American language idiom into an African idiom, and I think he
did it very, very successfully, because of his understanding of history,
because of his understanding of music from other parts of the world.’’
Nii Noi returned to Ghana to live full time in 1989. Since then, in
addition to twenty years of musical association with Ghanaba, his work is
documented in the progression of three successive groups, Mau Mau
Muziki (1990–97), African Sound Project (1999–2004), and Accra Trane
Station (2005–8).∞≥ Each group was of different size and instrumenta-
tion, but the percussionist Nii Otoo Annan, whose story follows in the
next chapter, was a constant in them all. While Nii Noi principally played

104 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

 31. Nii Noi playing
his bass afrifone.
Photograph ∫ 2007
Steven Feld.

saxophone in the 1990s, he devoted more time in the African Sound

Project and Accra Trane Station years to developing his six self-made
afrifone instruments.
‘‘The afrifones have liberated me from the saxophone,’’ he explained,
‘‘because they are much easier to play than the saxophone, easier to blow,
not as difficult to get your notes and your sounds as the saxophone. They
don’t require the long hours spent on saxophone practice. Because they
are limited in a way, they don’t have the range of the saxophones. But
they have the voice of the statements we want to make, so it makes our
music, it simplifies our music, makes it more direct and relevant. It makes
our music more African than African American when we play with the
afrifones. And that’s what I want, like Ghanaba, not to be an African
playing what people think of as jazz on standard jazz instruments, but
playing African music on African instruments that are informed by the
history of jazz and especially the spirit of Coltrane, and the politics of
those times.’’
For Nii Noi ‘‘those times’’ speak to the confluence of Coltrane’s music

NII NOI NORTEY 105

and Nkrumah’s Pan-African politics, writ large in the story of Ghana’s
independence. A critical role model and collaborator in that story was
Ghanaba, both because he absorbed jazz but always put the emphasis on
African idioms, and because he emphasized the significance of perform-
ing in one’s own community.
I asked Nii Noi about his participation in Ghanaba’s Hallelujah! proj-
ect, how it related to his own approaches to the Africanization of jazz
sources and references, how it created a spiritual and political arena
through music. After telling me about his years of rehearsing and record-
ing various duets with Ghanaba, and developing those concepts through
Mau Mau Muziki and African Sound Project, he answered by coming
back to the topic of instruments.
‘‘Ghanaba prefers my alghaita to my saxophone, because that fits into
his definition better. The saxophone brings in more of the jazz element,
which he is trying to sidestep, which also means that when I am playing
the saxophone, I repeat myself because I am influenced by great masters,
great traditions. It doesn’t always fit into the context of his music. But
when I play the alghaita, which is the oboe, then it brings something
alive, and that is when he features me more prominently. . . . So my role in
his music is quite important to me, because I create an atmosphere of an
ancient past, which is also good for him because it creates an aura in
which he can settle and project what he wants to say. So the accompani-
ment is offstage onto stage, and once we’re onstage, I follow the direction
as to what the music demands: if I’m to stay on my alghaita, or if I’m to
change to another instrument. But mostly it’s alghaita when I play with
him. And I think, when we do that, for both of us, there’s the addition of a
new instrument and the creation of a new tradition, because fontomfrom
drums normally don’t usually go with the alghaita horn and the alghaita
horn doesn’t often go with the fontomfrom drums. But we utilize rhyth-
mic principles which are common to both musical traditions, so when we
combine that, it extends the parameters of the music by many thousands
of years, because drums and horns go back in time. And when we play
them free like we do, it evokes an ancient past.’’∞∂
‘‘And why evoke an ancient past, I mean, how does that relate to the
Pan-African aspect of your project?’’
‘‘The ancient past means that the sound has traveled and survived in
the present, and that gives it more power, I think. Through Morocco the
alghaita sound came all the way across to Nigeria, and it is also very

106 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

common in Chad, and Niger, and also a very prominent instrument in
many parts of Asia and Europe. Obviously, it is an ancient instrument
because it has traveled many, many miles. Maybe that’s what attracted
Coltrane, too, the idea that one sound had touched and joined so many
cultures, religions, ceremonies, you know, that one sound traveled that
long, that much, that one sound could take you so deeply into the history
of all of these African and Asian and Middle Eastern and European
cultures.’’
In addition to these years of music, sculpture, and attending to Anyaa
Arts Library, his collection of books, recordings, and artifacts modeled
on Ghanaba’s Afrikan Heritage Library, Nii Noi also engaged briefly in
journalism, mostly, he told me, as a way of staying in touch with people
from his seventies and eighties black British Pan-African circle. But it was
also a way of expressing his support and deepening his connection to the
Pan-African Kemetic spiritualist, healer, and traditional priest from Bur-
kina Faso, Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig, founder of the Earth Center
and The Firefly. From 2001 to 2003, Nii Noi contributed fifteen columns
to The Firefly, a magazine of Pan-African culture and philosophy and
spirituality based in Chicago. His topics included Ghanaba, Kwame
Nkrumah, the Mau Mau, Patrice Lumumba, Ambuya Nehanda, Carmen
Perreira, Miriam Makeba, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, Pitika Ntuli,
and John Coltrane. He started the last piece in the series with the line
‘‘Song titles are important indications of a composer’s world view,’’ and
went on to discuss Coltrane’s many African titles and references.∞∑ With-
out knowledge of Norman Weinstein’s book A Night in Tunisia: Imagin-
ings of Africa in Jazz, Nii Noi developed parallel thoughts on the se-
quence and significance of Coltrane’s many African place and history
references.∞∏ Arguing for a spiritual unity in themes, he wrote: ‘‘It is
precisely this that colors the voice Coltrane bequeathed to the saxo-
phone, the voice of the African high priest/ess.’’
Discussing that concept with me, he said: ‘‘Coltrane essentially is a
spiritual person for us, and this is something that any African will relate
to, like the way any African or Pan-Africanist will relate to Coltrane’s
covers and art and song titles. And because he’s a spiritual person, he
definitely projected that in his music. So for me, spirit possession is one
of the highlights in his music, because he seems to be possessed himself
when he plays. And if he’s possessed, then the idea is to project that
possession onto us, the audience, too. So the possession element in his

NII NOI NORTEY 107

music makes it feel very African, to me. You know, because he’s there in
the role of a priest, trying to invoke or exorcise or that kind of thing, and
he doesn’t do it passively, he really goes into it and takes you along. He
tries to pull you into it, to get you involved in the whole music. That’s his
strength, he’s a whole lot like the traditional priests, trying to work
charms on you.’’
Sculpture is the concretized material incarnation of Nii Noi’s synaes-
thetic unification of visual and musical art as Pan-African cultural and
spiritual politics. In January 2006, when I returned to Accra for my first
long stay, Nii Noi greeted me with his exhibit called Accra Trane Station,
an installation of twenty related sound sculptures, each named for Col-
trane compositions. In the Accra Trane Station film you see my first tour
of three of them, ‘‘Africa Brass,’’ ‘‘Naima,’’ and ‘‘Giant Steps.’’ Over the first
six months of 2006, Nii Noi made refinements to these pieces during the
time we recorded the trio material for Meditations for John Coltrane.
When I left Accra, Nii Noi went to London to see his wife and college-age
sons. Unbeknownst to me, he did a major reorganization of the twenty
Coltrane sculptures before departing, reassembling them into a train and
station, and parking the entirety in his studio space. When I returned to

32. Nii Noi’s ‘‘Freedom Float’’ sculpture. Photograph ∫ 2007 Steven Feld.

108 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

Accra in January 2007 for a second long visit, he was back at work there
in preparation for the coming fiftieth anniversary of Ghana’s indepen-
dence. He was critical about the elitist tone of the national celebrations,
and explained his tribute, titled ‘‘Freedom Float,’’ as a populist and op-
positional act.
‘‘I prefer the word ‘freedom’ to ‘independence,’ ’’ he began. ‘‘The man at
the helm of the Freedom Float is Kwame Nkrumah, the chief architect of
the float, he’s the driver, the chief driver. And he’s sitting in the front
holding the steering wheel with Africa as a centerpiece. And the steering
wheel also happens to be a car horn, typical of the La trotro drivers. And
that is also to suggest the joy of the moment, and of movement, and the
loudness and the triumphs of those times. In this culture there are always
pennants of Ghanaian colors, red, gold, green, and black that go with the
noise. There are also flowers, which suggest celebration. And there’s a
number plate, a.d. 1957, the year of independence. In the float proper, we
may find both ordinary folks and politicians, those who are attuned to
the aspirations of the people and have made themselves into capable
leaders. So we have for instance Marcus Garvey, the pioneer of Pan-
Africanism as we know it.∞π
‘‘Also in the float you have ordinary musicians and dancers, you know.
That’s part of the celebration too, ordinary folks going about their ordi-
nary business with their various transportation forms. Like here we have
a trotro as a popular form and you know it’s part of the independence
spirit. So the independence spirit, freedom spirit, is more a popular
expression of the people. Also, in the float we highlight the role of
children in the development of the continent, so here you find children
in all endeavors, trying to make something meaningful out of their lives.
And that also becomes part of the freedom celebrations, the liberation of
the children from mundane things into more creative things.
‘‘Also in the float we have a representation of musicians . . . jazz musi-
cians, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Rouse,
Ghanaba, Sonny Rollins, Dexter Gordon, Charles Lloyd, Duke Ellington,
some bluesmen too, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Junior Wells, and more jazzmen,
Coleman Hawkins or Benny Carter, Randy Weston, Milford Graves, the
drummer. You’ll see also the symphony orchestra, our very unsung sym-
phony orchestra, one of the very first established on the African conti-
nent. And here they play a combination of Western and African musical
forms. So everyone is here, musicians, ordinary folks, representations of

NII NOI NORTEY 109

33. Nii Noi’s Accra Train Station installation. Photograph ∫ 2007 Steven Feld.

ancient civilizations, children, you know, politicians and leaders, every-

body that joined the process of freedom.’’
‘‘Last year,’’ I say, as we head inside, ‘‘last year everything was out, and
now it is all in the station. Why?’’
‘‘Yeah, it’s parked,’’ he replies, ‘‘because Meditations is playing. Now that
the soundtrack is done, it’s playing, so the train is parked in the station.
Look at the train, man, and you’re hearing Meditations, and you can see
the work is done, it’s well done.’’
Compared to the way stories of Osei Tutu were brought into Ni Noi’s
consciousness as a child, or the way John Coltrane and the musical
worlds surrounding his legacy were a critical inspiration linking almost
twenty years in the United Kingdom to almost another twenty back in
Ghana, Beethoven might seem a less likely citation here. But he’s here for
an equally significant, if unanticipated, reason. Namely, Nii Noi, like
many Africans and diasporans, embraces the belief that Beethoven was
black. Nii Noi first encountered this idea in the 1970s, a time of particular
popularity of books by Joel Augustus Rogers.
Born of mixed-race heritage in Jamaica in 1880, Rogers migrated to
the United States in 1906 and became a naturalized citizen ten years later.

110 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

He lived in Chicago and then in Harlem during the renaissance. A jour-
nalist and self-trained historian, he devoted his columns for black news-
papers and his numerous self-published books and pamphlets to ne-
glected legacies of African and diasporic achievement. His foremost
agenda was historical vindication, and he placed his work firmly in the
line of battling racism. The World’s Greatest Men of Color, One Hundred
Amazing Facts about the Negro, Nature Knows No Color Line, and Five
Negro Presidents were among his many titles. Between 1941 and 1944 he
published his three-volume magnum opus, Sex and Race, his most sus-
tained attack on myths of Aryan racial purity and superiority. It is hard to
underestimate the subversive and radical quality of his title for that time,
not to mention his subtitles: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All
Lands, and The History of White, Negro, and Indian Miscegenation in the
Two Americas.∞∫
While Rogers was close to Marcus Garvey, whom he knew in Jamaica,
and once praised by W. E. B. Du Bois, even his ardent supporters were
aware of serious gaps between his ideological commitments to humanist
antiracism and the historical accuracy of quite a few of his assertions.
After his death in 1966, some of his claims, including ones whose histor-
ical plausibility had long been questioned by both black and white intel-
lectuals, were nonetheless uncritically circulated in Afrocentric circles.
This returns us to the site of Nii Noi’s apotheosis, the 1970s black
British United Kingdom, where he was surrounded by African and Ca-
ribbean students and artists. It was in this milieu that Nii Noi first read,
with amazement, he reports, these lines in Rogers’s booklet One Hundred
Amazing Facts about the Negro: ‘‘Beethoven, the world’s greatest musi-
cian, was without a doubt a dark mulatto. He was called ‘the Black
Spaniard.’ ’’∞Ω
Rogers argued that Beethoven’s mother was a Moor, descended from
the Africans who made Spain their home for centuries. His commentary
was focused on the designation of ‘‘Spagnol’’ or ‘‘Spanish’’ to refer to
what he called Beethoven’s ‘‘dark’’ or ‘‘swarthy’’ or ‘‘blackish-brown’’ or
‘‘mulatto’’ skin complexion, and his ‘‘flat thick nose.’’
These days one can find numerous Afrocentric cyber-echoes to Rog-
ers’s arguments and their particular attention to physiognomy. An often-
quoted writer on this topic in the black-and-proud blogosphere is the
African American pianist Deborah D. Mosely, and the most often cited
part of her Internet article ‘‘Beethoven, the Black Spaniard’’ draws atten-

NII NOI NORTEY 111

tion, like Rogers, to characterizations of Beethoven’s physical appear-
ance. In ‘‘Beethoven by Maynard Solomon, p.78,’’ she writes, ‘‘he is de-
scribed as having ‘thick, bristly coal-black hair’ (in today’s parlance, we
proudly call it ‘kinky’) and a ‘ruddy-complexioned face.’ In Beethoven:
His Life and Times by Artes Orga, p.72, Beethoven’s pupil, Carl Czerny of
the ‘School of Velocity’ fame, recalls that Beethoven’s ‘coal-black hair, cut
a la Titus, stood up around his head’ [sounds almost like an Afro]. ‘His
black beard . . . darkened the lower part of his dark-complexioned face.’ ’’
An additional repeated focus for Mosely is the Viennese residence
subsequently called ‘‘Schwarzspanierhaus,’’ the ‘‘house of the Black Span-
iard.’’ Another is the essentializing claim that Beethoven’s syncopation
practices were so radical for Western music in his time that they had to
derive from an African sensibility. Using language that again recalls Rog-
ers’s frequent emphasis on vindication, Mosely protests the ‘‘academic
theft’’ of Beethoven’s ancestry and calls for ‘‘academic justice for the
people whose great and noble past was stolen and hidden from them.’’≤≠
That these ideas have long been in popular circulation called musicol-
ogy into the controversy early on, at least as early as 1949, in a Musical
Quarterly article by Donald MacArdle, Beethoven scholar and extensive
annotator of Anton Schindler’s Beethoven as I Knew Him. Setting the
trend for most subsequent discourse, MacArdle gave no credence to the
‘‘black Moor’’ theory of Beethoven’s ancestry. Most later refutations cite
him, and some grow much more dismissive. Yet after reexamining Rog-
ers’s fifteen sources, and numerous others in seven languages, the vir-
tuosic Africana music bibliographer Dominque-René de Lerma con-
cludes his Black Music Research Journal piece with considerable nuance:
‘‘Beethoven is united with the African concept of the community and the
spiritual, like John Coltrane, but we are richly blessed by authentic Black
heroes. Having Beethoven as an in-law is quite sufficient.’’≤∞
That comment notwithstanding, it’s probably fair to say that musicol-
ogy’s talk-back on this story has cumulatively involved somewhat more
positivist commentary defending ‘‘the facts’’ or ‘‘the truth’’ of Beethoven’s
whiteness than pursuing the historical and ideological significance of the
many assertions and reassertions of his blackness.
A subtle interpretive space for such a reading was recently opened in
an allegorical story by one of our great witnesses to anxieties of racial
dignity, the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. Her short
story ‘‘Beethoven Was ∞⁄∞∏th Black,’’ also the title to her most recent

112 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

collection, lets an imaginary white radio announcer’s ‘‘Beethoven was . . .’’
become her space to explore the fraught dialectics of confusion and
desire. ‘‘Once there were blacks wanting to be white. Now there are
whites wanting to be black. It’s the same secret,’’ she begins, on the path,
again, to examining intertwined South African hopes of restitution and
reclamation in the ruins of racial history.≤≤
But as in the case of De Lerma, what makes Nii Noi’s discourse dis-
tinctly fascinating is the juxtaposition of Beethoven’s name with Col-
trane’s. Here’s Nii Noi: ‘‘People might confuse John Coltrane with a
Scottish man because of his name,’’ he said. ‘‘Just like Beethoven’s name is
German, and people don’t see his African background, because Beetho-
ven is embraced by the German culture, and everybody knows him to be
a German. But in terms of race, Beethoven would be called an African in
this time because he’s of mixed race. But, you know, you can’t claim his
Africanness alone. He’s part of the world community. Like Coltrane. And
the more Coltranes, the more Beethovens, the more peace there will be
in the world. Because you can’t make music that is that great and that
universal without a deep spiritual component.’’
Nii Noi appropriates Beethoven, including the presumption of his
racial heritage, into a universalizing consolidation of just the suspicious
sort that the musicologist Nicholas Mathew exposes in his critical review
of tendencies to unify Beethoven’s voice against pluralist possibilities. Nii
Noi seems to be tapping into exactly that default vein where, in Mathew’s
words, ‘‘Beethoven is the home key of the musical canon, so to speak.’’≤≥
Nii Noi uses Coltrane as the equally universalizing relative minor of
that canonic home key of Beethoven. And in doing so he performs a
sweepingly essentialized narration of Coltrane as Africa, that is, of Col-
trane as the unification of rhythm and spirituality. But of course, speak-
ing as an African, and speaking in Africa, it is all made considerably more
complex by the way Nii Noi simultaneously universalizes and Africanizes
both Coltrane and Beethoven, and in the same sentences.
‘‘Coltrane is Africa,’’ he said—again. ‘‘It’s like it was his dream, because
he recorded so many African titles, and in a conversation he had with
Olatunji, he expressed the desire to visit Africa. He didn’t, because he
died. But I think our train can bring him back—he can visit spiritually on
our train. Future generations in Africa, when they study music, will have
to study jazz as an art form. And because of the African references John
Coltrane made in and through the jazz art form, he will end up being

NII NOI NORTEY 113

studied in the future by African students, on the same level as Beethoven
or Bach or Mozart, or great African classical musicians. We’ve had ours,
too, of course, on the continent, traditional composers on a level like
Beethoven and Bach. But I think Coltrane is a modern figure, and I
expect his contribution to African music, or music in general, will reflect
that kind of modern parallel between him and the European greats.
Africa could be in the vanguard musically if we taught Coltrane and
Beethoven together, you know, put them on exactly the same level as we
put our African music.’’
I know what you’re wondering now. Is Nii Noi aware that he might be
skating on thin ice, alternately freezing difference and melting universal-
ism in this confluence of Osei Tutu’s spiritual/political empire in West
Africa, Beethoven’s porous Europe flowing into and out of northern
Africa via Spain, and Coltrane’s fluid voicing of Black Atlantic spiritual
rhythm?
Maybe. But how about reading this another way, by asking if Nii Noi is
using different language to imagine a deep cosmopolitics, a progressive
philosophy of history, one that could dress Kantian universalism in the
kente cloth of Nkrumaist African socialist humanism? Imagine Nii Noi
harmonizing the voice of Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher who theo-
rizes postnational patriotism in the context of new plural-multicultural
presences within old nations. Imagine Nii Noi pumping bass to Kwame
Anthony Appiah, the philosopher who grooves on the reconcilation of
postmodern multiculturalisms with enlightenment ethics. Contempo-
rary cosmopolitanisms are transformative, Habermas and Appiah argue,
if justice is similarly understood at national and supernational scales.
Indeed, cosmopolitanism is thus fundamentally a necessary ethical re-
sponse to all forms of injustice.≤∂
Could Habermas’s or Appiah’s visions of cosmopolitan ethics be
equally revealed via Nii Noi’s reading/sounding of the 1950s to 1970s as a
confluence of cultural, spiritual, political moments that link African histo-
ries of decolonization to diasporic struggles for civil rights and multi-
cultural recognition? And what does it mean that this confluence is so
musically marked and historicized through the creative assertions of
reggae, free jazz, and Afro-experimentalism?
Nii Noi is surely on a parallel path here with Ghanaba. Slipping Beetho-
ven in between Coltrane and Osei Tutu, Nii Noi reprises Ghanaba’s
triangulation of the interaction of African and African American or Afro-

114 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

diasporic musics with the necessity to cite and engage Europe. And in
that context, Nii Noi’s performance of Afro-centric self-essentialism is
surely an energetic search for the broadest source of connections—expli-
cit, implicit, overt, covert, partial, fragmentary—that create an Afrocen-
tric cosmopolitics of world musical citizenship.
Some help with imagining that emphasis on connections, the ‘‘from X
to Y via Z’’ routings of my chapter titles, and Nii Noi’s Trane tracks,
comes now if I momentarily return to Ghana’s fiftieth anniversary of
independence and the contrast between the remoteness of Nii Noi’s
homemade and parked-at-the-station ‘‘Freedom Float,’’ and the over-the-
top competitive displays of cultural largesse performed in the indepen-
dence anniversary moment by European embassies in Accra.
I don’t think anyone who experienced Accra in the month of March 2007
would dispute the fact that the hands-down winning performance in the
contest of conspicuously excessive independence anniversary showman-
ship was staged by the Italian Embassy. At a cost of over $500,000, they air-
bused Daniel Barenboim and the 160-member-strong La Scala orchestra
and chorus to Accra for twenty-four hours to perform Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony at the fourteen-hundred-seat National Theatre. Forget the fact
that the evening opened with some local drumming. Forget the fact that
there were two black faces in the chorus (one African American and one
African Canadian). Forget the fact that the house was partially filled with
African listeners because the fifty-dollar tickets were all gratis even if the
who and what of attendance was very tightly and politically controlled.
Nobody really noticed these things.
What was locally stunning was that under the surface, pockets of Accra,
most of them not in attendance for one reason or another, knew that this
was Black Beethoven Comes Back to Mother Africa, even if the home-
coming took place amidst complete cluelessness on the part of Baren-
boim, La Scala, and the Italian Embassy. Moreover, what moved people
in Accra, what was very much noticed, was that the whole presentation
was spiritually divined, that is, outside of typical political process. And
that’s because Beethoven was invited to Accra by a personal appeal to La
Scala’s music director, Daniel Barenboim, from Kofi Annan, the former
U.N. secretary general and Ghana’s most high-profile international cit-
izen.≤∑ While ultimately paid for by the Italian government and city of
Milan, the event was received locally as a gift of angelic cosmopolitanism,
beamed down to Accra over the rainbow of a New York handshake.

NII NOI NORTEY 115

34. Portrait of Kofi Annan. Art ∫ 2008 Sheff.

But here Beethoven’s discursive currency as the ‘‘home key of the

musical canon’’ wasn’t just transposed up a notch to that key of elite
cosmopolitan diplomacy. It got modulated to the even higher key of
celebratory black political capital in the United States. Because the entire
bbc wire-service story of the Barenboim–La Scala performance of Bee-
thoven’s Ninth at Accra’s National Theatre was placed into the United
States Congressional Record on May 1, 2007.≤∏ It appears there as the
appendix to a brief speech of fiftieth-anniversary congratulations to
Ghana from New York’s Fifteenth District (Harlem and Upper West
Side), whose representative of more than twenty years, Charles Rangel,
was the first African American head of the House Ways and Means
Committee. A phone call to the staff associate in Representative Rangel’s
office informed me that yes, the congressman was proudly aware of Bee-
thoven’s black ancestry.
A few months later, by way of both unrelated funding and different
diplomacy, Accra Trane Station was invited to tour in Italy. By chance,
our itinerary included Milan, where Nii Noi and Nii Otoo taught a class
at the university, and where the Music Conservatory sponsored a trio
concert at the hall of the Circolo Filologico Milanese, right next to La
Scala. Just before the performance, we found ourselves relaxing down-

116 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

 35. From left, Nii Otoo Annan and Nii Noi Nortey in Milan.
Photograph ∫ 2007 Steven Feld.

36. Accra Trane Station performing in Milan.

Photograph ∫ 2007 Lorenzo Ferrarini.
stairs at the Circolo bar with our host, Nicola Scaldaferri, ethnomusicol-
ogist at the University of Milan. Nii Otoo nonchalantly requested a glass
of gin from the bartender, then proceeded to pour it onto the marble
floor as libation to accompany prayer for spiritual strength in the perfor-
mance to come. As we left to go upstairs and play, a journalist stopped us
to ask our impressions of Milan. With a nonchalance topping Nii Otoo’s
libation, it took Nii Noi just a few words to tell him that as Maestro
Barenboim and the La Scala orchestra and choir had recently brought
Beethoven back to Accra’s National Theatre, he felt that as a Pan-African
group it was equally important for us to bring Coltrane’s African legacy
to Milan’s La Scala annex.
The video lcd tells me that there is but a minute left on this, our last
Coltrane conversation cassette, and I say, ‘‘Thanks, Nii Noi, I’m still
thinking about how you link up Accra Trane Station from Coltrane to
Beethoven and back to Osei Tutu.’’
‘‘Well, Prof,’’ he responds, drawing deeper into his professorial voice
than I did to mine, ‘‘it’s no different than linking Malcolm X to Karl Marx
then back to Kwame Nkrumah. It’s all the same, like, maybe it just seems
more obvious when you put it on the musical level, when you can hear it
in our music. That music’s strength, I think, the way everything can come
together politically and spiritually, without reading books.’’
‘‘Yeah, I’ll think about that,’’ I say, just as the video cassette runs out. I’m
still thinking about it.

118 SECOND CHORUS, BLOW FREE

 Second Chorus, Blow Free

1. Accra Trane Station, Another Blue Train, cd, VoxLox, 2007; John Coltrane,
Blue Train, lp, Blue Note, 1957.
2. Key reference works for Fela include Michael Veal, Fela: Life and Times of an
African Musical Icon (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); Tejumola
Olaniyan, Arrest the Music! Fela and His Rebel Art and Politics (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2004); Carlos Moore, Fela: This Bitch of a Life, 2nd ed.
(1982; New York: Lawrence Moore, 2009); John Collins, Fela: Kalakuta Notes
(London: kit Publishers, 2009). Key reference works for John Coltrane include
Lewis Porter, John Coltrane: His Life and Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 2000); Leonard Brown, ed., John Coltrane and Black America’s Quest
for Freedom: Spirituality and the Music (New York: Oxford University Press,
2010); Chris DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews
(Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010); Ashley Khan, A Love Supreme: The Story
of John Coltrane’s Signature Album (New York: Penguin, 2003). The importance
of Alice Coltrane to this musical and spiritual legacy is revealed in Franya
Berkman, Monument Eternal: The Music of Alice Coltrane (Middletown: Wes-
leyan University Press, 2010).
After reading this chapter, Nii Noi expressed concern that it perhaps over-
stated the central position of Coltrane to his listening and practice. He reminded
me strongly of how much Coltrane was the ‘‘beacon,’’ but of his own simulta-
neous and deeply parallel engagements with the music of Sun Ra, Rahsaan
Roland Kirk, Yusef Lateef, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman,
Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and other 1960s–1970s avant-gard-
ists. Listening to Nii Noi talk about Coltrane as the ‘‘beacon’’ reminded me of
Amiri Baraka’s pithy and perfect summary: ‘‘Trane emerged as the process of
historical clarification itself.’’ See ‘‘John Coltrane, Why His Legacy Continues,’’ in
Baraka’s collection Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 192–94.
3. Nii Noi Nortey, Nii Otoo Annan, Steven Feld, Alex Coke, and Jefferson
Voorhees, Topographies of the Dark, cd, VoxLox, 2008; on the art project, see
Virginia Ryan, Multiple Entries: Africa and Beyond, 2001–2007 (Spoleto: Festival
dei Due Mondi/Commune di Spoleto, 2008).
4. Summary narrations of the history of the Asante empire include Robert B.
Edgerton, The Fall of the Asante Empire: The Hundred-Year War for Africa’s Gold
Coast (New York: Free Press, 1995); N. Kyeremateng and K. Nkansa, The Akans
of Ghana: Their History and Culture (Accra: Sebewie Publishers, 1996); J. K.
Fynn, Asante and Its Neighbors (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993);
Ivor Wilks, Forest of Gold: Essays on the Akan and the Kingdom of Asante (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1993). The broad West African precolonial and colonial
context for this history is summarized in Basil Davidson, West Africa before the

HORN BACKGROUNDS, RIFFS UNDERNEATH 267

Colonial Era: A History to 1850, 4th ed. (London: Longman, 1998); Michael
Crowder, West Africa under Colonial Rule (London: Hutchinson, 1968); also see
Frederick D. Lord Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, 5th ed.
(London: Frank Cass, 1965). A recent general history is Roger Gocking, The
History of Ghana (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005).
5. The music and poetry group African Dawn, active in London in the 1980s,
was founded by Kwesi Owusu, Sheikh Gueye, and Wanjiku Kiarie, and later
included Wala Danga, Vico Mensah, Merle Collins, and Nii Noi Nortey. They
released four lps; the current cd in circulation is the self-produced and self-
published Jali (1989). The aesthetic ideology of the group, and the larger British
black arts context in which its work was placed, has been chronicled by the
Ghanaian writer, filmmaker, and media producer Kwesi Owusu in The Struggle
for Black Arts in Britain: What Can We Consider Better Than Freedom (London:
Comedia, 1986), and two edited anthologies, Storms of the Heart: An Anthology of
Black Arts and Culture (London: Camden Press, 1988), and Black British Culture
and Society: A Text Reader (London: Routledge, 2000). Owusu’s introduction in
the last of these books, ‘‘Charting the Genealogy of Black British Cultural Stud-
ies’’ (1–18), provides a good historical introduction to the intellectual and artistic
world in which Nii Noi participated during his years in Britain in the 1970s and
1980s. A visual companion to that story is Paul Gilroy’s Black Britain: A Pho-
tographic History (London: Saqi, 2008).
Yusuf Hassan, ‘‘What Is Ours? Black Voices, Black Sounds, but Who Reaps the
Fruits?,’’ Africa Events (May 1987): 77–78, situates Dade Krama and African
Dawn against white curators and djs in the United Kingdom in terms of an
anticolonial politics of mediation. Another take, from the same moment, is
Maggie Jonas, ‘‘Is African Music Being Colonized?,’’ New African (May 1987):
45–46.
6. Misty In Roots developed their powerful roots reggae approach in the mid-
and late 1970s, releasing what has become one of the most successful of all live
reggae lps, Live at the Counter Eurovision (People Unite, 1979). They are largely
acknowledged for being the most steady and long-running onstage presence in
rock against racism concerts. Their 1982 trip to Zimbabwe and Zambia was
followed by the very popular lp Earth, on which Nii Noi perfoms (People Unite,
1983) and then Musi O Tunya (People Unite, 1985). More recently, Nii Noi also
plays on some tracks of Misty In Roots’s The John Peel Sessions (People Unite,
1995) and Roots Controller (People Unite/Real World, 2002). The group is still
active and maintains a website at www.mistyinroots.ws. On Misty In Roots’s
later trip to Ghana, with quotations on their reception from Nii Noi, see Klevor
Abo, ‘‘Music and Struggle,’’ West Africa, February 1, 1988, 174.
7. A vu (volume unit) meter is an analog device for representing volume
level, ubiquitous on radio and audio equipment from the early 1940s.
8. I’m grateful to Efua and Nii Noi for a copy of the revealing book about

268 HORN BACKGROUNDS, RIFFS UNDERNEATH

Bernie that Efua’s father, Eric Grant, so passionately worked to finish just before
his own death: Dawn to Dusk: A Biography of Bernie Grant mp (London: Ituni
Books, 2006). The Bernie Grant Archive’s website is www.berniegrantarchive
.org.uk; the Bernie Grant Arts Centre’s is www.berniegrantcentre.co.uk.
9. The late Coltrane sound of 1965–67 is represented by the lps A Love
Supreme, Ascension, New Thing at Newport, Kulu Sé Mama, Meditations, Live at the
Village Vanguard Again, and Expression, all on Impulse.
10. Nii Noi’s references were Klaus Wachsmann, ed., Essays on Music and
History in Africa (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971); J. H. K.
Nketia, The Music of Africa (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974); Paul Berliner, The
Soul of Mbira: Music and Traditions of the Shona People of Zimbabwe (Los An-
geles: University of California Press, 1979); Charles Keil, Tiv Song: The Sociology
of Art in a Classless Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
11. The World According to John Coltrane, dvd, bmg Special Products, 2002;
we also watched the full version of the Coltrane quartet’s ‘‘Alabama’’ performance
on Ralph Gleason’s Jazz Casual: John Coltrane, dvd, Rhino/wea, 2003.
12. Coltrane’s song ‘‘Alabama’’ is on his lp Live at Birdland, Impulse, 1963; see
the discussion of the song in Porter’s John Coltrane, 331.
13. The work of Mau Mau Muziki and African Sound Project was documented
on two cassettes, now out of print, produced and published by Nii Noi’s Anyaa
Arts Library. A sampler of both groups drawn from those cassettes is Made in
Ghana: Mau Mau Muziki (1990–1997) and African Sound Project (1999–2004),
cd, Anyaa Arts Library, 2008. Accra Trane Station (2005–8) is heard on the cds
Tribute to A Love Supreme (2005), Meditations for John Coltrane (2006), Another
Blue Train (2007), Topographies of the Dark, with Alex Coke and Jefferson Voor-
hees (2008), all on VoxLox.
14. Charles Keil explores this theme, powerfully linking the mysteries of
double-reed legacies from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, in ‘‘The
Most Important Instruments in the World,’’ his introductory chapter to Dick
Blau, Charles Keil, Angeliki Keil, and Steven Feld, Bright Balkan Morning: Ro-
mani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 2002), 23–86. On the role of the alghaita in African Islamic
music, also see Eric Charry, ‘‘Music and Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa,’’ in The
History of Islam in Africa, ed. Nehemia Levtzion and Randall Pouwels (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 2000), 545–73.
15. Nii Noi’s columns were published in the Chicago-based journal The Rising
Firefly: Kemetic Magazine of Culture, Philosophy and Spirituality, edited and
largely written by his friend Naba Lamoussa Morodenibig, whose teachings are
introduced at www.theearthcenter.com.
16. Norman Weinstein, A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz (Lon-
don: Scarecrow Press, 1992); the Coltrane chapter is ‘‘Sounding the African Cry
for Paradise’’ (60–72).

HORN BACKGROUNDS, RIFFS UNDERNEATH 269

 17. I’ve not gone into my conversations with Nii Noi about Kwame Nkrumah
here, but want to signpost both how deeply Nii Noi has read Nkrumah’s writings
and how significant they remain for his narration of the connections between
musical and political action in the work of Ghana’s nationalism and Pan-African-
ism. Some of this is revealed in Nii Noi’s comments in the Accra Trane Station
film. Another key location for the Nkrumah story here comes through the way
Nii Noi’s sculptures are surrounded by books; sometimes the books even be-
come part of the sculptures. Nii Noi often pointed out to me the importance of
education and libraries in Nkrumah’s vision of nation building. As presented in
the film, Nii Noi’s A–Z wall charts (A–Z of Ghanaba, A–Z of Coltrane, etc.)
developed one way to bring education, nation, and pedagogy together with
creative artistry. Of course, education was a place where Nkrumah’s emphasis on
the intertwining of nationalism and Pan-Africanism always triangulated to em-
brace international cosmopolitanism ideals. For example, in his speech at his
installation as first chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and
Technology (November 29, 1961), Nkrumah put it this way: ‘‘Knowledge is
international, and scientific knowledge especially cannot be restricted to any one
particular nation, in other words, science knows no frontiers.’’ The speech, titled
‘‘Flower of Learning,’’ is in Samuel Obeng, comp., Selected Speeches of Kwame
Nkrumah, vol. 2 (1979; Accra: Afram, 1997), 153–60; quotation at 155.
18. Joel Augustus Rogers’s books were largely self-financed and self-published.
After his death in 1966, many of the books continued to be published with the
name of his wife, Helga M. Rogers, as publisher. Those still in circulation include
World’s Great Men of Color (New York: Macmillan, 1972); Selected Writings of Joel
August Rogers (New York: Pyramid Publishers, 1988); One Hundred Amazing
Facts about the Negro with Complete Proof: A Shortcut to the World History of the
Negro, illustrated ed. (1934; St. Petersburg, Florida: Helga M. Rogers, 1980); Sex
and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands, vol. 1, The Old World,
and vol. 2, A History of White, Negro, and Indian Miscegenation in the Two Americas
(1943–46; St. Petersburg, Florida: Helga M. Rogers, 1989).
19. Rogers, One Hundred Amazing Facts about the Negro, 12.
20. Deborah D. Moseley’s ‘‘Beethoven, the Black Spaniard,’’ is posted at sev-
eral places including the website of ChickenBones: A Journal, at www.nathaniel
turner.com. Two of the other widely posted and reposted Internet articles are by
Cecil Adams, ‘‘Was Ludwig van Beethoven of African Ancestry?’’ (see, e.g., www
.straightdope.com), and Kwaku Person-Lynn, ‘‘Beethoven: Revealing His True
Identity’’ (e.g., www.ghanaweb.com).
21. Anton Felix Schindler, Beethoven as I Knew Him, ed. and annotated by
Donald W. MacArdle (trans. of 1860 German ed., 1966; New York: Dover, 1996);
Donald W. MacArdle, ‘‘The Family Van Beethoven,’’ Musical Quarterly 35 (1949):
528–50; Dominique-René de Lerma, ‘‘Beethoven as a Black Composer,’’ Black
Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1990): 118–22, originally in Black Music Research

270 HORN BACKGROUNDS, RIFFS UNDERNEATH

Newsletter 8, no. 1 (1985): 3–5; also at the Myrtle Hart Society website, myr
tlehart.org.
22. Nadine Gordimer, Beethoven Was 1/16th Black and Other Stories (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
23. Nicholas Mathew, ‘‘Beethoven and His Others,’’ Beethoven Forum 13, no. 2
(2006): 148–87.
24. Jürgen Habermas, The Divided West (London: Polity Press, 2006); Kwame
Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2007).
25. When she heard this part of the story, the jazz producer and historian
Maxine Gordon reminded me that the former secretary general is also a drum-
mer, and provided this link to the 2008 Tällberg Forum, where he sits in on
congas: youtube.com/watch?v=g2nMekOx1KU.
26. Hon. Charles B. Rangel of New York in the House of Representatives,
‘‘Tribute to the 50th Anniversary of the Republic of Ghana,’’ United States Con-
gressional Record—Extensions of Remarks, E899-E900, May 1, 2007. The text incor-
porates the April 25, 2007, report by the bbc correspondent David Willey, ‘‘La
Scala Brings Beethoven to Ghana,’’ originally published at news.bbc.co.uk.

Third Chorus, Back Inside

1. The rwaff (Royal West Africa Fontier Force) effort in Burma represented
one of the largest colonial army campaigns in the history of the British Empire;
see A. Haywood and F. A. S. Clarke, The History of the Royal West African Frontier
Force (Aldershot: Gale and Polden, 1964); also see Adrienne M. Israel, ‘‘Measur-
ing the War Experience: Ghanaian Soldiers in World War ii,’’ Journal of Modern
African Studies 25, no. 1 (1987): 159–68. Burma Camp is today the name of the
main army base in Accra; the camp was renamed at the time of independence to
commemorate the role of Ghanaians in the Second World War Burma Campaign.
2. The Bosavi research by me and my colleagues is reported in Steven Feld,
Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression, 2nd ed.
(1982; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Bambi B. Schieffelin,
The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990; 2nd ed., Tucson: Fenestra, 2005);
Edward L. Schieffelin, The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers
(London: St. Martin’s Press, 1976; 2nd ed., New York: Macmillan Palgrave, 2004).
3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955), trans. John Weightman and
Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1973).
4. Donna J. Haraway, A Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signifi-
cant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003); When Species Meet (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

HORN BACKGROUNDS, RIFFS UNDERNEATH 271