Mamadou Diabate Ensemble Plays

 

I found several YouTube Videos featuring Mamadou Diabate.  Except for the standup base player on the left in this one, I think the other three are the same players who were with the Ensemble on the square in Millersburg a couple of weeks ago.

A YouTube video can only give a small hint of the flavor of this music. The dome shaped percussion instrument in the back which is half of a large gourd, although it looks like something different in the video, is a case in point. I walked behind the speaker array to take photographs when they were playing here. That percussion was so low in frequency and so intense that I could feel it in my gut…in the video you can, of course, hardly hear it.

Concert on the Square

Yesterday morning I was in the hardware looking for parts for a project I am working on.  As I studied my options, I heard the name Mamadou Diabate on the local radio station being played in the store.  That is unusual, so I tried to listen to what was being said.  He was to be in concert on the square in Millersburg that evening…that is even more unusual.  I repeated his name in my mind all the rest of the day so I wouldn’t forget to go.  The group was available through the Ohio Arts Council.

I like to listen to music from West Africa every now and again so I went with expectations for a good concert.  My expectations were surpassed.  If you get a chance to hear the Mamadou Diabate Ensemble play, don’t miss it.  The members last night were:  Mamadou Diabate on kora, Balla Kouyate on balaphon, Ibrahim “Kolipe” Camara on percussion, and Mawuena Kodjovi on bass guitar.

Good Music…

Anniversary

It occurred to me today that The Quiet Way celebrated its first anniversary two weeks ago and I forgot it.  So where have I been?  Away…

A year ago when it started, I was still working but I wasn’t really fully employed.  I was packing equipment, sweeping floors, cleaning out storerooms, and throwing a lot of really good stuff into dumpsters to be ground up before it went to the landfill in preparation for the plant to be closed.  I had time to think about things, lots of things, in a different way.  Now I am working again and have been (mentally) employed since January.  My attention has been diverted from The Quiet Way and toward the joys and frustrations of starting a new job; towards meeting a natural requirement to get our hardware operating.  I enjoy the work but right now it demands most all of my attention.

I have written a few posts but they have not been as satisfying as the first few dozen.  Do you think so?  That has been disappointing and is not likely to change in the near term.

Don’t give up on me…I am looking forward to a real return to The Quiet Way.  I hope to be back in a few weeks.

OUPS — Messages from the Underworld

When you walk around in a city of any size you realize how much stuff is buried under its sidewalks and streets.  There are signs and symbols painted on streets and sidwalks.  There is a whole world of pipes, conduits and buried stuff down there.  There are a lot of them buried out in the country too.  If you dig before you call, you could be in for a lot of trouble.

Several years ago, a local landowner started digging around with his backhoe and hit a major fiberoptic transmission line that runs through the center of our county.  The story grew in its telling but he was charged thousands of dollars for that blunder…oops!

One summer morning a few years ago while I was at work in a large manufacturing facility, we got a building evacuation warning…now!  We gathered at our rally points in the parking lot.  Then the officials came around and moved us further away from the building.  A backhoe operator working on the street west of the plant had hit a high pressure natural gas line and the building was filling with natural gas coming in through the open windows…oops!  The building did not explode.

We have called several times here on the farm before we started a project, just to be sure we wouldn’t hit something.  They come out and paint on the ground or stick little plastic flags in the ground above all the important stuff.  They don’t charge for the service but it is worth a lot.

The One Man Band

We were in Urbana, Illinois last weekend.  During the summer there is a thriving farmer’s market in one of the downtown parking lots which we usually go to when we are there on Saturday.  There are lots of local fruit, vegetable, and meat stands.  Lots of local crafts, a tee shirt stand, and several performers scattered about making entertainment.  There were violinists, guitarists, and bluegrass bands.  And there was the one man band.

One lone individual with a couple of tambourines and an assorted collection of junk.  I walked past as he was playing…no one was listening to this crazy guy.  I looked back and saw a woman and her little son stop and look.  I went back to watch what happened.  Then a couple with two small children stopped.  The one man band had an audience and he was ready to perform.  He played his instruments, he put his monkey puppet on his hand, he sang, if you can call it that, he engaged his young audience by sliding a tiny pair of cymbals to one of them, he scratched a small pot with a plastic rake, he blew on his bugle.  The other players in the market were musicians.  The one man band was not a musician.  But he was an entertainer and he might have gone home with more money in his hat than any of the others.  He went home with some of mine.