Naani

A barren landscape dotted with trees, goats picking at dusty blades of grass; the roadside is lined with women on their way to market, balancing bowls of vegetables on their heads; children play as their mothers cook in front of shacks; metallic sounds ring out from a mechanic’s workshop; and as we get closer to the city, the concentration of people, traffic, trade and noise increases.Then we hear music: an outdoor festival is taking place. Drummers with female singers and dancers. Bleakness transforms into splendour, dullness into diversity, simplicity into captivating complexity, the profane becomes the profound.What we are witnessing is Naani: Drissa Kone, Oumou Mariko, Gerhard Kero and Ulli Sanou making space for both emptiness and abundance as they pay homage to the Malian beauty of djembe music and song.Sanzawas founded in 1989 and can already point to a long and eventful history. The movement started when a small group of west African music aficionados made an LP called ‘Sanza’. Since then, an evolving line-up has captured the public’s imagination with CDs of traditional djembe music entitled ‘Sanza live’ and ‘In search of the one’. The group also made a successful foray into world music with a CD release called ‘Doubtless Living’. By then, the core of the group comprised Drissa Kone, Oumou Mariko, Gerhard Kero and Ulli Sanou. Today, their approach is to strip back performance to the essentials: after all, fire needs to be contained, feeling doesn’t have to lead to sentimentality. These traditional, earthy rhythms are all about inspiring creativity, breezy arrangements emphasising the lightness at the heart of the music.