Griots and Idiophones. Calabashes of Chapalo. BFForever.

If one more dude yells "my friend" at me, I'm gonna befriend his head with a balafon mallet. Sure, the people here in Burkina Faso are friendly, but the tourist-predators have been getting under my skin. That said, it's been a delightful two weeks here, and a welcome change of scenery.

Starting with the most obvious-it's frikkin dry here. That makes some things easy and others hard. Peeing, for example is a cinch--you can pee anywhere, since the pee evaporates before it hits the ground. Drinking, on the other hand, is tricky, since you must actually drink as you are filling your cup. Otherwise the water disappears before you can get it to your face.

I was just enjoying a breakfast of curried homefries, a fried egg, and fresh bread with REAL butter, loving the cool (dry) breeze on my friend's balcony, when I saw a Ouagadougan garbage truck and smiled that smile which illuminates the inside of my face at least once or twice a day. It's the "this is Africa" smile. While the street below flowed with bicycles, motorcycles, scooters, and small cars carrying well-dressed or raggedy city-dwellers, a donkey trudged along with a large scrappy metal box in tow, in front of which sat two old women wrapped in colorful, if faded, dresses and headwrappings. Ougadougou.

There are gardens here. They are spacious outdoor restaurants, full of green, tables scattered here and there, under trees and beside hedges, with a stage where a variety of groups play every single day. Coming from Benin, a land surprisingly starved of live music, I must say that it's an awesome luxury to saunter down any old night and catch some locally-flavored balafon and ngoni (kora-like traditional 10-string harp made from a large gourd and a big stick), or lilting, shimmering, guitar-based Tuareg desert grooves, or more pan-African orchestras playing classic Congolese dance hits. I have only tasted a smattering of groups, but if not mind-blowing, at least they are always different, and usually interesting.

I heard (and played) some interesting music in Bobo-Dioulasso, land of the Bobo and Dioula-speakers. The second-largest city in Burkina, five hours from Ouaga, quickly gives away the smallness of Burkina-it's quite unintimidating. Walking from the bus station to the hotel I had chosen in my handy travel guide, I passed a store-front with a number of young men lounging on benches in the shade. One hustled across the street to introduce himself and offer me musical lessons. We made plans to jam the following morning.

The next day, after a bawdy musical romp at the shop, we piled a bunch of sound gear into and onto their van, crawled in ourselves, and went to play a baptism celebration. We rolled up to a wide, dusty, dirt street, where men and boys were scattered about in groups in the shade of a few large trees. A stereo blared American R&B, while children ran around in circles. Men sat around small tables roughly according to age, drinking small glasses of tea, smoking cigarettes and throwing cards with bravado.

Our rag-tag group in flip-flops set up under a large portable awning in the middle of the street. Before playing, we were brought an enormous bowl of riz gras with a pitiful dallop of sauce on top and a few small pieces of goat. After washing our hands, we huddled around the rice and dug in. It wat HOT, yikes. I'm used to eating hot pate with my hand-I usually just spread the pate out a bit and let it cool, but this quantity of piping hot rice could have kept a small house warm through a winter's night if there were such a thing here. I suffered through some small but tasty handfuls, and ended up waiting till the others finished so I could spread my rice out and let it cool before squeezing it into sticky balls to pop in my mouth.

Like a train starting slow and gradually gaining speed, we joined one by one the groove started by the guitarist, who, although young, was the de-facto musical leader. There were bass, guitar, piano, drums, a bass drum, a djembe, and they had hired two female griots to sing. We played a couple intrumental songs to warm things up, and the men slowly disappeared: this party was for the ladies.

Slowly filing out from the courtyard of a house in the middle of the block, first came the young ladies. Freshly coifed, wearing colorful embroidered dresses of fine fabric, they emerged with a slow smiling dance, like a giant psychedelic centipede. Head finally met tail, and the dance continued in a circle until the ladies took their seats around a large clearing of dirt and waited for the matrons. If the young ladies were nicely put together, their mothers were decked out and imposing with their beautiful get-ups.

During this time, the griots began to work their charms, and it was soon clear they were the act and we were just backing them up. A simple song would last twenty minutes while the griots sang about the family, the attendees, and who knows what else in powerful, dizzying flourishes. The guitarist and I would take turns trying to peak our little heads out into the cracks to add a well-timed flourish of our own before falling in line behind the singer and playing some repetitive groovy line.

One by one, women would approach the griots or the mother of the baptised, seated in the center of the circle, to offer a gift of money. Every so often, the griots would pass back a bill or two which someone would stuff in the guitar case.

It was a long afternoon, and though tired, we weren't finished for the day. We headed straight to a city-owned theater and set up the sound gear for a soiree of peul music where some of the members of the group would play a short set of traditional balafon music with percussion and dancing. The Peuls, also known as Fulani, are traditionally nomadic cattle herders, a people who are widely dispersed across West Africa and although accepted and appreciated for the meat, milk and cheese, they are seen as outsiders, even in places where they make up the majority. They typically spurn the education put in place by colonialists, prefering their quite profitable traditional practice of cattle-raising.

Anyhow, what I like about the Peul is their style. Men are apt to wear foot-length robes and cool shoes and maybe wrap their heads. The women, though, stand out from a mile away. To get fancy, they wear sparkly shawls and the girls do up their hair somethin else. Apart from an unusual style of braiding, they tie in colorful beads and silver coins. On a normal day, the Peul women are colorful and intriguing, but for a fete, they are a sight to behold. I was too shy to go around taking pictures of everybody so I'm afraid you'll just have to use your imagination or check google images for 'Peul'.

So my friends played, pleasing the crowd with their wild, colorful costumes, acrobatics and theatrics, and intense drumming and balafon beating.

Balafon this, balafon that, what in tarnation is a balafon, you ask? A balafon is a mallet-struck idiophone, a more ear-pleasing precursor to the xylophone, with a gourd attached below each wooden key. The gourds have small holes cut in them, which are covered by a thin membrane that creates a beautiful and characteristic buzz. They are pentatonic, with five notes per octave covering four octaves to give ................(who here is a math whiz?)...........that's right, twenty notes!

It is the most characteristic instrument of Burkinabe traditional music, and Bobo is Balafon Central. In Bobo is a neighborhood especially known for traditional Balafon music, and would you be surprised to learn that I made a beeline for it at the first opportunity? Well, I did.

Upon setting foot in this famed neighborhood, my ears perked up to the blood-quickening call of a djembe. I followed my ears, and before arriving at the source I was stopped by a couple of men who asked what I was looking for. Explaining that I was a wandering musician in search of the famed music of their quartier, they told me that they, too, were musicians, and offered to give me a little tour. We had a few minutes only, for this was a late-afternoon scouting mission, but in thirty minutes we passed through a number of cabarets and met a bunch of people.

Cabarets are the social hubs of Bolomakote, courtyards where Chapalo is brewed and served. Talk about homey atmosphere, the courtyard is nestled in the middle of a large family household. Ground sorghum grains are mixed with water, boiled, and left to ferment for a few days in large oil-drums. The resulting home brew is sold by the liter and served at room temperature (aka 80-90 degrees) in calabash bowls to clients who sit around the courtyard in pockets of shade on long benches. It's truly a family affair from the production to the consumption. Old ladies and young sit around drinking. Men, of course, are there in droves. Children help to prepare and serve it, while others play. One of my new friends gave a healthy slug to a child who couldn't have been older than four. Ah, L'Afrique, who am I to judge? Our children are drunk on video games and stoned on television. At least these kids are running around, getting dirty, and learning quickly about what they will soon face as adults.

I made a date and came back a couple days later to play with my new friend Si ("see") and his brother Adama. In a small mud room, we drank chapalo at nine in the morning, ate tasty morsels of lamb with chili powder and started to play-they, two balafons, and me, my saxophone. They played in a different style from my other friends in centre-ville, but much was the same. Everything was in a rythmic cycle of three, or four, and the harmony is quite simple to hear, as five notes don't yeild too many harmonic possibilities. I would try to catch bits of the melodies they sang, or a part of the accompaniment part. Straining to imagine another possible accompaniment, I would try variations until something locked in and worked. As their parts kept shifting, so did I have to continually adjust to maintain a balanced whole.

Soloing was fun, although playing pentatonic music is a challenge to do more with less. Using five notes, plus a few more for color, means you have to seek other sorts of variation, mostly rhythmic. There were a few moments of intensity which make me consider the possibility of coming back for a time to work with these musicians.

Tomorrow at five am (haha, yeah right, we'll see about that) I will take a little 17-seat mini-bus back to Benin, back to the muggy heat of the coast, back to the 'yovo, yovo, bon soir'-ing of the more brazen Beninese children, back to 250 final exams which must be graded, back to my house, by now scattered with mouse droppings and likely claimed by the spiders, back to "what did you bring me from Burkina?" from everybody and their mother. Back to the real world.