Beautiful Struggle: American-Ivorian Trans-Atlantic Band Zieti Turns War, Separation, and MIDI Madness into Perfect Afropop on Zemelewa

Far across the lagoon, people swayed as the music from battery-powered amps and sardine-powered jams drifted over the water. 

They were dancing to the beach rehearsal of Zieti, two Americans (guitarist Michael Shereikis and drummer Alex Owre) and two Ivorians (lead singer Yeoue Narcisse and guitarist/vocalist Tiende Laurent) who had unexpectedly become fast friends. By the water near Abidjan’s oceanfront shantytowns or in a tiny rehearsal studio built from shipping crates, the quartet developed an exuberant rapport in skillful, insistent songs.

Now a decade removed from Abidjan's mellow beaches, after years of political turmoil and violence, and despite the players' radically different backgrounds, Zieti has done the impossible: make roots-rich music that sounds utterly fresh and organic. Undulating bass lines, bright vocal harmonies, glittering percussion, wailing organ and accordion, and a vintage vibe winking at the best of 70s Afrofunk, they all come together onZemelewa (Grigri Discs; March 6, 2012) for a refreshing and passionate take on Ivorian tradition and the current state of Afropop.

But it almost never happened: “Before I left the country, we had gone into the studio and recorded ten tracks,” Shereikis recalls. “That recording was lost, which was a major blow to all of us. It sounded great though, and a lot of the songs on Zemelewa come from that time.”

Those songs were honed over two halcyon years of playing together. Composers Yeoue and Tiende had been friends for years, playing music together since they were kids in their home area in far Western Ivory Coast. It was King Shabba, a heavyweight on the Rasta-dominated local scene, who first connected them with drummer Owre. Owre soon brought along Shereikis. 

“It was instant friendship,” Yeoue remembers, “because Alex and Mike would come out and visit us, even though we lived in a part of town people thought was rough, and we’d go visit them. We saw each other all the time. We’d share simple meals—manioc and oil, sardines and bread—and we’d all eat from the same bowl.”

“From the very beginning we sat down and just played,” Owre reflects. “Not, ‘You play this, you play that.’ The guys accepted my style and they liked what I brought to the mix. They were happy to have some approaches that were different from what they got on their home turf. The faith and trust in each other superseded any need to be orthodox.”

Songs came together effortlessly: the group penned “Bah Bohi” five minutes after their first meeting with Shereikis. The friends practiced on the beach—a fact that’s almost palpable on elegant, aching tracks like “Tche.” They drew on Yeoue and Tiende’s Guere traditions for the lovely melodies and unique rhythms of their deep-rooted musical heritage, especially on songs like “Tindehe” and “Zion Do.” 

Wide-ranging musically, Yeoue and Tiende’s lyrics tackle issues from AIDS awareness to the power of tradition, from love lost to the need for political unity in a country torn by infighting and violence. They sing primarily in Guere, but as Shereikis says, “You don’t have to understand the words to appreciate this music. As you’re tapping your foot, Narcisse’s unique phrasing and tone convey a visceral sense that this is message music.”

When Zieti played an outdoor concert in Western Cote d’Ivoire, on Yeoue and Tiende’s home turf, they had their Guere compatriots dancing in circles and cheering to the group’s hard-hitting lyrics. The crowd even demanded they play “Zion Do” twice, to ecstatic response followed magically by a flourish of rain. “That was one of the proudest moments of my musical life,” Owre exclaims.

But after Owre and Shereikis left in 1999, things got complicated. Ivory Coast descended into civil war. Tiende was called home to one of the most violence-wracked areas of the country, resurfacing after months of silence, during which the other members feared he was dead. Yet Zieti managed to stay connected, and Shereikis arranged for local studio time for Yeoue and Tiende via an Ivorian contact he met at an African record store in DC.

The resulting cassette, full of MIDI-driven production, didn’t make much of a splash in Ivory Coast, but became the core of Zemelewa. Struck by the continued power and beauty of the band’s work, and deeply frustrated with the production approach favored in Abidjan, Shereikis set about to recast the songs, drawing on his exhaustive knowledge and passion for African pop music—from West African funk-inspired sounds to Congolese rumba. As Yeoue told Shereikis, “We’ll sing and play guitar, and you dress it up.”

Tracks began flying back and forth from Maryland to Maine where Owre had settled, as the American side of the project emerged. Through Grigri Discs, a label and incubator for the Afropop scene in DC, Shereikis recruited masterful players of everything from sax to slide guitar, including bandmates in Chopteeth Afrofunk Big Band and émigré musicians he knew from around DC. Now more lushly arranged, Zemelewa channels the band’s original spirit, first formed on the sand across the ocean long before.  

“I fleshed out what we had done together, the way I remembered it as we played and recorded it,” Shereikis notes. “I added a few other colors and elements to give it a bit of edge. None of these choices were calculated, beyond my hope that they would make Narcisse and Laurent  happy and give this music its full worth.”

For Zieti, the music and message don’t stop with the herculean effort of finally making their debut album. The group is now working together to help struggling artists harness their creativity by providing instruments to Ivorian musicians, lack of which is one of the key reasons MIDI production rules the day there. A first shipment of instruments was recently delivered to Yeoue, who has rented a small rehearsal space near his home in Abidjan, a place poised to become a community music hub. 

“The project we started with the instruments is very important,” Yeoue says, “and that’s what’s going to make the difference. Our work together proves what can be done, no matter how far apart or how different we seem from one another.”

Megan Blue!

Crazy With Joy: Henry Cole & the Afro-Beat Collective Find An Age-Old Mestizo Heart and Fresh Jazz Flash in Afrobeat on Roots Before Branches

 Quicksilver Puerto Rican drummer Henry Cole knows how Wayne Shorter might have jammed with Fela Kuti. Or what Miles would have done if only he’d gone Afro-Caribbean with his rock-jazz hybrids. He hears how jazz can grab the rootsy sounds of bomba, plena, and Cuban rumba, and sparkle with electro sheen and rock energy.

He hears it, because these sonic roots have been intertwining in Puerto Rico for hundreds of years. “If I had been a Puerto Rican musician playing a few centuries ago, I would have had the same kinds of influences: African, indigenous, European,” Cole explains. “They’ve come together to createmestizo sounds forever, and I’m just carrying that forward.”

Cole & the Afro-Beat Collective on Roots Before Branches (release: March 13, 2012), a gently autobiographical yet firmly funky vision that channels the joie-de-vivre of Cole’s home scene in Puerto Rico and the bright sophistication of New York’s jazz heights. Equally able to jam with a hip hop crew or jazz masters, Cole harnesses his well-honed rhythmic power and his love of catchy, evocative melodies to create a deep, wide-ranging vision of unity, balance, and Afro-Caribbean creativity.

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One night, the bold beat that shook up Lagos came home to Puerto Rico.

Cole had reveled in the diverse musical sounds of his fellow Puerto Rican musicians playing in the small clubs and bars of San Juan’s historic heart. He had played with the scene’s many vibrant and varied figures, often dashing from an early evening jazz gig to a rock show right across the street. Some of his artist friends did spoken word. Some rapped. Some played rock en Español. Some were hot international jazz performers—MacArthur Fellow saxophonist Miguel Zenón, Grammy award winning sax player DavidSánchez—and some were old-school Latin roots musicians and salsa masters.

How could Cole find something that would let them all get down?

The solution: Afrobeat and the masterful grooves of Fela Kuti. “Miguel and I started doing jam sessions in San Juan at Christmas with a trio. It was great, but I missed all these other elements, like that salsa energy,” Cole recalls. “But when I heard Fela, I was like ‘Wow, this is it!’ He had tradition, he had the rock vibe, he had solos, and a really intense energy. The songs were relatively simple and you didn’t need a big rehearsal. I got to Puerto Rico with a chart, called my friends, and played. It was the perfect musical vehicle, but we adapted it to the island, with local percussionists and a poet instead of a singer.”

This cross-pollination grooves hard on tracks like “Trabájala,” where rap poet Hérmes Ayala rocks the mic with a pointed call to action, alongside Zenón’s wailing beauty of a sax solo. Or the organ-powered “Solo dos veces,” that puts the Cole’s spitfire drums play off of Afro-funky horn lines. He keeps all the elements in balance, thanks to a keen organic sense of timing and melody. For Cole, one pulse beats through it all: There’s a high voice, a low voice—and a language that moves everyone.

“In many traditions, the drum that speaks, that improvises, usually has a high and a low sound. You have two sounds in Puerto Rican plena, playing the language of the drum. The traditional players don’t think about it in terms of technique; they think about language,” Cole explains. “I wanted to learn the language from the main traditional sources and then orchestrate it from there.”

Like a language, the album evolved over years, as Cole dug into indie rock (“Una para Isabel”), electronic music (“Comienzo,” “Uncovered Fears”), and jazz classics—he imagined a post-bop horn player fronting Fela’s band, or an Afro-Caribbean version of Bitches Brew—or simply in a springing pulse that sparked a whole melody in his inner ear.

Inspiration found Cole as he reflected on his childhood in Mayaguëz, the heartland of Puerto Rican plena, where at age nine he first fell in love with the drums and lost his mother (“Aurea V.” is a dreamy, bittersweet tribute to her). He questioned his path as a pro musician breaking into the New York scene (“To believe without seeing”) and his relationships (“No eres tu, soy yo”). He reveled in love and wrestled with his own mortality. The emotional turmoil led to stirring music, melodies Cole devised simply to satisfy and engage—to move beyond the sometimes heady intellectual world of jazz.

“I put a lot of energy into coming up with something that would express how I was feeling,” Cole reflects. “I imagine a group on the stage and the audience. And I think, ‘What can I offer to you, that will make me happy and you happy? What will bring us together and speak to all of us?’”

Cole brought highly versatile kindred spirits together in the studio in Puerto Rico and in New York: Zenón and Sánchez, the New Orleans-inspired post-bop tenor sax of John Ellis, Tito Puente trumpet man Piro Rodríguez, salsa master Cheito Quiñone (Arturo Sandoval, Julio Eglesias), and nimble, raw-edged guitarist Adam Rogers (Cassandra Wilson, John Zorn, Paul Simon).

Yet the tracks came together in a spirit of play, like the upbeat jam sessions in San Juan, capturing the sheer delight of making music that grooves. “In Puerto Rico, there’s a spirit of humility toward playing music, a real pleasure in the music,” Cole notes. “You can go crazy with joy and scream and play for fun. It’s a platform to be relaxed and happy. You play what you want, and you go back to the roots of playing, without attachments.”

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