ABSTRACT
African performance is a tightly wrapped bundle of arts that are sometimes diffcult to separate, even for analysis. Honest observers are hard pressed to find a single indigenous group in Africa that has a term congruent with the usual Western notion of “music.” Ethnomusicologists describe musical sounds according to pitches, but peoples in Africa often conceive of these sounds as voices. The most charitable assessment is that European misperceptions came from a lack of appreciation of African musical subtleties, including the language of performance. The resultant album draws on local African music to inform high-tech Western dance music. The West African superstar Baaba Maal recorded an album, Firin’ in Fouta, in three phases, each reflecting a different kind of music. “Folk” is often equated with “traditional,” or music performed in rural areas; “popular” is commonly associated with mass audiences and urban areas; and “art” is associated with elite, upper-class, written notation.
