Black diasporic encounters: a study of the music of Fela Sowande.(Critical essay)

Fela Sowande is now generally acknowledged as the most important twentieth-century West African composer of concert music and performer of jazz. Born in Oyo, western Nigeria, in March 1905, he went to London in 1934 and enrolled as an external candidate at the University of London and the Royal College of Music. He was one of the most notable figures on the black diaspora music scene in London in the first half of the twentieth century. He returned to Nigeria in 1953 and worked there until 1968, when he immigrated to the United States and taught at a number of colleges, including Howard University and Kent State University. He remained in the United States until his death in 1987. (1) The centennial anniversary of his birth was marked in 2005 with various activities in Europe, the United States, and Nigeria, signaling a rekindling of interest in his works. (2)

Three salient features define Sowande's work as a composer and a performer. First, many of his works are based on folk songs. He identified important similarities between African folk songs and Negro spirituals, even though these two genres speak to different human experiences. He drew attention to such similarities by using the two categories of songs as thematic material in many of his compositions. Second, his work as a performer was typified by a sustained collaboration with black musicians from the United States and the Caribbean and by the promotion of African and African-American music. In the 1930s and 1940s, for example, he was a jazz pianist, Hammond organist, and director of some of the best jazz groups in London. (3) His promotion of black music continued in the United States, where he gave a series of concerts performing his own compositions. Third, his arrangements of Negro spirituals and his interaction with black musicians from the diaspora illustrate his fascination for incorporating musical materials from different cultures into his compositions. Kimberlin and Euba (1992, 3) have used the term interculturalism to describe the works of African composers like Sowande in which "elements from two or more cultures are integrated." According to them, the composer or performer "of this music usually belongs to one of the cultures from which the elements are derived." For Sowande, the world is a borderless cultural space within which there are numerous possibilities for intercultural compositional and performance activities.

Sowande's work has received attention by a number of scholars. In Nigerian Art Music (Omojola 1995), for example, I provide a detailed study of his Folk Symphony. Sadoh (2004) focuses on Sowande's organ works. In addition, a book titled African Art Music in Nigeria (Omibiyi-Obidike 2001) is devoted exclusively to the life and works of Sowande. My essay in that volume examines some of his organ works (Omojola 2001). Other scholars who have examined Sowande's organ works include Hildreth (1978), Laidman (1989), and Munday (1992). Despite the importance of these various studies, the significance of Sowande's work as an African composer and performer who worked with black diaspora musical elements and collaborated with black musicians from different parts of the world has yet to be fully explored. (4)

In this article, I discuss Sowande's composing and performing career, focusing on how he was motivated by a desire to promote encounter and dialogue and to reinforce a sense of common identity among black populations from different parts of the world. (5) The encounter that is promoted through his performances and compositions reflects what I would refer to as a pan-African philosophy that is congruent with the goals of the pan-African movement of the early part of the twentieth century. The pan-African movement, which was guided by such leaders as Kwame Nkrumah and Marcus Garvey, was motivated by the need to unite and mobilize black peoples from different parts of the world toward the attainment of freedom from racial discrimination and colonialism. Many of Sowande's musical performances in London in the 1930s and 1940s were part of the activities of the pan-African movement in the city. I concentrate here mainly on his career in England in the 1930s and 1940s, his performance tour of the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and selections from his arrangements of Negro spirituals. I draw on his views on African music and culture and briefly explain how the colonial experience in Africa helped to shape the nature of his musical career. My discussion relies on Sowande's writings, newspapers dating to the 1930s, his scores and recordings, an extended field work in Nigeria, and on interviews that I conducted with some of his former students here in the United States. (6) My brief discussion of his orchestral works situates his arrangements of Negro spirituals within the larger context of his intercultural compositional style. As a background to this study, one must also look at certain central issues about black musical aesthetics and the relationship between African and African-American musical traditions.

Black Aesthetics in Music

The relationship between the musical traditions of continental Africa and those of the black diaspora derives from ancestral connections. In the view of many writers, despite the many years of separation and the geographical distance between these two regions, the kinship between their musical traditions remains strong. Thus, although each tradition has developed within the specific context of its cultural environment, they are united and distinguished by a body of stylistic elements. With regard to African-American music, Melville Herskovits (1941), Richard Waterman (1952), and William Tallmadge (1984) have justified this position and acknowledged the African roots of African-American music, even though African-American culture has developed its unique identity as shaped by its North American cultural and political environment. The discussions by these scholars reflect an identity debate that has continued to typify the discourse of African-American music. Critical to that discourse is the evaluation of African-American music in terms of its relationship to traditional African music on the one hand and European music on the other. This trend of discourse can be further observed in the contributions of James Weldon Johnson and Rosamund Johnson (1925), Harold Courlander (1963), and Amiri Baraka (1963).

Charles Keil, for example, has advanced a diachronic dimension to the discussion on the engagement between European and African forms in African-American music. In outlining the historical development of African-American forms since the beginning of the twentieth century, he observes a constant dialectic between the forces of change and retention. This progression, which he describes as "appropriation-revitalization process," maps out a historical and stylistic trajectory within which newer forms of African-American music are typified by an increasing affinity toward African forms (Keil 1991, 43-48). The development of bebop by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in the 1940s and the emergence of free jazz in the works of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, he argues, represented attempts to restore the centrality of the African-American blues idioms in jazz, in response to the increasing European appropriation of jazz. Thus, as Jackson (2003, 27) has observed, the greater emphasis on syncopation, horizontal approach to rhythmic figuration, melodic angularity, strong percussiveness, improvisation, and other "ring-centered values" (see Floyd 1999, 136-139) represents attempts by these musicians to revive the ailing African identity in jazz.