St. Louis Jazz

I won’t even begin to apologize, I have a lot to catch up on, but I’ll make it as entertaining as I can. Stay with me and I’ll tell you the story of my trip to St. Louis then stayed tuned in the next few days when I post a recap of the summer.

Late spring I was involved in a Take Your Daughter’s to Work Weekend which I mentioned in the previous blog entry. It went very well and to this day I feel like if I contributed anything to this country my entire peace corps service it was helping out those few days, my little piece of the take your daughter’s to work weekend. I put on my regular course of communication, problem solving, and creative thinking but I added a competition at the end where using household items/things you could buy at village shops five teams competed to build the largest free standing structure with the materials given. These materials included: a large amount of magazines, paper clips, seran wrap, string, and other random things that they were able to choose in turn with the other groups. It was amazing to see the ideas they came up with and to see their minds being given the chance for the first time in their educational career to think out side the box and be given an obstical that involved multiple different answers. As I’ve explained before this is severely hindered in a strict lecture classroom where the kids are truly frightened into asking any questions, especially the majority of Gambian girls who would die before raising their hands. There’s a DVD taped by the Gambian Television network of the event flying around somewhere, I’ll try and get a copy.

After Take Your Daughter’s to Work I set off with a few friends to northern Senegal to a little island city on the Mauritanian border, the original St. Louis. The ride up had typical west African travel complications. We were told the day before we would be able to catch a car from Barra (the village on the other side of the river in the Gambia) strait to St. Louis but I sensed that was typical bullshit. “Yea we can get you a car to anywhere in Africa from there if you wanted, no problem, we’ll see you tomorrow morning.” … yea for a price. After a minute talking to the car park manager in person we just walked away and headed for the border at the village of Karang where, after some heated negotiations got a car that would take us strait to St. Louis (pronounced san-Louie). In the cramped station wagon we spent the next ten hours traveling through the full heart of Senegal. Gigantic groves of Baobab trees and small Sahel villages turned into scattered acacia trees to rolling dunes of sand. Donkeys and horses gave way to herds of camels and broken down cars; towns of kids running around or working in the fields turned to ghost town of newly built suburbs where people hid in their houses from the mid days heat. We past the center of west African Islam the city of Touba where the most famous of Senegalese Imams stay and pray at the largest mosque in the country, a beautiful Taj Mahal esk structure that towers over the contrarily juxtaposed urban poverty of the city. Falling in and out of sleep in a daze of my cramping back and neck and exhaustion from the baking car’s interior; but there it stood in the distance, floating in the middle of the sea, two islands of asphalt surrounded by the cobalt mouth of the Senegal River, what better home could there be for the African seeds of Jazz.

Stepping out of the car sore and tired from the long days ride as the sun was slowly swallowed by the Atlantic we walked through the busy square streets of towering French colonial apartments. The laundry that draped over the balconies was being taken in for the night as the cool salty breeze relieved us. We found a small hostel in the heart of the old city with the help of a nice Mauritanian peace corps volunteer who we had met at W.A.I.S.T. and put our things down for the night. With the sun gone the yellow glow of street lamps littered a crowded street. The smell of smoky fish in the air and the sound of light guitar and heavy drum beats from the local bars. This place truly is the New Orleans of west Africa and why wouldn’t it be, New Orleans was created here in the streets of Saint Louis from that heart beat of an Senegalese drum with French and Wolof in the air. New Orleans just put the spark of the American spirit as icing on the cake of modern jazz.

We spent the night strolling the streets and popping our heads in little hotel bars and clubs where white tourists crammed into packed rooms and local kids packed the streets peeking heads through windows and open doorways awing musicians who 10 years prior were where they are. Music has and will always be the soul of this place and every year it opens it self around this time opens itself up to this festival, if we can manage to weed through the tourist clouds. The next day we took our time, the cold breath of the sea blanketing us from the peering sun, walking around French coffee shops and little art bungalows of local sculptors and painters, munching on cheap 500cefa benichin, a oily testament to truly great Wolof rice cooking. Somewhere along the way the girls in my group stumbled into a beautiful home and pool, which was just now having the finishes touches put on it. They charmed the man who owned it into giving us a thorough tour. It had the rugged feel of a New York loft apartment mixed with cultural nuances of west Africa and the filling of an expensively modern mansion. We’re talking showers with 53 settings and music, huge plasma televisions, and themed rooms (the morocco room, the African safari room, French room etc.). Somehow, the girls in typical fashion managed to score us a ticket to his housewarming party in a few days which would be littered with the cultured Dakarian elite, French imports, and hired jazz performers. Score.

The rest of our group arrived the next day which made about 8 of us grungy peace corps volunteers and the girls, knowing this, spent the day trying to buy clothes that were classy enough to be seen at this party. Eugene, Alex, and I went walking through the market in search of good food and a bit of trouble. Didn’t find any trouble but we came back to the hostel that afternoon with our stomachs full of Moroccan dishes. After all getting some egg sandwiches from a corner shop we got on the nicest clothes we had in our backpacks and headed over to the party. My mouth dropped as we walked through the door. Live music around a pool, people having intellectual conversations about development or the economy, eating salmon (yes, salmon, alhumdililiah), and sipping on aged French wine. There we are, dressed unhelpingly down, strait out of our sandy Gambian villages and now we’re eating escargot and talking politics… talk about a culture shock. We were the life of the party, turns out the party needed nothing else then a bunch of strangely-eccentric Peace Corps Volunteers. Everyone one was laughing, listening to music, and if we hadn’t go drunk of the wine or brandy we definitely were after the Champaign. It was the most fun I had had since coming to Africa but it wouldn’t of been the same if it didn’t have the pretence of living a year in my quaint border village. The eclecticness of it all, the good, the bad, the poor and the rich, the tourist hotels and grass root huts; a wise man could make an interesting anecdote on the dualism of life, but I will leave that for the more judicious.

Saturday would come and we went to eat at a nice Vietnamese restaurant that overlooked the river and Mauritania. From the other bank of the river we could see how true the saying was for them that the grass is greener on the other side. The Senegalese side was flourishing with the city of St. Louis complimenting the vast expansiveness of the Sahara on the other side, sand blowing in the ocean’s breeze. From years of desertification the dunes of the Sahara have finally begun it’s decent across the Senegal River. That day a group of French university students on vacation filled our hostel, an exquisitely multi-ligual Italian man had befriended Jenni and helped us charm the a ticket lady into getting us a group rate, with the French students, into the huge staple jazz concert of the festival. For the same cost it took us to drive to St. Louis we watched an enchanting old-school American jazz singer who sung some of Gershwin’s classic compositions and spoke what sounded like flawless French. Then after an intermission we watched an amazingly talented French jazz accordion player and his band. I know, jazz accordion?? Seriously, but it was fantastic. That then evolved into a duet with famous local Kora player (a characteristically Sene-gambian stringed instrument) mixed with one of the most amazing drum solos I have ever seen live. So no it wasn’t any Coltrain or Miles and the whole week I didn’t hear one trumpet but somehow it was still thickly classic jazz. That didn’t stop me though from yelling, “FREE BIRD!!!” between songs. I truly hope someone got it.

The next day we headed back to the Gambia and were back by late afternoon. The car dropped us off and at customs I realized I forgot the brand new coat that had just been sent in a care package to me. I dropped my stuff, told people to watch my bags then ran off towards Senegal to catch the car. I must have looked hysterical, then I must have looked even more hysterical as I tripped on a rock in a big crowd of punk kids and badly cut up my palms on shards of broken glass and stones. I laid there motionless and closed my eyes trying to blank out the thunder of laughter, mind you laughter not, “Oh my are you ok son?!?”. Time though was of the essence and out of a motionless slumber I jumped up, blood draining down my arm, and ran towards the car park. A man came up to me saying, “You forgot you thing right? Come with me the driver is waiting for you.” Which sounded to me like he had actually talked to the man and knew the situation, It would be quite the contrary. We get to the car park and I wipe the blood off on my already sweaty shirt. After running around for 10 minutes people giving me completely opposite advice I locate the car, and my coat. Relieved I jump back on this mans bike who I begin thanking for quote, “going so far out of your way to help me get my coat back and not charging me”. This is where I found out he really didn’t even know the driver, he just took a guess from me running that I had forgot something in the car, he then proceeded to tell me I should pay him 1000cefa (a crazy amount of money for the short trip) for him helping me, I then proceeded to tell him to go fuck himself and calmly explained (seriously completely calm, the adrenaline that had proceeded my freak out run and fall had worn off) that he never mentioned a price when he had picked me up and instead ran with the rouse that he sort of new the driver and had, as he definitely said, had heard from the driver and been told of the predicament. I ended up throwing him 20 dalasis, with coins, to get out of my face, twice the amount of a typical ride to the car park and back and went through customs. It was a rocky ferry ride in the darkness of night as I cleaned my wound with anything I could find in peoples backpacks, which ended up being hand sanitizer and we were back over the river in Banjul.