website:

San Jose, California
Friday, January 12, 2001

"For people who have an ear for traditional music in West Africa, you can hear that it is not an accident that bebop was born out of the communities of Africa that have been displaced."

By Andrew Gilbert
Special to the Mercury News

Suppose Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker had moved to Dakar in the early 1940s and begun collaborating with traditional percussionists, wedding the breath-taking harmonic flights of modern jazz with surging West African rhythms.

The results probably would sound something like guitarist Pascal Bokar's music - a remarkable synthesis of bebop and the rhythmic patterns he heard while growing up in Mali and Senegal.

Since settling in the Bay Area in 1999, the Senegalese musician mostly has worked in straight-ahead jazz contexts and has had few opportunities to present this facet of his music. So his performance Sunday afternoon at the Jazz School in downtown Berkeley has quickly turned into a community event.

Building on his quartet - which features keyboardist Bob Mocarsky, bassist Kai Eckhardt and drummer Dezon Claiborne - Bokar has invited a host of Bay Area-based African musicians to join the proceedings, including percussionists Djibi Faye and Rick Faye, guitarists Henri Pierre Koubaka and Yacine Kouyate, dancers Ndeye Gueye and Coura Ndiaye and a select group of singers who were students in his advanced class on African music fusion of rhythm and bebop last semester at San Jose State University.

"Essentially what we're doing is bringing jazz back into the African fold," says Bokar, 38, from his South Bay home. "I do things like use bebop lies from Charlie Parker's 'Billie's Bounce' and 'Scrapple From the Apple,' and play them within African rhythmic structures. Not only does it fit; it sounds great."

Part of what makes Bokar's music so distinctive is that he is thoroughly grounded in jazz. His music draws little, if anything, from the contemporary African pop music forms such as Afro-pop, highlife or soukous. Instead, he is part of a vanguard of young African musicians and composers more interested in the traditional dance rhythms that have been used for centuries in village ceremonies and celebrations. He has spent years honing his musical concept but has come up against such strong expectations about what African music should sound like that he often describes his sound by first explaining what it is not.

Rhythms from the Village

"A lot of the bands that do world music - they've built their music around certain dance beats," Bokar says. "So you won't hear a highlife beat or a soukous beat in my music, because those beats really don't have a basis in traditional African rhythms. They're new in the evolution of pop African culture. I'm taking the rhythms from the villages, so that people who have taken African dance classes would be able to dance to that music, because the rhythms are textbook - what they would learn in their dance classes."

African jazz fusions are hardly unprecedented. Pianist Randy Weston has spent much of his career bringing together African and African-American music, and John Coltrane recorded the powerful 1961 session on Impulse! "Africa/Brass." Keyboardist Joe Zawinul has long been an icon among African musicians for his ability to combine elements of jazz with African rhythmic structures. On the African side, pianist Abdullah Ibrahim and trumpeter Hugh Masekela have bridged both worlds effectively, but Bokar's upbringing and education have given him a particularly vivid musical vision.

Born in Paris to Senegalese parents, Bokar moved to Mali when he was an infant. He spent most of his teenage years in Senegal and attended art school in Dakar, where he studied both Senegalese and European classical music. Already interested in jazz, he was able to immerse himself in the music in France while attending the National Conservatory of Nice, where he took a dual program in classical guitar and jazz. He has his first big break when he hooked up with French tenor saxophonist Barney Wilen, a highly respected musician who recorded with Miles Davis and Art Blakey in the '50s.

In 1982, Bokar moved to Boston to study at Berklee College of Music. Immediately thrust into the school's hothouse creative environment, he was surrounded by players such as Greg Osby, Cyrus Chestnut, Donald Harrison and Kevin Eubanks. But his most important connection was with his roommate, Liberian-born bassist Kai Eckhardt, who also was determined to find ways of combining jazz with African music. While on the road with pioneering drummer Roy Haynes, Bokar encountered the legendary trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who helped provide him with a conceptual framework for his music.

Gillespie's Influence

"I was playing with Dizzy, and he was telling me how . . . he thought percussion was the missing link between the African-American community and the continent of Africa," Bokar says. "I wasn't with him very long, but he and I had very lengthy conversations on the philosophy of music. And he used to tell me all the time, 'You have to bring back the percussion to American music.' He thought that as an African musician interested in jazz, it would be easier for me to bring that into the mix of jazz. He understood rhythms really well. He was a master rhythm guy."

Bokar recorded his first album, "Beyond the Blue Sky," in 1994 for the Boston-based Accurate label. It's a lovely session that basically applies West African rhythms to standards such as "I've Got a Crush on You" and "Fly Me to the Moon." His first exposure to the Bay Area was in 1998, when he performed at the San Jose Jazz Festival. Taken with the region's wide-open creative environment and the interest in African music (to say nothing of the balmy West Coast weather), Bokar moved to the South Bay in 1999. Besides his work at San Jose State, he also teaches a class on African music, past to present, at the Jazz School, a course that's accredited by the University of California - Berkeley Extension.

Both in his classroom and through his music, he draws connections between the rhythms he heard played on the cora and balafon as a youth and the bebop he came to love as a student. His music doesn't so much combine two different traditions as uncover the common links between West Africa and the music created in North America by the diaspora of slavery.

"In bebop,what's really interesting is not only the choice of notes over the harmony but more importantly the rhythmic sequences with which people solo," Bokar says. "For people who have an ear for traditional music in West Africa, you can hear that it is not an accident that bebop was born out of the communities of Africa that have been displaced."