The making of ‘Masai at Dusk’
Riley Jordan singing with the Masai of Longido Tanzania…an unlikely journey.
Masai men mid dance step. Photo : Laura Morgan
A fundraiser was being held by Testigo Africa to raise money for the people of Longido, Tanzania, who are in desperate need of a reliable well full of juicy, thirst quenching water . As a part of the entertainment for the night, the original plan was for Riley to sing to a video clip of the Masai singing and dancing in the desert, but when she looked at the clip she realized that this was going to be tricky. The clip shows the tribe gathered in the desert, with everyone laughing, singing, screaming, talking, dancing… you get the picture. There was nowhere to hang a melody, so she summoned all of my inner musical personalities to a meeting. It was decided that the inner composer would use the sound footage as a palette from which to make an arrangement, the storyteller would be needed to make the piece cohesive; create a narrative from beginning to end and the singer (temperamental $%##@ diva) will be booked for a session, to create the counterpoint in the melody and to put a strong theme over the two distinct sections.
The inner editor, set to work scanning the 15 minutes of footage to find only a handful of samples that might have been useful. In the end a couple of loops of the women’s singing and one of the men were threaded together. To keep the communal feel, tribal chatter was layered under the track and between sections.
Luckily the women were singing pretty much in key the key of B flat, but the men were singing in another key altogether. A bit off pitch shift and a wave of the magic wand and the men were now singing in the key of F. While this was not ideal, it was a related key so it would have to work. Then came the melody lines, which were drawn from the inspiration of the traditional chants. However something was missing, the video footage was able to show the viewer how the chanting rose and fell from the women’s group to the men’s group in a spontaneous, ad hoc way. This needed to be in the song, so a narrative was placed in the piece to bring it all together. The inner editor was bought back in to pace the piece, adjusting the distance between the elements so that the timing created a seamless mood.
Masai children - Longido Tanzania. Photo - Laura Morgan
The piece was finished, however, there was one last thing to check. The vocal part was based on sounds based on traditional chants… What if Riley was inadvertently singing something that might offend the Masai?? So the piece was checked for meaning and it turns out that these chants have no set form, various tribes use them and they change with the seasons… and no, there were no Masai swear words in there. No offense to anyone’s mother-in-law or hairstyle.
So here is a copy of the finished piece for you to listen to:
Photos © Laura Morgan. Reproduced with permission. Many thanks to Testigo Africa and Laura Morgan
