Sonic Journey

Nov 3, 2009 1:42 PM

           
 

BÉLA FLECK'S MULTITRACK, FIELD-RECORDED MUSICAL EXCURSION TO FOUR AFRICAN COUNTRIES.

Fleck with Remi Jatta, who’s playing the akanting, a Gambian instrument with similarities to the banjo.

By Mike Levine

Never one to shy away from a musical challenge, banjoist Béla Fleck embarked on a trip to West Africa with the intent to collaborate and record with an array of different African musicians and highlight the banjo's roots on that continent. Some of these sessions were arranged in advance, but others were set up on the fly, and most of the music was field recorded. Fleck brought along an audio engineer and a video crew. The result of their expedition was an album, Throw Down Your Heart, Tales From the Acoustic Planet, Vol. 3: Africa Sessions (Rounder/Umgd, 2009), released this past spring, and a movie Throw Down Your Heart (Docudrama Films), which was in theatrical release earlier this year, and is due out November 3rd on DVD.

The songs for the project were recorded in locations ranging from a town square to the banks of the Nile river to a stone cooking hut. Fleck and company brought along two multitrack field recorders (one for backup), and a collection of microphones, as well as the video recording gear. I had a chance to talk to Fleck about the process and the challenges of preparing for and undertaking a project such as this, where the conditions would be so variable.

How many locations did you record in?
We were in four countries: Uganda, Tanzania, Mali, and The Gambia. We had portable recording rigs with us. We had two of them. We put together a kit so that we'd have redundancy. That was expecting something to go wrong, and it did, of course.

What did you record onto?
One machine was called a DEVA, an 8-channel recorder that's used in film for on-location film recording.

A hard disk recorder?
Yeah, and then you just keep pulling out the hard disks and popping in other ones. We also had an HHB Portadrive. It only had 6-track

The main multitrack was an 8-channel Zaxcom DEVA IV.

You carried a collection of mics?
Oh yeah. We'd gotten some stuff from Shure, they'd given us some mics to use. And then we also had brought some of my Neumanns, a couple of the U-89s, and several KM-184s. We actually had to think about mic stands. We weren't going to be able to think about mic stands in the middle of the field. Our engineer's name is Dave Sinko. He actually invented a mic stand that's a piece of metal that bends that you can wrap around things, and has the mic stand on the end. So you could wrap it around a chair leg, or you could stick it in the ground, or you could hang it from a tree or bend it in any direction you wanted.

Once you were in Africa, how did you get around?
We flew to each country and then drove around.

When you did these recordings, were you generally in some sort of town hall kind of place? No we did a lot of them outdoors. And it's amazing what we got. A number of the tracks that are on the record were recorded outdoors. Some of them you can tell, and it sounds cool because it's kind of mangy sounding, but the others you can't tell.

What’s an example of one you recorded outdoors?
There's "Jesus Is the Only Answer" with all the thumb pianos, and this one called “Angelina,” and one with the Zawose family, just called “Zawose” … Then other things like the first track on the album [“Tulinesangala”] was recorded in a really small cooking hut, like 6 or 8 feet across, but round. A stone hut with about 8 ladies singing, and some of them had babies strapped to their backs. You can’t hear the babies, they were very well behaved.