Singer, composer, and alto saxophonist Momo "Wandel" Soumah of Guinea was a true original, an artist who made a fusion of traditional African music and jazz that was deep, swinging, and utterly inspirational. When he died suddenly on June 15, 2003, Wandel was at work on a number of new projects. The last decade of his life was rich and productive, after Radio France International helped him record an international release around 1990. What RFI heard was essentially a jazz sextet made up of elderly traditional African instrumentalists. The group went to Paris and recorded Matchowe, one of the most unusual and enduring West African albums of its time.

In Wandel's sextet, the Mandinka kora and balafon handled the harmonies and took solos alongside the expressive, wooden flute of the Fula people. The djembe hand drum and bolon--essentially a bass kora--made up the rhythm section. And over the top, Wandel played his alto with the distracted spirit of Coletrane, and sang with the gruff playfulness and wit of Louis Armstrong. Matchowe includes Wandel's arrangements of folkloric tunes from five Guinean ethnic groups along with an inspired cover of Coletrane's "Afro Blue." In short, it inverted the work of Western pioneers like Coletrane, Sun Ra, and Don Pullen. Where these Americans have sought to explore the African origins of jazz, Wandel comes from the other side, armed with a lifetime's exposure to the folklore of West Africa, ancestral home of jazz's originators.

"Jazz has been here since World War II," he said in Conakry in 1993. "Charlie Parker, Coletrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington. These people were known. To us, their music was approximately African." In 1945, after finishing Koranic school, Wandel went into radio and wound up in the remote, mountainous Fouta Diallo region. The station there owned a banjo and a guitar, instruments used to comfort sick people in the bush. Wandel picked up the banjo and soon began playing in a group called Jovial Symphony. The band owned a sax, which the leader assured him was not a difficult instrument to play. He picked up a few biguines and paso dobles--popular French forms of the day. Then he heard Charlie Parker. Wandel told me, "He had a touch, and he played fast. I took my sax, and I started to learn it bit by bit."

After independence, in the era when President Sekou Toure was using music to bring together the cultures of a new nation, Wandel ended up in the capital, playing in Sylli Orchestre. He said, "We started to rework Guinean songs, to study and perfect them, with the idea that they too could be danceable…The idea of mixing jazz and Guinean traditions had been in my head for a long time. When we played traditional songs in the new regime, I improvised like a jazz player. People liked it, so I continued."

In 1983, the year before Sekou Toure died and Guinea opened once again to the world, Wandel formed his group. "I wanted to have jazz in my sound, but to associate it with folklore. Because I could hear something of jazz in my musical territory here. Every time I heard a jazz record, I thought that's a rhythm from here. There is the tam tam, the gingou, the little doun-doun." Wandel had a balafon tuned to a major scale. He knew that those notes would let him work in three different modes, enough to reproduce a large variety of traditional music. Then he thought about the bass. "The bolon that we play makes the same sound as the contrabass. So I brought that in. We tuned it, and it gave the rhythm. Then I added the flute and the djembe. No drums. A jazz drummer gives the tempo with the bass drum and does his fills on the snare and the toms. The djembe does the same thing in our group. Once we adapted our instruments, we began to orchestrate music. Then we took it before the Guinean public." They also took it to Paris in 1988, where they worked with jazz musicians for six months at the International Centre for Music.

Wandel and his group continued to perform and record, never losing that exuberant, visionary sound. He will be sorely missed, and his recordings, few as they are, will be remembered as landmarks and classics. Ricardo Carné tribute: http://www.afropop.org/news_flash.php?ID=211 Banning Eyre