An Explorer of a New Frontier in World Music

"What we are hearing hasn't been affected by James Brown or Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan," Jack Carneal says of the Malian music he's promoting. (By Bill O'leary -- The Washington Post)
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Now there were contracts to be signed and middlemen and the complications of communicating with a musician whose culture had been roped off from outsiders, an expert shot who knows how to coax a hippo's head just high enough out of the water for a clean kill.

Carneal was told to bring gifts. A week before Christmas, he boarded a plane bearing a camouflage vest and a headlamp. "I just feared the worst," he says. "That he wouldn't be into me, that there would be some miscommunication. . . . I had learned when I lived in Mali, no plan is certain, nothing at all is certain."

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Carneal never meant to get into the record business.

In 1999, he had followed his wife to Mali after she was awarded a small research grant to study rural education. He was charged with taking care of their young son during the day, making trips to the market and generally staying out of the way.

Carneal got a job taking pictures. He tried to master Mali's intricate system of greetings. He and Chris had little money to decorate their tin-roofed cinder-block home in Bougouni, a small rural town. He started keeping a journal and seeking out local music, carrying his Sony MiniDisc to record the musicians he found on his walks. He thought of these recordings as merely keepsakes to play for friends.

By August 2000, he had amassed dozens of cassettes and field recordings. It was only natural that he'd record the live music at the family's goodbye party.

When he returned home, Carneal's friends and friends of friends heard his tapes and encouraged him to start his own label. The ferocious djembe (hand drum) players and jubilant griot singer from the party became the first track on a collection of field recordings titled "Bougouni Yaalali," released last year. After the first track, Carneal works back in time through his travels across Mali: from an exuberant balaphone (xylophone) on New Year's Eve to the insects whirring around his concrete porch at night.

"This documentary impulse was what was driving me. I can hear voices of people I remember," he says from his Baltimore living room on a recent afternoon. He wonders if the people on the tape are still alive. "In many cases, that's all I have are these memories and this audiotape. . . . I can hear voices of people that we knew who I may never see again."

These are hardly the sentiments of a world-music producer or professional folklorist. Instead, he took his cues from Paul Bowles's late-'50s and early-'60s recordings of Moroccan songs and ephemera, as well as the author's ruminations on that period.

"Bowles is the key to this," Carneal says. His work "was more important to me while I was in Mali than anything else."

This record-it-all approach amounts to a driving philosophy among Carneal's fellow music hunters.