By Jason Cherkis
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, April 27, 2008; M03

BALTIMORE -- Last December, Jack Carneal was in a typical end-of-semester panic. A lecturer in Towson University's English department, he had a stack of 80-some papers to grade. At his rehabbed North Baltimore house, he was also doing Mr. Mom duty: making breakfast for his two young boys, shuttling them off to school, picking them up and making sure dinner was ready when his wife returned from her job in the federal government.

But one distraction loomed over everything else. Within the past year, Carneal had sprouted another career: He had joined the ranks of a growing number of amateur ethnomusicologists.

Last year Carneal, 40, had started a little label called Yaala Yaala, dedicated to releasing records by Malian musicians. His goal wasn't far from that of a humanitarian organization: He wanted to release the music and return all profits back to the musicians. What began as a hobby now hovered between a job and an obsession.

Almost in spite of himself, Carneal's ambitions were growing. They now included an expensive trip to Bamako, Mali's capital. He got cold feet. "You know, this is a terrible idea -- this whole label," he told his wife, Chris. "Maybe I should just bag out of this trip."

The trip amounted to a $2,000 gamble. The sole reason for the excursion was a pitch meeting with Yoro Sidibe, a "hunter's musician." Sidibe, who's around 70, is the sage of the genre, an expert songwriter, hunter and medicine man, renowned in the West African bush as well as in bustling marketplaces. He had released dozens of cassettes. Carneal wanted to persuade him to join the digital age.

While living in Mali in 1999 and 2000, Carneal had heard the tapes: Sidibe's alpha-male vocals; the stubborn, loping beat; the thumping preacher's intensity. It mattered little that the lyrics were a blur or that Sidibe's donso music aims to incite hunters to kill. Carneal was hooked.

He had played drums for indie bands, most notably Palace Music. To his ears, this was dance music, only dance music whose roots can be traced back centuries and is thumbed on a donso ngoni -- a large spike harp made of calabash gourd, bamboo and fishing wire.

He had in mind a number of songs for the CD that would become "Yoro Sidibe." These were daunting songs -- 15-to-25-minute epic tales containing verse after rumbling verse without a single chorus. They might be hard sells for an American audience, but that's the point.

"What we are hearing hasn't been affected by James Brown or Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan," Carneal says. "You really get a sense that there are still a lot of secrets among the men who are playing this music."

Carneal's sentiments are in keeping with a new legion of part-time field recorders. In the past few years, punk rockers, publicists and record shop owners have been casting ears and eyes around the globe on the hunt for unheard, non-Western sounds.

Craving authenticity amid the tape hiss, underground recorders are shunning the peace-and-harmony vibes of world music for a more warts-and-all style. Retro videos of African funk bands have found circulation on YouTube. Old cassettes are being digitized and zapped into the blogosphere.

And indie labels are providing a reliable pipeline for the raw and the unrefined. Carneal had put out a set of his own field recordings and two unauthorized reissues of tapes he purchased in Mali. But working with Sidibe would be different.

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."

* * *

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.

The Seattle-based Sublime Frequencies label has become the flagship of such handmade projects, taking down everything from Saharan bar rock to Syrian techno. They've even updated Bowles's old work with their own collection of Moroccan radio transmissions.

"I'm really aiming for a gut punch, a visceral epiphany that music can communicate," explains Sublime's Hisham Mayet. "I'm interested in an intensity of a performance, not an archival one."

Brian Shimkovitz, the blogger behind Awesome Tapes From Africa, sees Carneal's work as an example of the new form. "I think his records are important. They capture the real way people hear music," he explains. "His own recordings sound exactly the way things sound over there."

Carneal paired "Bougouni Yaalali" with releases of a 42-minute story song by the griot Daouda Dembele, and Pekos and Yoro Diallo's clanging, sparse blues -- essentially dubs of dubs from one boombox to another.

If Carneal has one regret, it's that he dubbed without keeping records, without receiving consent. He says all of the profits from the CDs remain in a Bank of America account called the Yaala Yaala Rural Musicians' Collective.

Carneal has spent serious time trying to track down the artists. He's e-mailed nonprofits and Peace Corps volunteers and contacted friends of friends, getting as close as locating one of the musicians' brothers.

"I want to do right. I want to keep doing it. Another friend said, 'Well, you should have done it right from the start,' " Carneal says. "And there's some truth to that."

* * *

Yoro Sidibe's home is at the corner of two trash-lined dirt roads in Bamako. Rooms built of mud, wood and cement ring a dirt courtyard. There is no running water or electricity.

When he was 14, he began to practice the ngoni in secret. He would go to a cave to play, Sidibe says via cellphone and translator. "I would go inside it," he says, "and eat there and do my research there. It was very difficult -- the thing that you are looking for, that I was seeking -- this guarded knowledge. Those things can not be given in an easy way."

Roughly 40 people live with Sidibe. It is his job to provide for them. Sidibe says he has done 24 performances in the past month. He is a hard man to track down.

In mid-December, Sidibe greeted Carneal in the Malian uniform of Dickies-style pants and short-sleeve work shirt. He was almost slight. Carneal remembers he was actually funny.

The two stumbled across the language barrier, talking about the weather and an upcoming show. Carneal gave him the hunting gear, the camo vest and headlamp. "I felt so great," he recalls. "My conscience is free. Now we can talk about music."

"As soon as I saw him, I felt like Jack was a good person," Sidibe says. "Jack doesn't know how much I appreciate the shirt."

It wasn't until a few days later that Carneal got word that Sidibe's producer had swiped the musician's entire advance. After many more phone calls, things were worked out.

Sidibe's goals appear to be in line with Carneal's. When Americans "hear the sounds coming through the speakers," the old hunter explains, "I want them to understand as they hear the sounds and see the photos, it's natural African music. I am the one who makes the instruments, no artificial production."

"Yoro Sidibe" is due out this month.

On a recent Tuesday evening, Carneal drives his sons, ages 6 and 10, home from baseball practice in his Subaru Outback. He asks if he can roll the windows up. He wants to crank the stereo.

Sidibe's ngoni finds a deep, hypnotic groove. The man and his apprentices work up a euphoric call-and-response. For a few minutes at least, everyone goes quiet and just listens. The traffic fades away. It doesn't matter that dinner will be late. Carneal doesn't worry at all.