Bela Fleck: Throw Down Your Heart
by Sascha Paladino
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bela FleckDirector: Sascha Paladino
Brand: New Video
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 97 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-11-03
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: DOCURAMA
Movie Reviews of Bela Fleck: Throw Down Your Heart
Movie Review: Heart Felt
Summary: 5 Stars
Mother Africa is the cradle of our species. She has also given birth to so much of our music that we sometimes lose our ear for its origins. "I thought it was important for people to realize where the banjo comes from because it is so much associated with a white Southern stereotype," says Bela Fleck, the world's primo virtuoso of this instrument. In "Throw Down Your Heart", he documents his six-week sojourn to Africa to discover whether the modern banjo still has a vibrant voice in the land where it was born.
The banjo is a descendant of an instrument that African slaves brought to the New World in the 16th century. It sat in the laps of musicians in cane and cotton fields, in plantation shacks and sheds, atop the levees and bales of raw goods that stood along the rivers that brought the blues to the bustling gulf ports.
By the early 19th century, the banjo was an essential element in plantation cakewalks and white minstrelsy. It accompanied sailors in their sea chanteys and traveled west with hopeful miners toward the Gold Rush. After the Civil War, the presentation banjo was adopted as a parlor instrument alongside the player piano. In the early 20th century, it sang in the ragtime orchestra and the Dixieland band. By the 1930s, the banjo had disappeared from the jazz ensemble, though it continued to flourish in folk music and in the jigs and reels of barn dances in the Appalachian states that reached a national audience through radio broadcasts. In the mid-1940s, the banjo burst forth as an instrument of arresting brilliance when it was featured in bluegrass music.
In the four countries on his itinerary, Bela Fleck steers clear of big cities and large venues. He, along with sound engineer Dave Sinko and director Sascha Paladino's filmmaking crew, head for the bush and the villages "to play with great African musicians and find a role for the banjo in their music."
In each of the stops, Bela connects with a musician to serve as host and translator and to introduce the party to locals and their particular instruments and tradition. He emphasizes that he has no wish to be front and center among the players, but prefers to take a seat on the backbench. In every group setting, he adds his banjo's voice as if he were politely joining a conversation already in progress.
The first destination is Uganda. The filmmakers stage a boisterous audition in Jinja to recruit musicians familiar with the local music. From there, the party travels to the village of Nakisenyi. In nearby Lwanika, Bela meets his first guide, Walusimbi Haruna, a professional musician whose specialty is the thumb piano. "Music is in every aspect of life," Haruna explains. The visit includes a stop at the grave of Haruna's late father, where burial customs in Africa and America are compared. In a touching moment, Bela is visibly caught off guard when Haruna is overcome with grief as they play a song about his father.
The thumb piano is culturally regarded as a man's instrument, but Jinja's prodigy, it turns out, is Ruth Akello, a woman who sings like an angel and plays like a "wizard." Nakisenyi possesses an enormous marimba, a communal instrument played by many people at once that sounds "like a rock band."
The filmmakers depart Nakisenyi with sadness. Dabbing at tears, Bela notes, "I felt truly welcomed."
The second destination gives the film its name. "Bagamoyo", in Tanzania, means "throw down your heart." Bagamoyo was a seaside collection point for the transport of slaves. Unfortunate captives knew that when they glimpsed the sea they should throw down their hearts because they would never see their homes again.
The Tanzanian guide is John Kitime. Bela had hoped he might meet Hukwe Zawose, the legend of traditional Gogo music, but is disappointed to learn that Zawose had died a few years earlier. He is delighted to find blind vocalist and thumb pianist Anania Ngoliga alive and well. The two compose and record seamless inventions from their very first session.
At a brief stopover in Dar Es Salaam, Bela becomes acquainted with determinedly tribal young Masai, who are pleased to demonstrate their traditional forms of dance.
The travelers cross the continent for their third destination, the Gambia, believed to the birthplace of the banjo. Sniffing the Gambian air, Bela quips, "I can smell banjo."
Jil Ekona Jatta is the Gambian guide. He introduces Bela to the akonting, a 3-string banjo ancestor. We see an akonting constructed as American banjos had been until the early 1800s: a animal skin is nailed to a hollowed calabash with a shaved hardwood pole run through it. After several days of drying in the sun, a carved bridge is glued to the head and strings of gut or hemp fiber are attached.
"It felt really natural playing with the musicians in Gambia," Bela reports. "It felt like the banjo was supposed to be there."
The fourth and final stop is Bamako, Mali, the "crown jewel of the African music community." The hostess is Oumou Sangare, the great "songbird" of Mali's Wassulu music, who owns the hotel the filmmakers enjoy during their stay and who moves among adoring crowds with the regal grace of one born to the purple.
Bassekou Kouyate, the town griot ("keeper of customs") introduces Bela to guitar hero Djelimady Tounkara and Kamal ngoni master Harouna Samake.
As we listen to the handcrafted lutes, harps, flutes, whistles, shakers, and drums of contemporary Africans, we are hearing instruments designed to perpetuate continuity with the ancestral past as well as the throbbing heart of the present. Some of this very music comforted the enslaved people dragged away to the Americas.
Music of all cultures in every age evokes exuberance and despondency, celebration and rapture, discovery and contemplation. The modern banjo evolved to express the musical forms of our European-derived Western tradition with its machined instruments and tempered tuning systems. Does the banjo have a role in African music? Of course it does because the voice belongs to the player not the instrument. "I just want to make great music," says Bela Fleck, a man of endless imagination and expansive heart. His banjo voice is and always has been sublime. In every setting it is truly welcomed.
Summary of Bela Fleck: Throw Down Your Heart
Studio: New Video Group Release Date: 11/03/2009B?la Fleck has spent most of his career moving the banjo into the future--i.e., away from what he calls "the white southern stereotype" and, with the help of his band the Flecktones, into genres not normally associated with the instrument--but with Throw Down Your Heart, he goes in the opposite direction, traveling to Africa to explore the banjo's ancient roots. Joined by documentary filmmaker Sascha Paladino, Fleck journeys to Uganda, Tanzania, Gambia, and Mali, where he jams with (and records) a variety of musicians (most of whom, ironically, have never so much as seen a banjo before), and the results are consistently lilting and joyous. In the Ugandan village of Nakisenyi, Fleck accompanies several locals playing a gigantic marimba as others sing, clap, and play wood blocks. In a small Tanzanian town, he sits in with some folks playing the kalimba, or thumb piano, while in Dar es Salaam, that country's largest city, he guests with an electric band with a kind of Afro-Cuban sound. In Gambia he jams with a fellow who plays a long-necked, three-stringed instrument called the akonting, a distant relative of the banjo, and in Mali he meets singer Oumou Sangare, one of the country's biggest stars. Fleck is appropriately deferential in all instances, and the interaction between the musicians is natural and intuitive; the Africans may be blown away by his virtuoso technique, but they are no slouches themselves, so these are meetings between equals. There are occasional glances at other aspects of African culture and history (such as the Tanzanian slave trade), but the music's the thing, and if the main program doesn't satisfy one's hunger for these wonderfully infectious sounds, an hour of bonus scenes and performances surely will. Fleck and Paladino also contribute an audio commentary track. --Sam Graham
Amazon Q&A with Q&A with B?la Fleck and Sascha Paladino, director of B?la Fleck: Throw Down Your Heart
Did you actually play an akonting or another banjo-predecessor while you were in Africa?
B?LA: Yes I did. And in the extra cuts in the new version of the film, there is some footage.I did better at learning their music on the banjo, though...
Has the trip to Africa affected or influenced your playing style since? For example, did you mimic any of Djelimady Tounkara's ngoni-inspired technique?
B?LA: I love the way it has changed my playing and given me some different thoughts to try. I also got a lot out of all the live touring I did with Oumou Sangare, Toumani Diabate and the other great musicians who came over.
Have you kept in touch with any of the African musicians or people you met during filming?
B?LA: Yes we have, some more than others of course.
Some of the musical moments ended up being pretty intimate; were you expecting that? Were any of the musicians uncomfortable being filmed?
SASCHA: I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew that the music would be amazing, but I didn't know how the musicians would feel about being filmed. Luckily, they really opened themselves up to us. Part of that had to do with B?la--when he pulled out his banjo and started playing, it put the African musicians at ease even if there were language barriers. Instant connections were formed through the music, and one of my goals with the film was to highlight those connections.
The setup of the story and the interviews are unobtrusive in that they allow the music to do most of the talking. Did you intentionally shy away from some of the documentary precepts for your first feature?
SASCHA: Yes. It was important to me to let the music speak for itself. I wanted to make sure this film wasn't just a collection of "talking head" interviews. I tried to include just enough of a glimpse into each musician's life and personality so that it would deepen your experience of their music, but not get bogged down with talking. To me, the film is a musical adventure, with B?la as your guide, that gives you a chance to hang out with and get to know some amazing African musicians. One of the themes that surfaced during the filming was the idea that Westerners are often exposed to the negative things happening in Africa - poverty, AIDS, war, things like that. As Haruna Walusimbi says in the film, that is only a very small bit of what Africa is. As a result, a big part of the film is about shedding light on some very beautiful, joyous things in Africa. One way we did that was by putting the glorious music front and center.
Though most of your previous ventures were in writing, are you going to focus more on directing now that you've completed this film?
SASCHA: I plan to continue both writing and directing. I like that writing and directing use different parts of your brain, but that in the end they're both really about telling good stories.
What made you decide to make this film together?
B?LA: Sascha had shot a film about Edgar Meyer and me, called Obstinato: Making Music for Two. When he made this movie, I got excited about his talent, especially since he is my younger brother. So he became the obvious and only choice when I decided to go to Africa and realized that it would have to be filmed.
SASCHA: When B?la asked me to work on the film, I had been making short documentaries for a few years, and had worked as a cinematographer on a music film in Africa, so I knew a bit about the challenges and joys of making a movie there. Since B?la is my brother, there was a level of comfort in working together that was a really positive thing for both of us. B?la and I didn't grow up together (he is 17 years older than me), and working together was a way of getting to know each other better, too.
Would you be interested in going back to Africa, maybe to places you didn't get a chance to see, and making more music?
B?LA: Yes, although I experienced so much on this recent trip that there is not a rush to go back immediately. I have some other projects to do right now, and other parts of the world to consider going to.
SASCHA: For sure. There's so much amazing music in Africa, we really just scratched the surface. There are many, many movies to be made about music in Africa!
Oumou said that B?la was better at communicating with his hands, that is, musically. Were you nonetheless curious or left in the dark about what the lyrics were saying? Haruna Walusimbi's song about his father was extremely moving; did you grasp the subject matter at the time?
B?LA: I had no idea what Haruna was singing or why he was crying until afterwards. It makes it very interesting to watch now, knowing what is going to happen.
SASCHA: I had a very deliberate strategy with the use of subtitles. The first couple of songs in the film, there are no subtitles translating the lyrics. This is because I wanted to put the viewer into B?la's shoes - he didn't know what the lyrics were saying at the time since they were in a different language, and he was really focused on the music. But as the film goes on you start to get subtitles translating the lyrics, starting with Haruna Walusimbi's song. The lyrics, dealing with the loss of Haruna's father, are very meaningful, and they deepen the emotional experience of the scene. So, starting with that scene the viewer is taken out of B?la's perspective a little bit and given more information than he had at the moment it was filmed.
The music created and recorded seemed so organic to the process, did you expect the trip to be such an overwhelming success?
SASCHA: When we first arrived in Africa at the beginning of the shoot, we had some fears that things weren't going to turn out the way we had hoped, and we wouldn't find enough compelling music. But soon we found our groove - and some amazing musicians - and the result was better than we could have imagined.
B?LA: We were very ambitious, but the trip far exceeded our expectations.
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