Transforming Vòdún

Front matter

MUSICAL CHANGE AND POSTCOLONIAL HEALING IN BENIN'S JAZZ AND BRASS BAND MUSIC

SARAH POLITZ

MUSICS IN MOTION SERIES

Chapter 5. Jomion and the Uklos: Hwedo-Jazz and Vodun in the New African Diaspora Conclusion: Trauma, Translation, Transformation

Glossary Notes Bibliography Index

TT

203 207 219 231

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.12221588

Illustrations

Figures

Figure 1. Didier and Chrétien Ahouandjinou with their mother in

Porto Novo 11 Figure 2. The shrine at Étienne Mechonou's residence 45 Figure 5. Étienne Mechonou, vódün priest and drummer 57 Figure 4. Gangbé Brass Band performing in Angers, France 145 Figure 5. Eyo'nlé Brass Band at home in Porto Novo 158 Figure 6. Romuald Hazoumé's "Cargo" 163 Figure 7. Romuald Hazoumé's “La Bouche du Roi" 164 Figure 8. Sam and Mathieu Gnonlonfoun performing at Harvard 185 Figure 9. Dan Ayidowhedo sculpture in Ouidah 188 Figure 10. Jomion and the Uklos 193

Musical Examples r

Music example 1. The opening of Gangbé's arrangement of "Alladanou." 122

Music example 2. Zenlí rhythm as played in Abomey 129 Music example 3. Zenli bell pattern as played on Gangbé Brass

Band's "Ajaka" 129 Music example 4. Gbon as played in Ouidah 138 Music example 5. Gbon as played on Gangbé's “Noubioto” 138 Music example 6. Masse gòhún groove recorded in Cotonou 161

Music example 7. Eyo'nlé Brass Band's masse gòhún groove on “Cargos Blues” 162

Fon Language Pronunciation Guide

The following phonetic sounds are common in the Fon language, but may be unfamiliar to some readers.

d asoftd sound produced with the flat of the tongue striking softly the roof of the mouth

€ ashort "e" sound, as in the English words bed or fret

gb aconsonant sound produced by the touching of the middle roof of the mouth and the tongue, immediately followed by the opening of the lips

kp a consonant sound produced by the touching of the back roof of the mouth and the back of the tongue, immediately followed by the opening of the lips

ny pronounced phonetically, the same as the Spanish ñ

o pronounced “aw,” as in the English words fought or law

x ahard, fricative “h” sound produced in the back of the throat

Tonal Markings

The Fon language uses five different tones. The most common are high, mid, and low tones, while two others, modulated low-to-high and modulated high-to-low, are less common. They are marked in this book as follows:

DD M De high tone low tone mid tone modulating tone (may be low-to-high or high-to-low)

xii / FonLanguage Pronunciation Guide IPA Spellings

Wherever possible, IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) spellings have been used for Fon words. In certain isolated cases, French phonetic spellings were retained for ease of identification.

Acknowledgments

When you work on a project for over a decade, as I have with this project since 2007, it becomes the work of many people. I am grateful to the many individuals who read the proposal and chapters of the manuscript at various points, including Damascus Kafumbe, Corinna Campbell, Daniel Reed, Jonathan Arac, and the members of the Arts Writing Group at the University of Florida: Rachel Carrico, Alvaro Louis Lima, Colleen Rua, Imani Mosley, Laura Dallman, and Jashodhara Sen. Thanks especially to Jeremy Wallach for indispensable perspective on refining the proposal in its early stages, and to Matthew Somaroff for expert editing help with the final version of the manuscript. Thanks to Silvio dos Santos, Welson Tremura, Jennifer Thomas, and Laura Ellis for continued support.

I am thankful to many institutions for their research support over the past years, including the Ashford Dissertation Completion Fellowship and the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship at Harvard, as well as the Oberlin Alumni Fund and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. The early stages of revising my dissertation and preparing the book proposal were generously supported by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Florida graciously provided funds for permissions and editorial assistance.

Thanks to the series editors, Kate van Orden and Kay Shelemay, and my acquisitions editor, Sara Cohen, at the University of Michigan Press for seeing the potential in this project, as well as to editorial associate Anna Pohlod and production editor Mary Hashman for seeing the project through to completion and answering my many questions, and copyeditor John Raymond for a keen eye for detail. I owe immense thanks to the peer reviewers, Patty Tang and Michael Veal, for their appreciation of the book's strengths and their incisive analysis of its weaknesses. The book is overall much stronger for their comments.

I owe much to the members of my dissertation committee, Ingrid Monson, Kay Shelemay, Sindhu Revuluri, and Jacob Olupona, a truly wonderful group xiv / Acknowledgments of people to work with on this project, who saw me through the various phases of its development with support at really crucial moments. As I wrote the dissertation, I also benefited greatly from the input of Professors Richard Wolf, Christopher Hasty, and Jean and John Comaroff, as well as my Fon language teacher, Saturnin Tomeho. They have all read parts of this project as it developed, and I'm grateful for their valuable feedback.

I would also like to thank my master's thesis committee at Wesleyan, Eric Charry, Mark Slobin, and Jay Hoggard, as well as Chams Linkpon, who helped with translations and many connections in Benin. J. B. Gnonlonfoun was always ready to help with translations as the book project developed, and the book would not be what it is without him. I am grateful, too, to my graduate student colleagues at Harvard and at Wesleyan, many of whom read chapter drafts and helped me prepare and practice conference papers and teaching demos, as well as to my family, my parents and my brother, and my partner, Karl, for all of their support.

My debts in Benin are really too many to name, and extend ever outward through networks of music and adopted family. To my drum teacher, Étienne Mechonou, and to Constant Legonou in Abomey for patience and understanding. To Firmin and Joël at the Centre Culturel Francais in Cotonou for giving my Fon language skills a shot in the arm. And to the musicians of Gangbé and Eyo’nlé Brass Bands, and Jomion and the Uklos, who served variously as informants, assistants, and companions throughout my work, for welcoming me into their world.

INTRODUCTION

In the Forét Sacrée in Ouidah, Benin, there is a baobab tree that was once a Hweda! king. Or, perhaps more accurately, the tree still is this king. Oral histories tell that, in a moment of supreme improvisation and spiritual force, the king transformed himself into this sacred plant in order to escape from Italian missionaries during the seventeenth century, demonstrating his mastery of the intersection between the physical and the spiritual worlds and the truth of their interpermeability. He has become vòdún,? a spirit, and the tree is a shrine that receives offerings and gives wisdom, prescriptions for the problems in the world that teach how to turn one thing into another in the pursuit of greater physical and spiritual health, well-being, and balance.

This book is about how Beninese jazz and brass band musicians transform Benin's cultural traditions, especially the ancestral spiritual practice of vodun and its musical repertoires, for international contexts of performance. An important starting point for understanding these creative processes lies in these musicians' lived experiences. Through their transformations of Benin's cultural and spiritual traditions, musicians increase their value and signifying potential in the world and performatively “work through," “act out,” and reclaim colonial narratives about the devaluation of African culture (LaCapra 2001, 22, in Visser 2015, 254). Their music is thus a site where they counter monolithic or dismissive conceptions of African culture with the multiplicity and depth of Beninese traditions and make interventions in global networks of economic and social inequality. Music and ritual offer powerful tools for undertaking these projects because of their flexible relationship to time and ability to deploy the poetic properties of historical symbols. They also make space for the ongoing and incomplete nature of postcolonial healing in a world that is still filled with neocolonial violence in unjust policies and racist actions. So the healing that these musicians undertake for themselves and for others does not take "recovery" as its goal, but finds music and ritual to be pragmatic tactics for surviving in a still-healing world (see Lloyd 2000).

In this introduction, I briefly present the historical contexts, spiritual practices, and economic systems that have shaped the use value of vódün and its traditions over time in Benin, before introducing the transnational community of jazz and brass band musicians that is the focus of this study. I then lay out a framework for understanding these musicians' relationships to Afro-modern space-time, performance, and diasporic livelihoods. I suggest that their approaches enable them to claim the value of African culture, of cultural continuity, of grounded spiritual practice, and economic autonomy —and the modernist sensibilities of jazz and other Afro-diasporic creative forms that tie Benin into global networks of economic and cultural interdependency. This is reflected in their projects in developing their own professionalization as musicians, and in increasing the value attached to vodun practice and music in a way that allows their creative healing power to continue working in the world. In these projects, musicians push for the possibility for themselves and other African musicians to inhabit more than just a few, racially oriented subject positions. The final part of the introduction discusses the multiple dimensions of cultural transformation that musicians engage, and sometimes blend, in adapting to contextual factors. The transformation of personal and collective experience, especially of postcolonial trauma and the associated value systems attached to African culture, is central to this discussion. From a spiritual perspective, I consider the usefulness of concepts of personhood, destiny, and temporality from Fon culture as performative, open-ended models for understanding how musicians represent cultural multiplicity and value through their work. Musicians' transformative processes extend from transitions between forms of value—the material, the immaterial, and the metaphysical — each embodied, enacted, and experienced in spiritual and economic ways—to the production of new forms of Afro-modernity that seek to challenge and correct the modern West's multiple temporal and spiritual ailments.

Benin and Vódün: Shifting Temporalities of Value and Resistance

A large part of the experience that Beninese musicians bring to their creative work in the transformation of cultural value and associated healing processes lies in the historical formation of the Republic of Benin, a nation whose people belong to multiple ethnic and religious traditions, and which has transitioned through several different political phases as a network of empires, a French colony, a socialist state, and a democracy. This process has unfolded through a series of overlapping temporalities, which, while presented chronologically here, musicians and audiences may experience in combination in other temporal organizations.

Throughout Benin’s history, vodun music and practice has been a primary location for the formation and contestation of cultural cohesion.’ Yet it has been misunderstood and misrepresented in media across the world, and indeed at times in Benin, as a backwards system of superstitions and witch doctors that holds Beninese society back from joining the modern world. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen the circulation of unsubstantiated rumors about vodun communities and practitioners among Afro-Christian and Christian evangelical communities in Benin, many of which repeat and build on colonial-era fears about indigenous spiritual practices and the unknown, for example, that vòdún communities are centers for the spread of AIDS and sexual abuse, that vodun practitioners steal babies in the night, and that vodun secret societies plot the ritual killings of politically unpopular figures.*

Vódün refers to the indigenous spiritual practices, primarily of the Fon, Gun, Adja, and Ewe peoples in Benin and Togo, that connect the physical world to the spiritual world of the deified ancestors and forces of nature (the sea, thunder and lightning, the earth, healing and illness, iron and war). The two worlds are interpermeable and affect one another. Both deified ancestors and these natural forces are referred to as vodun. Vòdún practice includes ceremonies for initiation, purification, worship of the ancestors and other spirits, the naming of newborns, and funerals, all which include drumming, song, dance, prayers, historical recitations, and animal and food sacrifices. Any person can become vódün when they die, when their se, or that part of their soul that is their "destiny" in the broadest sense, transfers from their body into a spiritual force, usually with physical manifestations. Particularly powerful people, such as kings and priests, can transform themselves into physical manifestations such as trees, animals, shrines, or natural events upon the end of their human lives. They also possess vodun practitioners through dance and music during ritual ceremonies, and can communicate with the living in this way. Royal vòdún are a particularly important connection to lineage and cultural continuity within Fon and Gun societies, which center around the leadership of divine rulers. Vodun’s outlook on cultural contact, whether African or European, has been one of assimilation, syncretization, and multiplicity, constantly bringing new ideas and influences into its pantheon as cultural transformations take place, as was the case particularly with Yoruba culture as well as Islam and Christianity? Vódün as a philosophical system thus contains the tools for navigating contradictions and contested worldviews.

The precolonial kingdoms of Danxome (ethnically, Fon, in present-day Abomey) and Xogbonu (ethnically Gun, in present-day Porto Novo) were the first nation-like formations that consolidated ethnicity, power, and culture in ways that produced allegiance and membership among their subjects. Often, the power of these kingdoms over their subjects, especially over conquered peoples, was enforced through ritual initiation to vodun practice, and through the capturing of neighboring people’s drummers and vodun priests to assimilate their religious practices into those already practiced in the kingdom. Less well documented but of perhaps even greater importance are the uses of vodun practice by Yoruba-descended ethnic minorities such as the Toffin and the Hwla against the hegemony of the major kingdoms’ centralized power. The complex interplay between individual, royal, and divine agency in these settings is characteristic of how vódün practice textured peoples’ experience in this era, and how these musical histories have continued to be inflected for Beninese musicians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Vódün music and practice, and their associated skills, were highly valued transcultural capital for building the precolonial kingdoms. The slave trade was also a factor in the kingdoms' consolidation of power as they sought to control trade with Europeans, and sent their prisoners of war away to what they considered the next life, across the ocean. Beninese musicians often invoke musical references and metaphors from this precolonial period as a way of showing their ties to African tradition and Beninese culture, or of working through cultural memories of the slave trade.

The arrival of French colonialism, the fall of the Dànxomean empire in 1897, and the creation of the French colony of Dahomey brought major changes to systems of royal power and culture, including vodun music and practice, although this process was uneven across different parts of the region. Christian evangelical activities had been largely unsuccessful in the attempts of Italian and Portuguese missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Dànxome fought hard against the takeover of the French, one of the last such empires to fall to colonialism. But with French occupation and the institution of a system of Catholic education in the early twentieth century, social changes began to take hold, even though the precolonial capital of Abomey has remained resolutely resistant. As part of their civilizing mission, it was the policy of the Catholic Church to suppress vodun practice wherever they could, as a threat to the creation of morally autonomous, modern subjects, including associated activities like traditional drumming, dancing, healing, and divination, and the speaking of African languages like Fon and Gun in mission schools. For some educated Dahomeans, then, vodun practice came to be negatively associated with a lower class, uneducated experience. There are accounts, however, of missionaries researching and incorporating indigenous culture and religion in their teaching, even if these efforts relied on ideas of African or Dahomean culture as unified and homogeneous." Colonial ethnographers' writing contributed many of the concepts that invented African tradition as an object during this period.’ It was in this period that many of the binary constructions one hears in Beninese musicians' discussions were put into place: traditional, modern, sacred, popular, evolved, refined, authentic, original, pure.

An anticolonial movement began to grow in the 1930s, but was divided into factions, and faded with the outbreak of World War II. New independent African churches such as the Celestial Church of Christ and the Cherubim and Seraphim Society were founded in this era, and, through their adaptations of vodun-derived musics for Christian liturgy, represented one outlet for working within but against the colonial system. Beninese musicians draw, implicitly and explicitly, on many of the experiential metaphors of this period in their work, for example ideas of artistic modernism, distinctions (and overlaps) between sacred and secular music, values associated with cultural purity and hybridity, implicit divisions of social class in Beninese (then-Dahomean) society, and the competition within the national movement over socialist and capitalist ideologies.

After independence from France in 1960, transformations of vódün music increased, and the metaphors for music making multiplied, with influence from jazz, salsa, funk, highlife, Afrobeat, and other African and Afro-diasporic styles. The Beninese trumpeter Ignace de Souza founded the Black Santiago orchestra during this period, inspired by the highlife musician E. T. Mensah of Ghana and Louis Armstrong's visit to Ghana in 1956, which de Souza attended. Things changed quickly in Benin, though, with the rise to power of General Mathieu Kérékou, a military man from northern Benin who trained in Dakar, in 1974, and the institution of a Marxist-Leninist government modeled after the People's Republic of China in 1976. The new country was named the People's Republic of Benin. This was around the time many of the musicians in this book were born. For its supporters, this government represented a rejection of the economic power of the West, especially France, and a step toward African autonomy of government and trade.

Understanding the powerful symbolic links between vódün practice and the precolonial Fon kingdom in Danxome, and the role religion in general had come to play in resisting state authority of many kinds, Kérékou suppressed not only vodun practice, closing many temples and restricting the months of the year when ceremonies could be performed, but also shuttered the houses of worship and schools of Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims. Kérékou was a great patron of popular music, however, especially the Orchestre de Poly- Rythmo, whose adaptations of vodun music with communist lyrical messages marked an important point of inflection in the history of transforming vodun music and experience in Benin. Many musicians also fondly remember Kérékou’s vocational programs in music education, artisanal crafts, and agriculture in public schools during this era. Metaphors for creating and interpreting music during this period were wide-ranging, but the most salient included the multiple musical genres in play in processes of transformation in the ‘60s and early '70s, and as time went on strategies for bringing sacred genres into the secular, popular sphere in order to gain patronage and avoid persecution.

With the institution of democracy, the opening of the economy, and the rewriting of the Republic of Benin's constitution (allowing for vódün as one of the country's three official religions) in 1990, a golden era began for musical creativity and entrepreneurship, based in the strength of the country's cultural and religious pluralism. The end of the Cold War reset many African countries' relationships with the world, and many, like Benin, found themselves in a position of needing to be their own advocates for resources and for recognition. Music became a part of this process in a big way in Benin; because of the isolation of the communist period, much of the cultural nationalism that other African countries experienced around independence in the 1960s was displaced to this era for Beninese people. The 1990s, when many of the musicians in this book formed groups and established themselves musically and professionally, was a period of cultural renaissance in Benin with a renewed focus on the national heritage (and exchange value) of vódün traditional religion, on Benin's Afro-diasporic connections, and its place in international markets. The institution of the annual Féte de Vódün now takes place every January 10, and the past few Beninese presidents have taken this as an opportunity to perform their connections to what is perceived as grassroots, everyday, authentic culture. The sudden turn to neoliberalism, like Marxism before it, has had mixed effects for musicians, as they are encouraged to be entrepreneurial and creative with their music, but within set parameters of national identity and the reestablishment of ties with producers and audiences in the colonial metropole in

France. Their involvement in these national projects of revaluation and recognition has been an important context for their own professionalization in learning to create cultural value for vódün music and practice in ways that give them space to be multiple and flexible, alive and improvised, and to do the work of social and cultural healing.

Jazz and brass band musicians draw on the musical and experiential metaphors of each of these periods in different ways and at different times. They may serve as tools to navigate unpredictable terrains abroad, as the echoes of precolonial, colonial, and independence-era pasts exert their influence, requiring the resistant or selectively cooperative tactics of a previous era. In other scenarios the variety of metaphors represented here can play out in disagreements, jealousies, conflicts, and contestations between musicians about individual and collective representation, arguments that bring vodun back to the center of processes of social formation for individuals, for musical groups, and for the Beninese people. The music of jazz and brass band musicians is an important site for the working out and processing of many historical ruptures of the past several centuries that have resonated globally and locally.

The period of the 2000s and onward marks an era in Beninese music with new metaphors and experiences, particularly those of mobility and migration. While Beninese musicians had been traveling and relocating in previous eras, often in an effort to avoid political persecution, local Beninese politics in the 19905, as well as changes in immigration policy in Europe and North America, made mobilities of various kinds more attainable for musicians. These experiences with life abroad have also become a part of musicians' projects of curating audience experiences, professionalizing themselves musically, and cultivating increased cultural value for vodun.

Jazz and Brass Band Musicians

The jazz and brass band musicians in this study — the members of Gangbé Brass Band, Eyo'nlé Brass Band, and Jomion and the Uklos — come from the southern part of Benin, particularly the cities of Cotonou and Porto Novo, the country's twin capitals, which are situated an hour apart via zemi-jahn motorcycle taxi on the southern coast, one the economic center and the other the seat of government. Some musicians have resided in this region for their entire lives, with periodic international forays for tours, while others have the reverse arrangement, having moved their residences abroad in France, Belgium, or New York, while making periodic trips home to Benin, if they have the means and legal status to do so. Many musicians aspire to this kind of mobility.

The musicians I worked with form a "community of practice" that is distinct from that of pop and rock musicians in Cotonou in a number of ways. They have a significant amount of musical training and mastery, on brass instruments, concert band percussion, and in music theory and solfége, received from relatives in military or police orchestras, or from their own participation in church-centered brass bands or fanfares. Many have studied jazz improvisation, composition, and theory at institutions in France, Canada, or other parts of West Africa, such as Niger and Cóte d'Ivoire. They have smartphones and reliable internet access, and listen widely on YouTube and other platforms to modern jazz from several different eras— especially to bebop, hard bop, and postbop, to African American gospel, and to salsa and Cuban jazz and timba. They speak fluent French and, depending on where they grew up, one or two local languages, including Fon, Gun, Yoruba, Adja, and Mahi. Intellectual and philosophical debate is a favorite activity, which meant that over time my questions joined in broader intellectual conversations that the musicians were already engaged in among themselves. A frequent discussion my presence prompted among the musicians was whether scholars of Beninese music, and I in particular, should be doing “musicologie” or “ethnologie” (an older French academic formulation), these two domains taken as mutually exclusive, with musicology perceived as preferable and less tainted by colonial pasts. The American concept of "ethnomusicology" is unfamiliar in Benin, and has taken some explaining. Based on my description, musicians usually called this discipline la sociologie de la musique, or music sociology.

Most of the musicians grew up in Christian communities, participating in music at one of several independent African churches such as the Celestial Church of Christ or the Cherubim and Seraphim Society. A few grew up in vódün communities and later converted to Christianity. In pursuit of the projects in the genre they describe as tradi-moderne music, many of these musicians have undertaken systematic research into traditional vodun religious music, the source of contemporary rhythmic styles employed in independent churches and brass bands. Their aspirations are mostly international, as in Benin audiences are appreciative but small, and engagements are low-paying. The chief mode of travel for these musicians is the format of the African brass band, with groups like Gangbé Brass Band and Eyon'le Brass Band making regular appearances on the European summer festival circuit. The latest generation of jazz musicians coming of age in the 2000s has started to expand beyond the brass band format, preferring to work as individual freelancers like drummer Joza Orisha and bassist Manu Falla, or to form new fusions like the Afro-funk ensemble Viviola, formed in 2014, and the jazz-gospel group Jomion and the Uklos, formed in 2008.

This study covers fieldwork totaling sixteen months over a period of eleven years with the community of professional jazz and brass band musicians in Benin’s southern region. I first visited Benin in the fall of 2007 for two months during a yearlong trip to Africa as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. During my fieldwork I interviewed musicians from the Gangbé Brass Band (formed in 1993), the Eyo’nlé Brass Band (formed in 1999), and Jomion and the Uklos (formed in 2008), as well as former members of these bands, many of whom have gone on to form their own groups. Interviewing current and former members meant that their accounts of events often differed in important ways, revealing to me many of the fault lines that have made the artistic and pragmatic realities of these projects so difficult. I also interviewed musicians from the previous generation of popular musicians, such as Sagbohan Danialou and Vincent Ahehinnou of Orchestre Poly-Rythmo. I combined the accounts I recorded in these interviews with participant-observation in performance and rehearsals, historical research, and translations and musical analysis of specific songs to develop my understanding of the connections between postcolonial trauma, healing, and experience that make up this book.

My memories of my first meetings bring me back to the practical realities of being a musician in Benin. My first contact in Cotonou was Didier Ahouandjinou (1980-), the youngest son of the late, great police orchestra director Henri Ahouandjinou. Didier, an accomplished and busy jazz pianist, was constantly on his way from a studio session to a gig to another session, or on his way back home to Porto Novo in a sept-place shared taxi to sleep for a few hours before getting up and doing it all again. I first met him in front of the Cathedrale de Saint Michel on one of Cotonou's busy downtown streets. I brought my trombone. I had just come from two months spent in Accra, Ghana, and had been given Didier's contact by a trombonist there, Eli Gas. Didier arrived by zemi-jahn motorcycle taxi, with his keyboard slung over his shoulder. As I joined him on the back of the zem, which now carried a load of three people and two instruments, and we zoomed away, I watched as he narrowly but expertly avoided crashing his instrument into surrounding traffic.

Didier agreed to send a few of his musician friends to see me at my hostel, including several trombone players. This was how I met his brother Aaron Ahouandjinou, who is now the trombonist with the jazz ensemble Viviola. We had some trouble understanding each other at first (my French, my appreciation for Beninese expressions, and my fluency in Fon have all improved a lot over the past years), but we played some music together, the bebop blues “Billie's Bounce." Aaron seemed to find this acceptable. I explained what I was doing in Benin. Well, truthfully I didn't yet know what I was doing in Benin, but I told Aaron that I was interested in talking to jazz musicians about their relationship to traditional music. He looked interested, and we made plans to go to Porto Novo the following day to meet the rest of his brothers.

In order to avoid the series of transfers from zemi-jahn to sept-place to zem again, Aaron took me and my trombone on the back of his keke (motorcycle), and hired a zem to carry my suitcase, which we attached with several bungee cords, on the hour-long trip to Porto Novo. When I climbed onto the back of Aaron's bike, he turned around and said, "That's exactly where I put Roswell." Roswell? “Roswell Rudd was here?!" I said. Rudd (1935-2017), the American avant-garde trombonist, had been there to record an album with the Gangbé Brass Band, Trombone Tribe, which came out in 2009. I found a strange excitement in discovering that I shared this esoteric connection with Aaron and his brothers, perhaps because I was drawn to signs of familiarity, but also because it offered a glimpse into the breadth of their international networks and their enthusiasm for collaboration.