Locomotoring

This is first post of the year and I am starting with a resolution, a small mental shift to explore.

Apparently, the word ostinato in music is a stubborn short melodic repeat, a persistent unyielding pattern. Very recently, I heard the word in the context of Fela Kuti’s music in Jad Abumrad’s new podcast, Fela Kuti: Fear no man. Before Jad’s podcast, Fela’s Afro Jazz music was out of context for me. After the podcast, the context has become somewhat surreal. Jad’s podcasts, this and Dolly Parton’s America, are exceptionally powerful that way – they combine the best of journalism with the best of music.

I grew up in post-independent India. I come from a family that had to leave their land in Bangladesh, post-partition, to start over in India. As a child, I read about colonialism in history books but I didn’t have time to think about the everyday remnants of colonialism. Today, I understand these remnants a lot better and how they cling decades after. And when I think about them, I get resentful. Within that personal context, now that I know Fela Kuti’s context (to the extent one can really know what one doesn’t live) his music sounds like the rumble before the thunderstorm.

Musical ostinato has always made me anxious. It isn’t a drone (e.g. Duduk) that I can set aside. It leaves me wanting to move to the next bit. In an ostinato, time appears to glitch, a déjà vu that you can’t get out of. Fela uses ostinato heavily – it seems to go on and on, for minutes, for tens of minutes. And then, wham, the vocals appear. I barely understand the lyrics but what I understand makes me want to know more. Fela’s live audiences claim that they experienced what today we associate with the mind altering properties of magic mushrooms. Musical experts who understand ostinato suggest if you let go of the need to move on and embrace the ostinato, you can get into a trance like state. The pattern itself invites you to explore the interwoven sub-patterns. Fela would get his audience in a mind altered state and he would then say what he had to say:

The seemingly light hearted lyrics hide a revolution (and you will need to listen to Jad’s podcast) – it is a sum total of his experiences and his spirit, the colonialism that surrounded him, the ideological genealogy that he inherited from his mother, his own incarcerations, and the beatings. He comes out of jail in bandages, writes about his time in jail and he is put back in jail. It feels cyclical.

Coming back to the ostinato – a day is a circle, a relatively small one at that. Sun goes up, sun goes down. I get restless when the days seem like they are repeating themselves – wake up, eat/work, sleep and repeat. What if I could embrace that seemingly tedious circle – wake up, eat/work, sleep and repeat – with grace. There will invariably be sub-patterns to enjoy like a found object of delight during a neighborhood walk (last one was an unexpected cluster of mushrooms). There will be cycles of moon and some nights when the moon isn’t full, it would result in stargazing. There will be larger cyclical patterns like the flowers in the spring, the hikes in the summer, the red and gold leaves in the autumn, the mushrooms following first rains, and the bursting waterfalls in the winter. Then, there will be the long awaited vocals, like a travel to a new land.