During World War II, round-faced Arthur S. Alberts of Yonkers, N.Y. went to West Africa as head of an OWI mission. He came back an enthusiastic amateur musicologist. The primitive native music—its complicated rhythms pounded out with hands or curved sticks on crudely made drums—made him think inevitably of the origins of jazz. He recorded some of it on ancient equipment for the Library of Congress, returned to the U.S. convinced that West African music deserved some better recording.
Last year Alberts went back to Africa. Equipping a "poor man's safari," including a jeep, a high-fidelity tape recorder and cameras, Alberts and his wife Lois covered 6,000 miles through the jungle and subdesert of southwestern French West Africa, the Gold Coast and Liberia. The best and most widely representative of what he caught on his tape recorder was out last week in three handsome albums: Tribal, Folk and Cafe Music of West Africa (Field Recordings, 24 sides; $25.88). Including much material never recorded before, Alberts' albums are a gold mine for musicologists and anthropologists, provide some exciting listening for the merely curious music lover.
Recording mostly at night "because the moon is very good for music," Alberts captured much of his music without artificial staging, sometimes caught scenes of unrehearsed frenzy. In a Baoulé village of the Ivory Coast, for instance, he happened on a performance of "spirit songs" following the ritual killing of two infants: shortly before Alberts and his wife arrived, a village woman had given birth to twins, and according to a tribal superstition which holds that twins are evil, they had been buried alive. Alberts' recording is hair-raising in its intensity. In Ouagadougou, between the Gold Coast and Timbuktu, as guest of the Sorbonne-educated emperor, he recorded the palace orchestra, which included such instruments as the one-stringed rebec—a crude violin—and huge calabash drums.
The West Africans themselves were seldom shy about having their music recorded; they considered the playbacks "tremendous magic." Once, hearing his voice played back, a native insisted that Alberts had stolen his tongue. He regained his composure when Alberts held up a mirror.
Arthur Alberts' next recording objectives: the South American hinterland and the Caribbean.