May 7 - The Kinshasa Sessions

Was it hot?
Imagine zipping yourself into the heaviest clothes and winter coat you own, stepping into a sauna, and wrapping yourself in a wool blanket. Now be thankful that I didn't ask you to imagine being on the boat John Mitchell was on that day because it made the situation I just described seem pleasant by comparison.
John tried to take his mind off the heat and the flies and the cigarette smoke and the smell of diesel fuel and rotting fish by re-reading the information he had on his target, Aman Umoja--Aman--the visionary musical prophet of Africa. Not that he needed to. As an archivist for Polydor Records--but more importantly, as a lifelong music lover--he was very familiar with Aman's story. It was the stuff of legend.
Aman was born sometime in the late 1940s in Kindu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (then the Republic of Congo) to a prostitute, who died while giving birth. His father was unknown, but was believed to have been a soldier or musician (or both).
In a sense, though, Aman was a child of many parents. He grew up in the brothel where his mother had worked, and was raised by the women she had worked with. They were the ones who named him Aman, which means trust or safety in Arabic, in the hopes that he would enjoy both throughout his life. Aman was also an appropriate name for him because of his unusually large size as a child--He was the size of a man.
Aman didn't have any formal education. He learned everything he knew about the world by helping out the women--he called them all his mothers--in the house. When he wasn't doing whatever needed doing, he was learning piano, guitar, violin, and various percussion and wind instruments--as well as many different musical styles--from the musicians who frequented the brothel. It was because of his masterful ability to bring together all musical instruments and styles that his mothers gave him the surname of Umoja, meaning unity in Swahili.
John Mitchell slapped at flies the size of hummingbirds as his boat puttered along the river. He was making his way to the village of Kilanja, a distant tributary of the Congo. It was here that he hoped to find the master tapes of the Kinshasa Sessions, the legendary recordings Aman had made in the early 1970s. Part librarian, part obsessive/compulsive detective, and part musicological Indiana Jones, John had spent the better part of the past three years making phone calls, writing letters, combing the Internet, chasing ghosts, pursuing every imaginable lead, and coming up empty handed every time in his quest for the Kinshasa tapes.
But this was it. He'd finally traced the tapes to a record company's vault in Kilanja. And now a journey that had started in New York City and seen John pass through Frankfurt, Nairobi, Kinshasa, and onto a rusted out fishing boat on the Congo, was quickly reaching its conclusion. He took a drink from a hot bottle of Coca Cola that mocked his thirst rather than quenching it, and returned to his file on Aman.
When he was 16 years old, Aman moved to London where he secured a scholarship at London's prestigious Conservatory of the Arts. Bored, Aman dropped out after a semester, choosing instead to play music on street corners and the occasional club. When the weather turned cold, he stowed away on various freight trains and cargo ships and made his way to Calcutta, where he spent the next 12 years jamming with local musicians and helping to create Afro-hindu, Ghunjaba, Shank, and other hybrids of African and Subcontinental music.
In the 1960s he converted to Islam and returned to Africa. Much of his musical output from the mid to late 1960s was marked by Middle Eastern and North African instrumentation and phrasings. His masterwork of this period was the double-album Allahu Akbar, an intense, psychedelic, musical interpretation of the Koran, which many musicologists describe as a Muslim Love Supreme.
After arriving at the docks of Kilanja, John's bus ride into the town's center was an outstretched middle finger to the idea of safety and restraint, but he made it, and he (eventually) found his way to the offices of the ironically if not ambitiously named Skyscraper Records. (Two Story Records would have been a more apt name.) There he met Thierry Diawara, the professorial archivist with whom he'd exchanged several snail mail letters over the last several months. After pleasantries and tea, they went together to the vault.
The vault was more of a shed, a shack of cinder blocks with a rusty iron door sitting in the middle of a small walled-in courtyard behind Skyscraper Records' offices. Thierry fumbled with the keys, and John felt the build up of three plus years of anticipation, hope and fear coursing through every nerve ending in his body. This was it. The Kinshasa Sessions' master tapes were behind that door. Just before getting to see them, getting to hear them, John's mind raced through the back story of the Kinshasa Sessions one final time.
Aman left Islam in 1971 and went back to recording secular music. This was when he traveled to Kinshasa, and for six weeks during that sweltering summer he recorded almost around the clock. These sessions, the Kinshasa Sessions, were the missing link in Aman's career, the transitional recordings between the spiritual music of his Muslim years and the otherworldly transcendent funk of his stratospheric pan-African superstar years, the music that precipitated his ascendancy to the realm of prophet. Music that quite possibly no one had heard since it was recorded. Music that got lost and shuffled around and recovered and lost again and found and hidden under a rock and now here it was again. It was like if Bob Marley had a missing album that he'd recorded just before Exodus, or Nirvana just before Nevermind, or Dylan just before Blood on the Tracks, or the Beatles just before Abbey Road, or Prince just before Purple Rain, or Miles Davis just before Bitches Brew, or Sly just before There's a Riot Goin' On, or any other legendary artist just before an iconic, genre defining album. The Kinshasa Sessions had the potential to be all those things and more.
Thierry opened the door. The tapes were ruined.
Nobody had gone into the vault for years, but the roof had leaked, and rats had infested the place. The room was a mess of melted, chewed-through cardboard and reels of unspooled tape. Nothing was salvageable. This was it, the end of the trail. The Kinshasa Sessions were no longer. Their music exists only in our imagination.