In 1983, armed with a demo tape and Bill Laswell’s phone number, Foday Musa Suso set out to get himself a record contract. He’d seen the video for Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit,” from a record Laswell produced, and was impressed with the sound and the dancing white gloves. “I thought, I’m going to call this tubab”–a Mande term for white person–“but then I thought, No, he’s a typical tubab, he won’t know anything about African music,” says Suso. “But I was wrong. Bill is one of those people who listen to all kinds of music.”
That take changed Suso’s career forever. Doors opened for him to work with the likes of Philip Glass, the Kronos Quartet, and most recently the great jazz drummer Jack DeJohnette. He’s become a bona fide international ambassador for African music; in June he performed “Orion,” a piece commissioned by the 2004 Athens Cultural Olympiad, with Glass in Athens. “That was good,” says Suso. “We played two nights and both nights sold out.” According to Glass, they’re in talks with Ravinia to bring the piece to Chicago sometime next year.
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Suso has lived in the same one-bedroom apartment in Hyde Park for 27 years. His living room is filled with the tools of his trade–several koras, including an insectlike electric kora he bought in the mid-80s in New York, and various other African stringed and percussion instruments. One wall is occupied by a huge rack filled with about 1,000 cassettes of his own performances, and its top serves as a mantel for a display of CDs he’s played on over the past three decades. The other three walls are decorated with posters announcing gigs all over the world. Beneath a set of windows is the PC that he records his compositions on.
Suso was born in 1950 into a griot family–a family of musicians, historians, and storytellers. His father, Saikou Suso, was a great kora player, and when Foday turned seven it was time for him to learn the instrument. At ten he went to study with an uncle in a different village, living with his family for seven years until he had command of the instrument.
He came to Chicago on September 8, 1977. He spent eight months living with Rudolph, his parents, and his younger brother in Hyde Park. “He was part of the family,” says Rudolph. “I have pictures of him at Christmas opening presents. We got him a coat and snow boots–it was a rough winter.” They immediately started putting together the band. Rudolph had written to Hamid Drake from Africa–they’d been regular collaborators in Chicago–and Drake was on board from the start, but it took a few months to find bassist Joe Thomas. “We went through four or five bass players,” says Suso. “They all come and try the music and they say, ‘Oh, this music is very sweet, but it is very strange.’ But Joe Thomas said, ‘I will like to try something different.’ I said, ‘You got it,’ you know? This music is very very different.”
The Mandingo Griot Society released a second album in 1981, but by then Rudolph had moved to Los Angeles and Drake was increasingly busy playing with Fred Anderson. So Suso started to think about going solo.
“We became very good friends,” says Suso of Glass. “When we got back he said, ‘Suso, you are my friend. Here is the key to my house–you will never stay in a hotel in New York again.’” Zack Glass has returned to visit Suso’s family in Gambia three times, and Philip Glass has worked with Suso several times since.
