“We don’t know where they went, but Bordas sold his instruments, and chased them on the train to Abidjan.”Īt this point, Traoré’s friend Idrissa Koné enters the story. He had lived in the West, he wanted an adventure, and Bordas’s wife loved him,” Traoré said. “It was all because of a Congolese musician, a saxophonist, who arrived, and played the sax with our band. The years of Tropic Jazz’s success, however, would be limited. Tropic Jazz is there to fill the demand for modern music with their version of Yé-Yé, a popular French genre at the time. And jazz was a means to distinguish oneself from the past and basically to move ahead and to live with your time.”Īs independence sweeps through Upper Volta in 1960, Bobo has the advantage of a railroad that connects the city to the port of Abidjan, in Côte d’Ivoire. “It related somehow to America, black America. “It’s related to some kind of modernity,” Florent Mazzoleni, a French music producer and writer who has studied the era, has said. The word “jazz” is popular in Africa at the time, and even though they’re not playing jazz, the band is named Tropic Jazz. And that’s how it started.” Soon they have recruited other musicians, and founded a band. “By the end of the day, I could accompany him by myself,” Traoré told me. The next morning, he begins his apprenticeship with Bordas. He calls someone over, but that man can’t do it.” Traoré shouts out, “Me, monsieur!” Bordas motions to him to approach, and Traoré makes shape after shape with his fingers.
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“He is showing them how to make shapes with their fingers on the guitar. On a Sunday night, Traoré goes to see if he can play in Bordas’s band, and a group of other hopefuls is crowded around the Frenchman.
“He wanted a guitar player,” Traoré told me. In 1959, a year before Upper Volta’s independence, from France, Brahima Traoré, the son of two musicians, hears that a Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Bordas, has arrived in town with his wife and wants to form a band. The city has wide avenues where people shelter from the heat under the spreading branches of giant shea trees, and many of its denizens fill the long tropical nights in its bars and cafés. Bobo is in the south of Upper Volta, the country now known as Burkina Faso. Its setting is West Africa, the city of Bobo-Dioulasso. This story begins with the betrayal of a husband and ends with the betrayal of an entire country. Volta Jazz’s infectious music signalled a new era of cosmopolitanism in Burkina Faso.
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