If Soulfege wasn t so good, guitarist Derrick Ashong s tireless eclecticism, behind-the-scenes work and outspoken attitude would ring hollow. But the band is an exuberant, sinuous mix of highlife, hip-hop, funk and reggae all reflective of Ashong s wandering background.
Ashong lived in Ghana until he was 3 years old, then moved to New York for the residency of his father, a pediatrician.
At age 8, a coup in Ghana brought the Ashongs to Saudi Arabia.
Ashong picked up early hip-hop and Middle Eastern music from his travels, and his parents made sure that he stayed connected with the music of his native country. Our parents used to play these old highlife records and old Afrobeat and Afropop records, and that sound has been with me my whole life.
Highlife is a fusion of traditional Ghanaian and other West African music, and big-band jazz and calypso. Early examples were horn-based, but with Soulfege Ashong plays a nimble three-fingered guitar-picking style that contributes to the bounce.
It s also got an uplifting message that Ashong considers just as important.
On his Web site and in his writings, Ashong is outspoken about several issues, including the images of the African-American community perpetuated by mainstream hip-hop.
We will never do a show where we invite somebody up there who s going to call you a bitch or the N-word or anything like that. Not because that music shouldn t be done, but because the mainstream is saturated with that.
And it does have a negative impact. And I m sick of some corporate executive telling me what s authentic, and that what happens to be authentic is destroying the communities that I love.
Ashong notes that hip-hop music is bought primarily by white kids, and says that the opportunity for cross-cultural communication is being abused.
The race thing who cares? Anybody should be able to buy and commune with this music.
But what the record industry has done, is say, Well, if this guy s talking about black nationalism, I don t know if our target audience is going to deal with that.
Oh, this kid is talking about uplifting their community, but it s so localized, is our target audience going to really relate to that?
So what sells to the lowest common denominator? Sex and violence.
And these artists are getting pimped and pimping their own communities, and I refuse to make excuses for that.
Ashong, who majored in African-American studies and ethnomusicology at Harvard, lived in Boston until recently moving to Los Angeles to work with Artist Network, a new media company founded by Dave Stewart, formerly of The Eurythmics.
Ashong is working on music and video production, as well as the business end of show biz.
I theorized around lots of different ways of looking at intellectual property and distributing music in grad school, and I m putting some of those things that we used to get the Soulfege name and word out to creating a new record label.
Soulfege hasn t been playing as much lately as previously, Ashong says, because he and the other two core members singers Kelley Nicole and Jonathan Gramling are busy writing business plans and raising capital for a proposed TV series. The show, Ashong says, would be a global fusion of Making the Band, Behind the Music and American Idol in which the band would travel through many different countries, learning about youth culture through music.
They re also being filmed for a documentary to be called The Shift, which Ashong says is about global change agents including Al Gore, Deepak Chopra and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. And Soulfege has founded the Sweet Mother Tour, a rubric for many of its shows that combine high-tech communication with the musical experience.
SMT is more than the music; it s a movement.
The basic premise is that no society can develop without an understanding of its own worth. And because artists have this power to influence people s thinking in profound and intimate ways, we want to apply that power to making people feel empowered to facilitate change in their society. We want to connect those change agents to each other by building bridges through the arts, music, film, television, Internet, whatever.
At many SMT shows, there are Web portals with live video and audio, where people can meet up and sample works by people from around the corner or around the world. Eventually, the goal is that merchandise purchases through SMT partners will fund anti-poverty and public-health work in Africa and elsewhere. It s part jam, part rally, part networking, but it s all fun.
SMT started as a way to connect elements of the African diaspora, but while meeting with prospective partners worldwide Ashong says he quickly realized that the concerns were universal. We realized that the issues that we ve been dealing with really are resonant for kids all over the world. So we decided that this is more than a movement for the African diaspora; this is really a global movement.
What kind of issues?
How are we represented in the media? How do we see ourselves?
What is our value system? What defines a young man? What defines a young woman?
Are you defined by the size of your attitude, by your sexuality, by your willingness to be violent? What s happening with the dumbing down of our societies? Why aren t people asking the tough questions: What are we doing about it?
Do our governments really represent us? That question came up everywhere.
Unfiltered communication, Ashong says, is an end in itself.
I can t go and say, Well, these cats in Brazil need to think about this if they re going to interact with these cats in Belgium. That s not up to me.
But what we can do as artists, and what we can do if we reach out to people in these different arenas technology, finance, etc.
is build bridges. And these can enable people to engage in a dialogue on terms that they feel good about. And through that, you start to see change happening.
You start to see people imagining things they couldn t think of for their own community, just by seeing what someone s doing in their own community.
There won t be any film crews at the Black Rep Saturday night, but the band will show video footage of earlier shows and discuss the work of SMT before the show.
But even if you don t get there early, the music stands on its own.
Soulfege s message of uplift and the interconnectedness of cultures is easy to attach to, especially since it goes down so smoothly and funkily. The typical response is not so much that they heard politically committed music; it s that they heard a great party band. And that is by design.
If you were to listen carefully to the lyrics of our songs, some of them are very political; some of them are spiritual; some of them are socially conscious. Some are just about love; some are just about fun. But you rarely hear Soulfege sing a song that s about the government, or the Iraq war.
[Our music is] something we believe in, but that whether you re Republican, Democrat, Christian, Muslim, gay, straight, black, white, whatever, it can reach you on a spiritual level if you re open to the sound.
Ashong says Soulfege s audiences have included grandparents, grandchildren and a bunch of drunk college kids jumping up and down in a basement. But what we try to convey is a sense that Hey, we can come together, we can have fun, we can make music that fuses our cultures, and it s all good.
For those who want more, there s a world they can discover. But we re not pushy. We don t proselytize; we play.
Soulfege is at the Providence Black Rep, 276 Westminster St., Providence, Saturday night. The pre-show presentation is at 8 and the show is at 9:30.
Admission is $10. Call (401) 351-0353.
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