Led by Grammy-winning Snarky Puppy founder Michael League, Bokanté are an international supergroup whose music traces the blues, from its roots in West Africa and the Arab world throughout the diaspora, placing it firmly into a modern context. The group's brand-new studio album, History, consists of nine tracks celebrating Black history, global unity and the futility of war.

We were fortunate to speak with Michael to gain some insight as to how the new album came about, shedding light on his experience learning traditional guembri techniques from Gnawa mentors as well as his own thoughts on the artistic process. 

The new album is called History - how far back are you looking?

The title comes from a song which Malika and I wrote. It’s largely about the factual concept that history is written by the winners, that the books we read and the stories that we're told are largely told from the perspective of the people who were victorious – and not the people who were oppressed or lost. The idea behind the song is that there's a lot more to the story than the history that we read.

Malika's lyrics delve into that; she spends a lot of time on this record talking about people who go through motions and live life in a very, ‘another-brick-in-the-wall’ kind of way. She also talks about the opposite kind of people, who are exceptional and choose not to be so complacent and compliant, who are different and hold that up rather than conforming. I think that's the general or the macro-theme of the record.

Could you describe the group’s working relationship and how it has changed over the years? Did the pandemic influence the way in which this album was produced?

I wouldn't say that the pandemic really had anything to do with it. Malika and I had done two records in a certain kind of way, with us having written the vast majority of the music – even though one of the records was orchestral, so that was different in its own way, but still largely Malika and I doing the writing. I think that whether the pandemic had happened or not, we would've opted to do what we did, which was to get everyone in a room writing together. The way in which the pandemic helped make that happen was that people were much more willing to come to a place and collaborate for collaboration’s sake, versus needing X amount of money per day and that kind of thing which, pre-Covid, was so dominant. But no, I think it was just time to explore what possibilities there might be with ten or eleven heads in the composition game, rather than just two.

It was a lot more efficient, faster and less stressful because everybody had an individual responsibility and the making of the album didn't just fall on two sets of shoulders. There were no negatives whatsoever.

How long did it take before you were ready to go back in the studio again and what did that process look like?

I would say that for the last few years, Bokanté's been pretty quiet just because we've been preparing for this album release, which is our first record in… I guess five years, right? We've been waiting around trying to make this record happen and for it to make as big of a splash as possible. We recorded it in 2021 at my house and, for us, it's a big, big step in a new direction. It's very much co-written, this album, versus the previous records, which were almost completely Malika and I. So, that's kind of where we're at now. I mean, Bokanté's not like a band that goes on tour every month; it's kind of like a hibernating bear that comes out and does a bunch of hunting and then goes back to sleep.

Tell us about a couple of sonic and geographical influences that inspired you when putting this album together.

On this record, we're pulling a lot from North Africa, for sure. I played a lot of guembri on the record, which is the North African bass. That’s one of the main sounds – it’s on ‘Adjoni’, it’s on ‘History’; it's probably on half the record or more. In fact, there's three or four people in the band who have studied North African music and know quite a bit about it, so there's a lot of that influence. Generally, in Bokanté's music there's a lot of West African influence from places like Mali and Senegal – those kinds of places where this desert blues thing is happening. But then, this record also has more indie-rock influences, like a lot of ‘St. Vincent’ kind of stuff going on in the guitars. We chose to have the guitars occupy a role that was less melodic and more textural – or, I should say, less riff-based, like the first record, where the guitars are playing all these heavy riffs. And on this record, we were like: "What if the guitars never play riffs? What if the riffs are always guembri and bass, and the guitars are painting around them?" So that was one of the concepts, which is at any moment pulling a lot of different influences conceptually from a lot of different traditions.

Your best-known group, Snarky Puppy, found their voice over several years through live experimentation – is there room for that kind of inventiveness within Bokanté's setlist, as opposed to more straight-ahead jazz arrangements?

I would say that the Bokanté is actually much more structured than Snarky Puppy. There's a lot of variation from night to night, because you have three percussionists that can change grooves and a lot of wonderful soloists who can go in a lot of different directions. And, above all, Malika is such a complete musician. She’s able to take things vocally into new spaces every night. But I think at the end of the day, in Bokanté, we're really just playing songs. Snarky Puppy's structures are so much longer and, because there's no vocalist, there's more room for us to go into very unexpected places – whereas with Bokanté, we're thinking about delivering these songs powerfully to the audience. The majority of the really unexpected creative energy occurs during the songwriting and the recording sessions.

There's still some freedom – over half the band is jazz-based in terms of their upbringing – so I wouldn’t call it strict, but I would say that the way in which we deliver songs is direct and kind of succinct in a certain sense, with lots of room for improvisation.

A lot of the musical styles that impact the the group's sound are firmly rooted in these traditions which you’ve already mentioned – I imagine you have to tread carefully in terms of paying them respect?

I think you have to tread quite carefully with respect to any heritage, you know? I mean, I think the same should be done when a German person plays funk! There's no genre of music on earth that belongs to the planet. Every style of music that exists, even if they're ubiquitous and you encounter them anywhere – I know that those styles of music were formed and created by specific groups of people, living in specific places with specific cultures. We assign a false degree of, let's say, ‘global belonging’ to Black American forms of music, and they're not. The blues, funk, rock and roll, soul, hip-hop, gospel. These are Black American styles of music. If you’re a white American, or an Asian person living in France, you don't have the same perspective on that stuff. I don't believe that it means that you can't play it or shouldn't play it, but I do believe that it means that you have to recognise when you're playing something that's yours, culturally, and when you're playing something that's not.

I think, as with all of this, that the most important thing is not what your passport says or whether that gives you a right to play a certain music or not, because I believe that's total crap. The most important thing is that when you're playing music from anywhere, even from your own culture, you're doing something new with it that's genuinely authentic in a way that offers something unique.

How do you apply this philosophy to your own personal musical practice?

For me, trying to play Gnawa music like an actual Gnawa musician and claiming to be that and not doing anything unique or new with it – it’s just as ridiculous to me as someone playing jazz in the style of Miles Davis in 1968 and not doing anything new. My test always is like, would a Gnawa Maalem play this exactly the way that I'm playing it – or can they play it exactly the way that I'm playing it? When you get the answer of no, then you know that you're actually doing something kind of unique and interesting, because it's also very important to remember that no one is born playing music like you.

The world doesn't benefit and ultimately you as an artist are not doing the most essential artistic thing, which is individual expression and bringing something unique into the world. So our rule in Bokanté, our rule in Snarky Puppy, I think most musicians’ rule when they play any genre of music, especially ones that are outside of their own cultures, is that you are doing your thing with it; that you are taking a concept or an idea or a scale, a sound or a rhythm and you're processing and articulating it in a way that is unique to you, and that you feel genuine and authentic doing so. In my opinion, the greatest way of expressing respect for a musical style is by learning about the tradition and where it comes from, doing your homework and then ultimately doing your own thing with it. It's not a skin-colour thing, it's not a passport thing. It’s about people's experiences that they've had, how much exposure they've had to culture and, most importantly, how they process that experience.

Bokanté has adopted a more socio-political stance since forming several years ago. A handful of the group’s members consider themselves immigrants – what sort of credibility does this lend your songwriting?

First off, I would say that I think storytelling is the heart of songwriting – whether it's put in an obvious or esoteric way, there's always a story being told. In a lot of folk music traditions maybe that way is a little more literal. But storytelling is an essential part of composition, even in non-lyrical and instrumental styles of music.

One of the pleasures of songwriting is you can do whatever you want. You can tell people how you think they should live. You can completely avoid anything that could be controversial. You can present perspectives, you can be condescending or tongue in cheek. I mean, you can do whatever you want. Malika takes a lot of different approaches when she writes. Generally, she's not chastising people in songs, but sometimes she plays the role of the oppressor. Sometimes, she plays the role of the innocent and ignorant victim. She explores a wide variety of perspectives and that diversity makes the repertoire interesting, when you know what she's talking about.

Tell us more about the linguistic choices on the album? As per usual, Malika sings predominantly in her native Guadeloupean Creole.

Ultimately, she's singing in Creole most of the time because, sonically, it's the most appropriate language for the music that she speaks. In certain songs she sings in French, but those songs tend to be slower, 'stretchier' songs where the French language sounds better. There's even two songs now that are in English for the first time! We've never had English songs because they didn’t fit, stylistically. Again, we could talk all day about the concepts of ethics and authenticity and whatever. But if something sounds bad, it sounds bad. We tried English on certain songs and it sounded bad, so we changed the language, because that's the most important thing: how things sound and how the sound makes you feel.

And then, once you've opened yourself up from enjoyment, then you're ready to receive the message of the song. So for me, the aesthetic is the number one thing. Biologically, it's the most important thing that when we hear sound as humans, even sound for enjoyment, we're touching upon instincts and adaptations that have been developing throughout humanity for over hundreds of thousands of years, depending on how far back you want to go! So texture is number one - I don’t really care what a song is about if I don’t like the sound of the language, of the singer or the instruments behind it.

It seems a lot of your work draws on interactions with different cultures around the world. Are you put off by the concern of ‘stealing’ from others materials that might not initially belong to you?

In my opinion, it's almost physically impossible to be an artist and not steal. It's what we do. And, like I said, the most important part of that process of theft is that in the end, you turn the item that you've stolen into your own by doing something unique to it. All human beings are capable of, and constantly do defy stereotypes based on their experiences, and that's what I love about Bokanté. It's an expression of that, in that we have black, white, Asian, Latino musicians playing in our group which, musically, is a mixture of African and Caribbean. We're coming together to offer what we all have individually, to create something that, hopefully, is unique. We lean on each other when someone's more of an expert in something. When someone's more knowledgeable in something, we lean on that person to guide us, using them as our barometer of, “Is this okay? Does this feel good?”, rather than trusting our ignorance. It’s like a little microcosm of the planet in a certain sense.

Bokanté's third album, History, is released via Real World Records on Friday 30th June, 2023 and is available to purchase in both vinyl and CD formats.