Emily Ferretti
At the heart of cover story subject Weedie Braimah’s Grammy-nominated album The Hands of Time are the instruments. The djembe. The ngoni. The kora. The balafon. All weaving through and working with the electric guitar, the electric bass, the synth. It’s an altogether new sound, these tapestries—folding one culture into another, reverberating with songs of the past and visions for the future. As the son of a New Orleans jazz drummer and a Ghanaian djembefola, Braimah says this marriage is a poignant reflection of his personal history: “What you’re seeing is my life. You’re not hearing—you’re seeing my life, through your ears.”
In our first ever issue dedicated entirely to the music of our region, we explore the power behind these tools of music, our instruments. In our feature story “The Acadian Accordion,” a German instrument becomes something singularly Cajun in the hands of a master—its altogether new sound altering the cultural identity of a people in just a short century. In the Bywater, we discover a playground of sound-inspired architecture; in Baton Rouge, a sculptor who makes birds of violins, bags out of cellos. We look back on Armstrong’s roots and find Fate Marable atop a steamboat, banging away at the calliope keyboard in gloves and a wash of steam. And we finish, appropriately, in Clarksdale, where they say the devil retuned bluesman Robert Johnson’s guitar in exchange for his soul.
