Valuing Tradition
Mali’s Jeliw, European Publishers and Copyright
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.31661Keywords:
Africa, copyright, creative industries, griots, jeliw, Mali, music industry, music publishing, piracyAbstract
The issue of how copyright works for the musical traditions of Africa has been steadily growing in importance since the 1990s, pushed to the fore by the increasing visibility of African artists in the world music market, the neoliberalisation of African economies that is pushing intellectual property (IP) issues into the centre of state creative industry policies, the ubiquity of illegal forms of reproduction, physical and increasingly digital, and the processes by which immaterial goods and cultural traditions are becoming reimagined as commodities. Recent scholarly discussions of this issue moves the debate significantly beyond the simple notion of copyright as a Eurocentric imposition on vulnerable African cultural heritage and instead considers how IP issues are addressed differentially in specific local contexts across sub-Saharan Africa. This article examines these issues in relation to how Mali’s Mande griots (jeliw) work with European publishers. Based on a series of sixteen interviews with jeli musicians and European publishers and others in the world music industry, its main finding is that while it is necessary to reconsider what we mean by composition in relation to Mali’s jeliw and their musical practice, copyright can and is being adapted by publishers working with traditional musicians to provide much needed revenue to jeli composers and plays a role in sustaining a vital, but vulnerable, tradition.
References
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Camara, Seydou, Eric Charry and Jan Jansen. 2002. “The Mande Praise Song kayra (Peace): Mande Global Perspectives”. Metamorphoses (Spring): 300–21.
Charry, Eric. 2000. Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, John. 2006. “Copyright, Folklore and Music Piracy in Ghana”. Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies Culture, Communication and Media Studies 20/1: 158–70.
Cottrell, Stephen. 2010. “An Interview with Ben Mandelson.” Ethnomusicology Forum 19/1: 57–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411911003754780
Cutter, Charles. 1968. “The Politics of Music in Mali”. African Arts 1/3 (Spring): 38–9, 74–7. https://doi.org/10.2307/3334345
De Beukelaer, Christaan. 2015. Developing Cultural Industries: Learning from the Palimpsest of Practice. Brussels: European Cultural Foundation.
Diawara, Mamadou. 2016. “Breaking the Contract?: Handling Intangible Cultural Goods among Different Generations in Mali”. In Copyright Africa: How Intellectual Property, Media and Markets Transform Immaterial Cultural Goods, edited by Ute Röschenthaler and Mamadou Diawara, 246–70. Herefordshire, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing.
Diawara, Manthia. 1997. “The Song of the Griot”. Transition 74: 16–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/2935371
—2005. “The Sixties in Bamako: Malick Sidibé and James Brown”. In Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, edited by Harry Elam and Kennell Jackson, 242–66. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Durán, Lucy. 1995. “Birds of Wasulu: Freedom of Expression and Expressions of Freedom in the Popular Music of Southern Mali”. British Journal of Ethnomusicology 4: 101–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/09681229508567240
—2011. “Music Production as a Tool of Research, and Impact”. Ethnomusicology Forum 20/2: 245–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2011.596653
—2013. “Director and Camera. Growing into Music, Mali 1. ‘Da kali: The Pledge to the Art of the Griot’, and Growing into Music, Mali 2. ‘Do farala a kan: Something has Been Added. Musical Progress amongst Children of Griot Families’”. DVD, SOAS, University of London. http://www.growingintomusic.co.uk.
—2014. “Our Stories, from Us, the ‘They’: Nick Gold Talks to Lucy Durán about the Making of Buena Vista Social Club”. Journal of World Popular Music 1/1: 133–51. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.v1i1.133
—2015. “Growing into Music in Mali—Perspectives on Informal Learning in West Africa”. In European Perspectives on Music Education. IV. Every Learner Counts: Democracy and Inclusion in Music Education, edited by Natassa Economidou and Mary Stakelum, 49–64. Innsbruck: Helbling Verlag.
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Eisenberg, Andrew. 2012. “M-Commerce and the (Re)making of the Music Industry in Kenya: Preliminary Notes and Findings”. Paper presented at the meetings of the Association of Social Anthropologists, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 5 April.
Fassler, Joe. 2011. “How Copyright Law Hurts Music, From Chuck D to Girl Talk, Conversation with Kembrew McLeod”. The Atlantic, 12 April. https://tinyurl.com/girl-talk-236975 (accessed 12 January 2017).
Feld, Steven. 2000a. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music”. Public Culture 12/1 (Winter): 145–71. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-1-145
—2000b. “The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop”. In Western Music and its Others, edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, 254–80. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Feld, Steven and Annemette Kirkegaard. 2010. “Entangled Complicities in the Prehistory of “World Music”: Poul Rovsing Olsen and Jean Jenkins Encounter Brian Eno and David Byrne in the Bush of Ghosts”. Popular Musicology Online. http://www.popular-musicology-online.com/issues/04/feld.html
Frith, Simon. 1988. “Copyright and the Music Business”. Popular Music 7/1 (January): 57–75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/853076?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Frith, Simon and Lee Marshall, eds. 2004. Music and Copyright. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Frow, John. 1995. “Elvis’ Fame: The Commodity Form and the Form of the Person”. Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 7/2: 131–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/743519
Gilbert, Jeremy. 2012. “Capitalism, Creativity and the Crisis in the Music Industry”. openDemocracy.net. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jeremy-gilbert/capitalism-creativity-and-crisis-in-music-industry (accessed 4 July 2015).
Harker, Dave. 1997. “The Wonderful World of IFPI: Music Industry Rhetoric, the Critics and the Classical Marxist Critique”. Popular Music 16/1 (January): 45–79. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143000000696
Homan, Shane. 2015. “The Popular Music Industry”. In The Routledge Cultural Industries Reader, edited by Kate Oakley and Justin O’Conner, 141–52. London: Routledge.
Jatta, Sidia. 1985. “Born Musicians: Traditional Music from the Gambia”. In Repercussions: A Celebration of African American Music, edited by Geoffrey Haydon and Dennis Marks, 16–29. London: Century.
Johansson, Mats and Ola K. Berge. 2014. “Who Owns an Interpretation? Legal and Symbolic Ownership of Norwegian Folk Music”. Ethnomusicology 58/1 (Winter): 30–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.1.0030
Manuel, Peter. 1993. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—2014. “The Regional North Indian Popular Music Industry in 2014: From Cassette Culture to Cyberculture”. Popular Music 33: 389–412. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143014000592
Marshall, Lee. 2005. Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry. London: Sage.
McCann, Anthony. 2001. “All that is Not Given is Lost: Irish Traditional Music, Copyright, and Common Property”. Ethnomusicology 45/1 (Winter): 89–106. http://www.jstor.org/stable/852635?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Mills, Sherylle. 1996. “Indigenous Music and the Law: An Analysis of National and International Legislation”. Yearbook for Traditional Music 28: 57–86. http://www.jstor.org/stable/767807?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Morgan, Andy. 2013. Music, Culture and Conflict in Mali: A Report for Freemuse. London: Freemuse. http://freemuse.org/graphics/Publications/PDF/Music-Culture-Conflict_MALI.pdf
—2014. “Les Ambassadeurs—Mali’s Musical Revolutionaries”. Andy Morgan Writes (blog). 4 July. https://tinyurl.com/les-ambassadeurs (accessed 15 July 2015).
Musangi, Neo. 2016. “From Communal Practice to Intellectual Property: The Ngqoko Cultural Group, Political Claim-making the Judicialization of Performance in South Africa”. In Röschenthaler and Diawara 2016: 218–46.
Oakley, Kate and Justin O’Conner, eds. 2015. The Routledge Cultural Industries Reader. London: Routledge.
Perullo, Alex. 2011. Live from Dar es Salaam: Popular Music and Tanzania’s Music Economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
—2012. Artistic Rights: Copyright Law for East African Musicians, Artists, Writers, and Other Authors. Washington, DC: US State Department and Kwetu Press.
Perullo, Alex and Andrew Eisenberg. 2014. “Musical Property Rights Regimes in Tanzania and Kenya after TRIPS”. In The Sage Handbook of Intellectual Property, edited by Matthew David and Debora Halbert, 148–64. London: Sage.
Röschenthaler, Ute and Mamadou Diawara, eds. 2016. Copyright Africa: How Intellectual Property, Media and Markets Transform Immaterial Cultural Goods. Herefordshire, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing.
Seeger, Anthony. 1992. “Ethnomusicology and Music Law”. Special Issue: Music and the Public Interest. Ethnomusicology 36/3 (Autumn): 345–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/851868?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Schulz, Dorothea. 1997. “Praise without Enchantment: Griots, Media and the Politics of Tradition in Mali”. Africa Today 44/4 (October–December): 443–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4187191?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Skinner, Ryan. 2004. “Determined Urbanites: Diasporic Jeliya in the 21st Century”. Mande Studies 6: 139–61.
—2012a. “Artists, Music Piracy, and the Crisis of Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Mali”. Anthropological Quarterly 85/3: 723–54. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0053
—2012b. “Money Trouble in an African Art World: Copyright, Piracy, and the Politics of Culture in Postcolonial Mali”. I@J 3/1: 63–79.
—2012c. “Cultural Politics in the Post-Colony: Music, Nationalism and Statism in Mali, 1964–75”. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 82/4 (November): 511–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972012000484
Soares, Benjamin. 2012. “On the Recent Mess in Mali”. Anthropology Today 28/5 (October): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2012.00894.x
Taylor, Timothy. 2004. “Bad World Music”. In Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, edited by Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno, 83–99. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203309049_chapter_4
Tcheuyap, Alexie. 2016. “Music for Everyone: The Dynamics of Piracy in Cameroon”. In Röschenthaler and Diawara 2016: 270–92.
Toynbee, Jason. 2008. “Open Source Reggae”. In Copyright and Piracy: An Interdisciplinary Critique, edited by Lionel Bently, Jennifer Davis and Jane Ginsburg, 357–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wallis, Roger and Krister Malm. 1984. Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries. London: Constable.
Whitehouse, B. 2012. “What Went Wrong in Mali?”. LRB 30 (August): 17–18.
WIPO. 1997. “International Protection of Expressions of Folklore: Unesco Follow-up to the 1989 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore”. Paper prepared by Marc Denhez, Barrister and Solicitor, Ottawa for the Unesco-Wipo World Forum on the Protection of Folklore. Phuket, Thailand, 8–10 April. https://tinyurl.com/OMPI-FOLK-PKT
Camara, Seydou, Eric Charry and Jan Jansen. 2002. “The Mande Praise Song kayra (Peace): Mande Global Perspectives”. Metamorphoses (Spring): 300–21.
Charry, Eric. 2000. Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Collins, John. 2006. “Copyright, Folklore and Music Piracy in Ghana”. Critical Arts: A Journal of South-North Cultural and Media Studies Culture, Communication and Media Studies 20/1: 158–70.
Cottrell, Stephen. 2010. “An Interview with Ben Mandelson.” Ethnomusicology Forum 19/1: 57–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411911003754780
Cutter, Charles. 1968. “The Politics of Music in Mali”. African Arts 1/3 (Spring): 38–9, 74–7. https://doi.org/10.2307/3334345
De Beukelaer, Christaan. 2015. Developing Cultural Industries: Learning from the Palimpsest of Practice. Brussels: European Cultural Foundation.
Diawara, Mamadou. 2016. “Breaking the Contract?: Handling Intangible Cultural Goods among Different Generations in Mali”. In Copyright Africa: How Intellectual Property, Media and Markets Transform Immaterial Cultural Goods, edited by Ute Röschenthaler and Mamadou Diawara, 246–70. Herefordshire, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing.
Diawara, Manthia. 1997. “The Song of the Griot”. Transition 74: 16–30. https://doi.org/10.2307/2935371
—2005. “The Sixties in Bamako: Malick Sidibé and James Brown”. In Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, edited by Harry Elam and Kennell Jackson, 242–66. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Durán, Lucy. 1995. “Birds of Wasulu: Freedom of Expression and Expressions of Freedom in the Popular Music of Southern Mali”. British Journal of Ethnomusicology 4: 101–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/09681229508567240
—2011. “Music Production as a Tool of Research, and Impact”. Ethnomusicology Forum 20/2: 245–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2011.596653
—2013. “Director and Camera. Growing into Music, Mali 1. ‘Da kali: The Pledge to the Art of the Griot’, and Growing into Music, Mali 2. ‘Do farala a kan: Something has Been Added. Musical Progress amongst Children of Griot Families’”. DVD, SOAS, University of London. http://www.growingintomusic.co.uk.
—2014. “Our Stories, from Us, the ‘They’: Nick Gold Talks to Lucy Durán about the Making of Buena Vista Social Club”. Journal of World Popular Music 1/1: 133–51. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.v1i1.133
—2015. “Growing into Music in Mali—Perspectives on Informal Learning in West Africa”. In European Perspectives on Music Education. IV. Every Learner Counts: Democracy and Inclusion in Music Education, edited by Natassa Economidou and Mary Stakelum, 49–64. Innsbruck: Helbling Verlag.
—2016. “About Fode Lassana Diabaté”. Interview with Lassana Diabaté, filmed in Tlayacapan, Morelos, Mexico, 26 March. https://tinyurl.com/fode-lassana-diabate (accessed 10 January 2017).
Eisenberg, Andrew. 2012. “M-Commerce and the (Re)making of the Music Industry in Kenya: Preliminary Notes and Findings”. Paper presented at the meetings of the Association of Social Anthropologists, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 5 April.
Fassler, Joe. 2011. “How Copyright Law Hurts Music, From Chuck D to Girl Talk, Conversation with Kembrew McLeod”. The Atlantic, 12 April. https://tinyurl.com/girl-talk-236975 (accessed 12 January 2017).
Feld, Steven. 2000a. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music”. Public Culture 12/1 (Winter): 145–71. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-12-1-145
—2000b. “The Poetics and Politics of Pygmy Pop”. In Western Music and its Others, edited by Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh, 254–80. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Feld, Steven and Annemette Kirkegaard. 2010. “Entangled Complicities in the Prehistory of “World Music”: Poul Rovsing Olsen and Jean Jenkins Encounter Brian Eno and David Byrne in the Bush of Ghosts”. Popular Musicology Online. http://www.popular-musicology-online.com/issues/04/feld.html
Frith, Simon. 1988. “Copyright and the Music Business”. Popular Music 7/1 (January): 57–75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/853076?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Frith, Simon and Lee Marshall, eds. 2004. Music and Copyright. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Frow, John. 1995. “Elvis’ Fame: The Commodity Form and the Form of the Person”. Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 7/2: 131–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/743519
Gilbert, Jeremy. 2012. “Capitalism, Creativity and the Crisis in the Music Industry”. openDemocracy.net. https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jeremy-gilbert/capitalism-creativity-and-crisis-in-music-industry (accessed 4 July 2015).
Harker, Dave. 1997. “The Wonderful World of IFPI: Music Industry Rhetoric, the Critics and the Classical Marxist Critique”. Popular Music 16/1 (January): 45–79. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143000000696
Homan, Shane. 2015. “The Popular Music Industry”. In The Routledge Cultural Industries Reader, edited by Kate Oakley and Justin O’Conner, 141–52. London: Routledge.
Jatta, Sidia. 1985. “Born Musicians: Traditional Music from the Gambia”. In Repercussions: A Celebration of African American Music, edited by Geoffrey Haydon and Dennis Marks, 16–29. London: Century.
Johansson, Mats and Ola K. Berge. 2014. “Who Owns an Interpretation? Legal and Symbolic Ownership of Norwegian Folk Music”. Ethnomusicology 58/1 (Winter): 30–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.1.0030
Manuel, Peter. 1993. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
—2014. “The Regional North Indian Popular Music Industry in 2014: From Cassette Culture to Cyberculture”. Popular Music 33: 389–412. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261143014000592
Marshall, Lee. 2005. Bootlegging: Romanticism and Copyright in the Music Industry. London: Sage.
McCann, Anthony. 2001. “All that is Not Given is Lost: Irish Traditional Music, Copyright, and Common Property”. Ethnomusicology 45/1 (Winter): 89–106. http://www.jstor.org/stable/852635?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Mills, Sherylle. 1996. “Indigenous Music and the Law: An Analysis of National and International Legislation”. Yearbook for Traditional Music 28: 57–86. http://www.jstor.org/stable/767807?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Morgan, Andy. 2013. Music, Culture and Conflict in Mali: A Report for Freemuse. London: Freemuse. http://freemuse.org/graphics/Publications/PDF/Music-Culture-Conflict_MALI.pdf
—2014. “Les Ambassadeurs—Mali’s Musical Revolutionaries”. Andy Morgan Writes (blog). 4 July. https://tinyurl.com/les-ambassadeurs (accessed 15 July 2015).
Musangi, Neo. 2016. “From Communal Practice to Intellectual Property: The Ngqoko Cultural Group, Political Claim-making the Judicialization of Performance in South Africa”. In Röschenthaler and Diawara 2016: 218–46.
Oakley, Kate and Justin O’Conner, eds. 2015. The Routledge Cultural Industries Reader. London: Routledge.
Perullo, Alex. 2011. Live from Dar es Salaam: Popular Music and Tanzania’s Music Economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
—2012. Artistic Rights: Copyright Law for East African Musicians, Artists, Writers, and Other Authors. Washington, DC: US State Department and Kwetu Press.
Perullo, Alex and Andrew Eisenberg. 2014. “Musical Property Rights Regimes in Tanzania and Kenya after TRIPS”. In The Sage Handbook of Intellectual Property, edited by Matthew David and Debora Halbert, 148–64. London: Sage.
Röschenthaler, Ute and Mamadou Diawara, eds. 2016. Copyright Africa: How Intellectual Property, Media and Markets Transform Immaterial Cultural Goods. Herefordshire, UK: Sean Kingston Publishing.
Seeger, Anthony. 1992. “Ethnomusicology and Music Law”. Special Issue: Music and the Public Interest. Ethnomusicology 36/3 (Autumn): 345–59. http://www.jstor.org/stable/851868?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Schulz, Dorothea. 1997. “Praise without Enchantment: Griots, Media and the Politics of Tradition in Mali”. Africa Today 44/4 (October–December): 443–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4187191?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Skinner, Ryan. 2004. “Determined Urbanites: Diasporic Jeliya in the 21st Century”. Mande Studies 6: 139–61.
—2012a. “Artists, Music Piracy, and the Crisis of Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Mali”. Anthropological Quarterly 85/3: 723–54. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0053
—2012b. “Money Trouble in an African Art World: Copyright, Piracy, and the Politics of Culture in Postcolonial Mali”. I@J 3/1: 63–79.
—2012c. “Cultural Politics in the Post-Colony: Music, Nationalism and Statism in Mali, 1964–75”. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 82/4 (November): 511–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0001972012000484
Soares, Benjamin. 2012. “On the Recent Mess in Mali”. Anthropology Today 28/5 (October): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2012.00894.x
Taylor, Timothy. 2004. “Bad World Music”. In Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, edited by Christopher Washburne and Maiken Derno, 83–99. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203309049_chapter_4
Tcheuyap, Alexie. 2016. “Music for Everyone: The Dynamics of Piracy in Cameroon”. In Röschenthaler and Diawara 2016: 270–92.
Toynbee, Jason. 2008. “Open Source Reggae”. In Copyright and Piracy: An Interdisciplinary Critique, edited by Lionel Bently, Jennifer Davis and Jane Ginsburg, 357–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wallis, Roger and Krister Malm. 1984. Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in Small Countries. London: Constable.
Whitehouse, B. 2012. “What Went Wrong in Mali?”. LRB 30 (August): 17–18.
WIPO. 1997. “International Protection of Expressions of Folklore: Unesco Follow-up to the 1989 Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore”. Paper prepared by Marc Denhez, Barrister and Solicitor, Ottawa for the Unesco-Wipo World Forum on the Protection of Folklore. Phuket, Thailand, 8–10 April. https://tinyurl.com/OMPI-FOLK-PKT
Published
2017-06-02
Issue
Section
Music Industries
How to Cite
Melville, C. (2017). Valuing Tradition: Mali’s Jeliw, European Publishers and Copyright. Journal of World Popular Music, 4(1), 10-44. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.31661
