Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 328 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-5148-1 (hbk), 978-0-8223-5162-7 (pbk). $84.95/$23.95.

Abstract

Steven Feld, Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 328 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-5148-1 (hbk), 978-0-8223-5162-7 (pbk). $84.95/$23.95.During his first visit to Accra in October 2004, Steven Feld met Nii Noi Nortey, who happens to be a sculptor, but also an instrument inventor and avant-garde multi-instrumentalist. This encounter was the first connection with the Accra Trane Station band and the starting point of Five Musical Years in Ghana. These years spent in Accra led Feld to develop a multimedia project: a book that includes several photographs, three documentary movies and ten CDs. All that material helps the reader to explore Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra both as a 'diasporic dialogue' and a 'musical intimacy'.This project's originality lies in the hybrid methodology it proposes. This is made possible by Feld's mastery of academic tools, allied to filming and recording techniques. Feld offers a detailed ethnography, combined to musical analyses, enhanced by life stories and his participation as a musician. Feld was trained in anthropological film-making in Santa Fe and Paris, where he followed the teaching of Jean Rouch, which is visible in his own shooting style.Feld continues to deepen the concept of 'acoustemology' he firstly introduced during his research at Bosavi rainforest (Papua New Guinea) in the 1980s. Acoustemology, as part of a sensory anthropology, is 'the agency of knowing the world through sound' (49); it is about sound as a way of sensuous knowing, that is to say about the world felt, performed and embodied through sound. A similar concept could also be applied to pictures, drawings, paintings, odours or tastes. Feld's successful response to the challenge of acoustemology is not only to assemble audio-visual and textual material; it lies also in the fact that he succeeds to perform his knowledge within the Accra Trane Station band, and exchange subjectivities through sounds.Furthermore, he ably avoids another centrism by intentionally choosing an African urban standpoint, and by questioning his own interpretation during hours of discussion, where local views conflict with his own. Indeed, according to Feld, the most important part of the project is its dialogism. The montage of the three films, realized by Feld and his faithful editor Jeremiah Ra Richards, was thus the result of these feedback and 'dialogic editing' methods.Feld opts for performed 'intervocability' rather than academic contextualization, and tries to offer a non-European understanding of jazz cosmopolitanism, explicitly criticizing the still-dominant history of jazz. Cosmopolitanism is the key concept in Feld's critical approach. He tends to understand the desire for expansive agency and unravel it in its complexity. He emphasizes the voices and perspectives of the musicians with whom he collaborated during these five years, in order to overcome a certain kind of romanticism that permeates the idea that cosmopolitanism could be a banal and easy achievement.Conceived as a 'memoir genre', the book unfolds memories, feelings and hearings of its characters and of the author, retold by the latter. It thus unveils different interpretations of a multi-level 'cosmopolitanism from below' which implies exchanges, circulation and the inevitability of borrowing traditions and experiences. As Nii Noi says, cosmopolitanism implies 'going beyond your little horizon. And hoping that outside of that little horizon of yours there's still sense and meaning' (90). It implies borrowing from various traditions and tending 'to extend this borrowing into the future' (91). It thus implies a reconfiguring of space and time, and encompasses a very complex agency.A multiplicity of persons and anecdotes overlap throughout the pages to convey, highlight and enrich four main stories that structure the essay: the stories of Ghanaba, Nii Noi Nortey, Nii Otoo Annan and the Por Por group. …