Mariama Ndure Sonically Embodies Liberation, Both Collective and Personal
Ndure’s full-length debut, Rituals, seamlessly weaves together West African musical traditions with elements of R&B, soul, hip hop, modern jazz and improvisation
By Tyler Francischine
Photos by Leikny Havik SkjærsethRituals — the full-length debut from Mariama Ndure, a vocalist and composer born in Norway to Gambian parents — sonically mirrors the sea change of collective liberation that’s washing over the world. Embodying the ocean’s tides, Ndure’s voice swells in bursts of strength before receding into breathy, contemplative moments.
Much like a storm that washes ashore, bringing waves that can crack apart a wooden boat into matchsticks, Rituals reaches peaks that demand your complete attention. If you’re really listening, and you understand the weight carried within her words — pain, injustice, the inhumane conditions of (Western) society that leave each of us feeling isolated and lost — you shatter into a million pieces, waiting for the next melodic swell to lift you up and rebuild you. When you gather your emotions and thoughts after Rituals ends, you find they’re not in the same configuration they once were.
Backed by Ibou Cissokho on kora, Liv Andrea Hauge on piano and backing vocals, Joel Ring on upright bass and Xander Crook on drums, Mariama Ndure also features guest appearances from vocalist and guitarist Becaye Aw, rapper BOLA, or Abimbola Akinsiku, as well as David Levesque on synth and Amo Soumah on percussion.
WOOO spoke with Mariama over a video call from Gainesville, Florida, to Oslo, Norway, about Rituals, dropping Friday, Oct. 18, 2024, on Global Sonics, the independent label founded by Norwegian, Algerian and French composer and musician Malika Makouf Rasmussen.
Let’s dive right into this stunning, demanding, prolific and extremely heartfelt album you created: Rituals. The first sounds the listener hears when they push ‘play’ are your isolated vocals, which are soon complemented by a sparse melody on the upright bass. A couple lines into the track, “My Body I,” you say, “My body, this body/They say it only carries one shade/My body, this body/An illusion of their ideas.” What ideas are you introducing us to in this opening?
Mariama: I’m talking about how the body is a shell, and how we’re constantly being judged because of our shells during this very short lifetime that we each have. This music was part of a commission that I received in 2020 from Global Oslo Music to write new music and create a live show. For this piece specifically, dance artist Amie Mbye and I were mirroring each other: both women of color, both artists based in Oslo, Norway, and both born to Gambian parents. We were experimenting with the idea of mirrors and the way that we can mirror each other. But what happens if this mirroring doesn’t match your ideas of yourself, or the ideas others have of you?
In this track, there’s an underlying discovery of feminine strength and defiance in the face of those restrictions that society places on us, especially as women of color. Not fitting in has often been the case for me, with my upbringing being raised in a Gambian home but being in an outwardly white society. There were so many demands that I couldn’t meet — on both sides. But, by the end of the track, it talks about finding my own voice, taking the power, and reclaiming this definition of myself.
For me, it’s about not being afraid to take space. A lot of times, especially when you live in a very white society, you’re often very scared to take up space. I felt like, with this music, I took a lot of space when I performed it, not feeling ashamed or scared of that.
Discovering and standing in your power seems to be a major theme we hear throughout these 12 songs. Was creating Rituals an empowering experience for you, and do you intend it to feel that way for listeners?
Mariama: We all have rituals that we do, whether we think about them or not. Maybe that’s waking up in the morning and drinking a cup of coffee or listening to the radio; sometimes it’s allowing yourself to go into that meditative state to get ready for bed. This album is a call to embrace rituals, or maybe to examine the rituals in your life. For me, making this record was a ritual in self-discovery, much like my ritual of what I do with my hair every day. Embracing the self and our rituals — because they are personal — can mean something to us. Maybe those rituals even help us make it through the day, or through the year. In this album creation process, I’ve gone through some rituals, and I’ve had a lot of time to be in myself.
I’d love to learn more about the creation process behind these songs. I understand many of these tracks trace their roots to trips you took to the Gambia in 2018 as part of your master’s program at the Norwegian Academy of Music. In 2023, you traveled to Senegal to continue your discovery and research. How did becoming embedded with musicians in the Mandinka and Wolof traditions impact your artistic approach?
Mariama: Even before I made those specific musical discovery travels to Gambia and Senegal, I used to be in a West African musical ensemble in Gainesville, Florida, called Famato. It was led by Amo Soumah, a dear friend from Guinea, [a country in West Africa just south of the Gambia.] We played West African traditional music from the Mandinka tribe. He’s just such an amazing percussionist, and I learned so much from him during my time in Gainesville. It was a big part of my musical journey to learn more about traditions from West Africa, and it was the first time I was part of a project that highlighted music from my region — like actively being a part of that, rather than just listening to it. I’m really glad he was able to play djembe and dunduns for four of the tracks on Rituals. “‘Lang Bang,’ for example, which is a traditional folk tune from the Mandinka tribe, is a tribute to the West African griots, who are musicians who pass down traditions within their families. They’ve kept their songs alive since, I don’t know, before Christ even, before colonization and all that. So ‘Lang Bang’ gives homage to the griots, and it’s also my way of thanking the griots I met during my trips to Gambia and Senegal, who’ve been so generous with teaching me this music. I’m taking us back to where it all started, so the tradition can meet the current moment. In that exchange, I am constructing my own expression.
Yes, I’m from Gambia, but I’m not from a griot tradition. Yet, I was met with so much generosity and love in these meetings in Gambia and Senegal. I learned songs, I took choral lessons. In Senegal, I was able to take some percussion lessons with N’deye Seck, one of the very few female percussionists who’s from a griot family. She’s freaking amazing, so that was really cool. For me, these experiences were about taking ownership of what it means to be Gambian, besides through the eyes of family and the society I grew up in.
I simply have to mention your first single, “Saraba,” which you learned in Senegal based on a traditional melody created by griots and popularized by Samba Diabré Samb and Lalo Kéba Dramé. There’s a moment in the song when you sing the name of your father, [who passed away from cancer in 1994.] Your voice stretches – but never cracks – to withstand the weight of the pain caused by this loss. Can you share a bit more about what this song means to you?
Mariama: There was something about the melody that drew me. It’s a tribute to my ancestors, and specifically my dad. I had a really hard time singing this song. I was on the brink of crying in the first recording we did of it. I felt that I needed to re-do it to make it ‘sound better,’ but the sound engineer was like, ‘The point is not to make it sound perfect; this is what it is. Re-recording will remove the essence of the song.’
The sadness of this song comes from the dreams that my parents had, migrating from Gambia to Norway with all these hopes for themselves. They weren’t able to fulfill them as a unit when my dad passed away. My parents always wanted to go back to Gambia. ‘Saraba’ really takes on the sacrifice and heartache my parents had to go through, leaving a home they loved. Here I am, living my dream, trying to be true to who I am, and honoring them and my culture.
Thank you for sharing that. I’d also love to learn more about the inspiration behind “Release,” a standout that I’m sure will stop listeners in their tracks with your powerful vocals and frenetic, all-encompassing instrumentation. What’s the story behind this song?
Mariama: When I wrote this song, I was so angry. It was in 2020, a period when things were becoming clear to me in friendships and in other relationships — the way that I was living with discomfort. As women, being on our periods, we are used to a certain amount of discomfort, and we just live with it and power through, because society doesn’t really give you room to take that time off for yourself. In that same way, I was in some unhealthy friendships, and I didn’t realize it until then. It wasn’t necessarily that people were being mean to me, but I was constantly in situations in which I didn’t feel safe. I would experience racism or ignorant stuff, and I would just feel uncomfortable.
“Release” is about confronting those people, but then, I’m also confronting myself, because when people — and the media — say stuff to you, you believe it. In a colonized world, I see internal racism is still present, not only in the West, but also even in Gambia. You are looked upon as more beautiful if you have lighter skin, and if you have more European features. Straight hair is the good hair. This track is me telling those people who have been imprinting this on us, ‘Fuck you, this is not true.’
For me, that release came when I was living in Gainesville. After so many years of working against my curls, straightening them out, putting them in braids and experiencing so much pain, because I have always been incredibly tender-headed, one day, I decided I wanted to go natural. I also want to add, this is not a diss toward people who choose to straighten their hair and so forth. The beauty of Black hair is how many different forms it can take, and we love to see that. The process of going natural was huge for me. When I think about it now, it’s sort of crazy: my friend was like, ‘I got you, and we’ll go through this and this, and you’re going to look so good.’ Like this song, that process was a way of confronting those demons within and externally and finding a way of releasing myself from that, which we can all relate to.
Speaking of the way we relate, I’d like to see music critics try to relate to Rituals by placing this album in a box or attaching genre labels to it, as it seamlessly weaves together West African musical traditions with jazz, hip-hop, soul and R&B. How does this work utilize your formal musical training, and how does it expand beyond what you learned in that proverbial ivory tower?
Mariama: I’m really glad that I did my master’s program, because I wouldn’t have been able to travel to Gambia, pushing myself to learn about my musical culture in the way that I did, but I also definitely felt like there were a lot of microaggressions. I was told, ‘We haven’t had anyone like you here before.’ This music is a sort of rebuilding of myself and consequently showing people that there are many layers to being a musician — to being a Black, female composer and musician.
When performing these songs, it meant the world to me when Black people came up to me after the shows and thanked me and were so moved. The world definitely likes to put limitations on us based on the way we look. They assume we must have a certain type of sound if we have a certain type of look, but really, there are no limitations.
Rituals by Mariama Ndure will be released on October 18 by Global Sonics. Listen to singles “Saraba” and “Beginning Again” here.
