Singing from the Rooftop

Last month, on a crisp October Sunday, Guinean singer/songwriter Natu Camara and her band took to a Harlem rooftop for a live set and recording session. It was their second live, in-person set since January, thanks to the stubborn presence of COVID-19. The virus has forced musicians everywhere to improvise in order to play together, and the rooftop setting provided a safe way to get together, experiment technically, and begin recording tracks for an upcoming album. 

The band hadn’t rehearsed since January, only seeing each other for a livestream for the Madison World Music Festival in September. After getting the instruments and recording equipment up four flights, one was reminded why city rooftops capture the imagination, It was a day to remember before a note was played — the rooftop vantage point offered a wide, sweeping view that stretched across all of Harlem and beyond. 

Dimendi put the world on notice that Natu Camara was back, and 2020 was a shaping up to be a breakout year, with a second album in the works and several high-proline festival gigs including the Festival International in Lafayette, La, Globalbuquerque in New Mexico, and the Madison World Music Festival. Natu had just started working with the band on her second solo album at the beginning of the year but COVID disrupted those plans and forced her to get creative.

“How do we survive and make music in this pandemic?” Natu asked, explaining how she learned to record a whole show on her phone in order to do virtual festivals. “We all learned something. After we agree on the tempo and the structure, I recorded the guitar and vocals and sent it to the musicians who added their parts. then we put it together and created a mix.” To break up the isolation during the depth of the quarantine Natu also began weekly Zoom sing-alongs to keep spirits up. 

At her rooftop session, Natu sang several songs from her album Dimedi and the new (to my ears), “Look in the Mirror”,  that stuck out immediately with its forceful message and hard edged sound. 

“Take a look in the Mirror” the lyrics urge — not the reflection, but deeper inside yourself and how the decisions you make affect the world. “The mirror” is doing most of the talking here, answered by Lindsey Wilson reading the chorus: “I am making the world for the better”. The track begins with a quick flourish from Oscar Debe’s timbala, he and his mates John Adams on keyboards, Kayode Kuti on bass, and Gianni Mano on congas pull together on a percolating reggae groove, Matthew Albeck’s guitar puts the exclamation mark on Natu’s vocals. Although written several years ago, current events give the words a particular resonance; reflection is not a passive activity but a medium for change. Baba Graff’s recording of “Look in the Mirror”  will be released November 10th as a video single.

Before coming to Harlem, Natu Camara had already made her musical mark in Guinea, with Ideal Black Girls, the first all female rap group in West Africa. Though a superstar at home, Natu’s relocation to NYC wasn’t easy - personal tragedy, a lack of English, and the day-to-day working grind prevented her from making music for six years. But in 2018 she found her voice again, releasing her solo album Dimendi, which was recorded in Mali in Salif Keita’s Bamako studio. 

“It’s a little scary going into the studio right now” she continues, “The studio is very intimate, enclosed, we had to find a way to work together and minimize the risk. Everyone in the band tested negative but you just don’t know who was using the microphones there before you. That was the beginning of the idea of working on the rooftop.” Rather than go to the Graff studios, Baba Graff came to the rooftop and recorded the band there, and the results sound good so it may be the way the new album gets made. 

Live music is a rare and precious commodity in New York these days and this event particularly so, since it also bore witness to the effort — and risk — musicians made just to get together and play. It offered a glimpse of the work process, the quick conversations between takes or false starts;  the changes made until things came together in the right way. All the mundane, workaday details of music-making that we too often took for granted before now feel almost sacred; a rare bit of normalcy to be savored and protected. As the music filtered gently down to the streets below an occasional car horn or siren echoed off surrounding buildings, prompting a bittersweet moment of reflection on a most unusual year, until the sound faded. 

Lead Vocal & Guitar: Natu Camara, Guitar Electric: Matthew Albeck, Bass: Kayode Kuti, Drums: Oscar Debe, Keyword: John F Adam, Percussions: Gianni Mano, Engineer: Baba GRAFF Studio, Creative director: Jamie Ambler, lineup was the same as the virtual performance for the Madison World Music Festival (link above)