- Playing
- May Your Days
- From
- Julie Shapiro
While I traveled around Ghana in January, 2008, certain sounds jumped into my recorder, like: kiddo handclaps, the pounding of fufu in Circle Market, Empress Olivia and her kpash kposh, screaming insects, screaming birds, screaming bats, one very hungry goat, fishermen singing while hauling in an enormous net from the Gulf of Guinea, the unmistakable cacophony of a tro-tro station, an unexpected pop song blaring from streetside speakers, the deep rhythms of a wedding celebration and glorious live music from a front porch.
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Piece Description
While I traveled around Ghana in January, 2008, certain sounds jumped into my recorder, like: kiddo handclaps, the pounding of fufu in Circle Market, Empress Olivia and her kpash kposh, screaming insects, screaming birds, screaming bats, one very hungry goat, fishermen singing while hauling in an enormous net from the Gulf of Guinea, the unmistakable cacophony of a tro-tro station, an unexpected pop song blaring from streetside speakers, the deep rhythms of a wedding celebration and glorious live music from a front porch.
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James Reiss
Posted on April 25, 2008 at 12:16 PM | Permalink
Review of May Your Days
Julie Shapiro has lugged her mic from the Windy City to West Africa in search of The Ultimate Radio Experience. During the 1950s if Cinerama captured wrap-around visual imagery in movie theaters, in 2008 Shapiro's roving mic presents an Audiorama for public radio in gorgeous living decibels. Unlike any travelogue, Shapiro's pieces are devoid of commentary, such National Geographic-type sentences as "Ghana is a land of contrasts" or "Accra, the capital city of a thriving country, is a colorful seaport."
PDs may find it less risky to schedule Rick Steves for his hour-long travel shows than Julie Shapiro, whose segments are a fraction of Steves's length. Steves, a master impresario, would interview a couple of English-speaking Ghanaian tour guides to give Americans a sense of the West African country a bit smaller than the state of Utah. But Shapiro is unique in being able to evoke the mood of, say, the Circle Market in Takoradi merely by recording the pounding of thick doughlike wads of the traditional vegetable known as fufu. Listeners don't need a translator to make sense of Ghanaian fishermen chanting while hauling in their nets.
The writer's axiom that it is better "to show" than "to tell," better to convey a direct experience of something than to yammer about it, holds true here. Maybe Shapiro's earful of Akan and Mossi, as well as English, would benefit from her written liner notes, the fact, for example, that "While I traveled around Ghana in January, 2008, certain sounds jumped into my recorder." Surely a brief introductory spiel about what she recorded -- kiddo handclaps, Empress Olivia and her kpash kposh, screaming birds, et cetera -- might focus Shapiro's fugal rendition of the art of noise.
Toward the end of this segment, all at once a small child warbles the words, "May your days be merry and bright." The notion of a white Christmas in Ghana may sound odd to American ears. But Shapiro has risked her career on offbeat details, sound bites you've never quite heard before.
Lol, folks: in Julie Shapiro's world it's always Christmas!