Podcasting the Blues From Cameroon
Last April I blogged about Roland Boula (see the “Blues Scholar”) and his solitary existence as the caretaker of Madison Park, a small beach resort outside of Limbe. Roland has remained one of my closest and most trusted friends in Cameroon. In the presence of others, he’s fond of saying that we actually came from the same mother, indicating that our different skin color is only a small variation of inherited traits routinely observed between siblings. We often share a good laugh at this, but I’d be proud to call Roland my brother any day of the week.
In addition to being an all-around nice guy, Roland is one of those rare individuals with the soul of an artist, the discerning eye of an engineer and the heart of a poet. A typical day at Madison Park might find him wrenching an engine, roofing a building or struggling variously to stem the inevitable decay brought by the salt air upon a half-acre of goods imported by his patron. In his spare time—if he’s lucky to have any— Roland’s escape is into the music borne of African rhythms: blues, jazz, gospel and soul.
When I first met Roland, he showed me his prized vinyl collection which included a half-dozen scratchy LPs and a paperback encyclopedia of blues and jazz recording artists. He talked of the history of various sub-forms of the genres, of which artist inspired whom, their personal stories and so on. True to form, he then showed me how he’d engineered an ingenious solution to adapt a mismatched needle to an old turntable he found in Douala.
That was two years ago. Since then, Roland has scrimped and saved enough cash to buy a secondhand laptop computer. He told me he’d reserved a third of his salary for months until he was able to do so. The seller had loaded Windows Vista on it, apparently in an effort to boost its perceived value, but only succeeding in making the thing slower to boot and operate. Roland asked if I could carry his treasured laptop back to Buea to install Windows XP (smart man), reload the drivers and add “some music software” if I had any.
Now, this is the sort of short-term IT project I can really sink my teeth into. The following weekend, I returned to Madison Park with Roland’s laptop configured precisely as it should be, which included an ultimate blues collection of more than 90 artists and 1,500 individual tracks. Along with a selection of MP3 software and various other goodies, I included a laptop DJ program that simulates two turntables and a mixer. Of everything, Roland was most taken by the latter.
The reason was clear. If Roland had his druthers, he told me, he’d host his own radio program in which he plays thematic selections from his collection and “tell the story of the blues.” I mentioned podcasting as a means of expanding his audience beyond the greater Limbe/Buea/Tiko area to include listeners from all over the world. This struck a chord with him. He has most of the tools at his disposal already, save for recording software and Internet access.
With the frequency of my visits to Limbe I can easily carry Roland’s podcast back to Buea with me on a USB drive where I can upload it at the office. That’s the easy part. However, I’ll confess that aside from occasionally using recording tools like Audacity I wouldn’t know where to start with creating a podcast. So if any readers can recommend their preferred podcasting setup, please post a comment. Open source or freeware apps for the Windows platform are what we’re after, preferably something without too steep of a learning curve.
With some luck, you might soon be listening to Roland’s blues show recorded where the sky meets the sea in the SW of Cameroon.
brilliant
look forward to hearing it
wish i knew more about podcasting to know the programmes you looking for but hopefully someone can help.
Good Luck
There are quite a few free podcasting services out there. Just google “free podcast hosting” to get a sampling.
Alternatively you can set up podcasting through a wordpress.com blog (though I think you may need to pay for a space upgrade to store all the files). The support forums are pretty good over there and it’d let you set up your own domain name and post blog entries as well as the audio.
I had not read your “Blues Scholar” post, so it was nice to read both essays. Last time I was in Buea, I spent a long day with a friend wandering around Molyko and putting together a CD of Cameroonian rap. I think I nearly got a guy fired at one music shop because I was taking up so much of his time–his boss got quite upset. I enjoy the rap, even though I can’t understand some of the lyrics in various dialects and in rapid-fire French. But I can catch some of the words, and it is quite expressive rap and is very politically and socially conscious in some of its messages. Maybe Roland will someday podcast his favorites, and if he is into rap, then perhaps we’ll get a taste of this “Kamer” rap/hiphop. Is it just me or are his fans already making requests? OK, no pressure, Roland and Mola Evakise, take your time, small-small.
I just did a search for videos of Cameroonian rap and found this one, which I liked immediately:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_1B9cbl37s
Hey, Bill. Great post, as usual. I listen to a lot of podcasts and a friend and I even tried recording a few episodes of a movie review podcast (though we never got around to posting or publishing it). Anyways, a handful of the podcasts that I listen to are from mypodcast.com, a free podcast hosting site. The general quality of those podcasts don’t strike me to differently than other, more professionally hosted podcasts. I should note, however, that the vast majority of podcasts I listen to are conversational or reporting. The quality might be different from what you want for a musically oriented podcast. I hope you were able to glean something helpful from all that. I’m looking forward to hearing Roland’s show.
Oh, also: I ran into Joe today on my way to UB. If you guys would like to get together this weekend, let me know, or stop by the guest house at the Presbyterian Synod Office
I worry that I am creating a reputation for being a blogger’s worst nightmare. Yeah, I suspect OurManInBda would agree that I am like, uh, the Blog Police. What can I say? It must be the whole issue of my once aspiring (and failing woefully) to be a member of the Cameroonian educated elite–what some would have called the “intelligentsia” back in those heady nationalistic days….
All the same, I want to say that I am positively haunted by this sentence you wrote: “In addition to being an all-around nice guy, Roland is one of those rare individuals with the soul of an artist, the discerning eye of an engineer and the heart of a poet.”
This sentence made me think of my brother. My brother loves music and has a really incredible collection. My brother is also quite the engineer. (He happens to be an IT consultant, too, and I take tons of questions to him whenever I read your IT-related blog entries or when I read OurMan’s IT ideas for volunteers.) I believe my brother has a little poetry in his soul, too, but he is definitely an artist.
I really appreciate Roland’s willingness to open up his world to us. I wonder what Roland would say if asked what it means to have “the heart of a poet.” I’d be curious to know. That way, armed with Roland’s definition, I can check if I, too, have the heart of a poet.
bill,
if you and roland succeed with the podcast, please, let me know. i loved taking in his selections at madison park and equally enjoyed discussing his musical tastes.
thanks,
amber