POR POR: Honk Horn Music from Ghana

Ghanaian transport worker's union makes a unique music— POR POR (pronounced “Paw Paw”) is named for the honking sound of antique squeeze-bulb car horns, ubiquitous on the wooden lorries of Ghana’s early transport history. After vehicles with electric horns arrived in West Africa, these obsolete signaling instruments virtually disappeared. But a union of bus and truck drivers in the Accra township of La kept the por por horns from their old vehicles and, adding bells, drums, and voices, invented a jazzy honking music. The La drivers only performed Por Por at funerals of their fellow union transport workers. Because they weren’t professional musicians, their music went largely unnoticed in Ghana and remained unknown to the larger world for 60 years. By accident, UNM music and anthropology professor Steven Feld encountered the Por Por band in Accra in 2005, and the music got its first international exposure when he produced the group’s debut 2007 CD for Smithsonian Folkways. Tonight, Feld will premier their new CD on VoxLox entitled, KLEBO! accompanied by a slide show of photographs and commentary to be followed by a screening of his just-released, hour-long documentary film, A Por Por Funeral For Ashirifie, which follows a honk horn funeral and connects the honk horn drivers’ funerals to the jazz funeral history of New Orleans.