Washington Post
Sept 28 2012
Pioneering collector of African music retires from Voice of America
By Tara Bahrampour, Friday, September 28, 9:10 PM
Long before there was ping-pong diplomacy or pere – stroika, a short,
balding, Armenian American was lugging an enormous reel-to-reel from
village to village, sweet-talking people into singing and playing for
him.
Leo Sarkisian had the kind of career that today lives only in legend ‘
hired by famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow, he was paid by the U.S.
government to travel throughout Africa, visiting every country over
half a century, and returning with thousands of rare recordings of
music that most of the world had never heard.
On Friday, Sarkisian, 91, officially retired from the Voice of
America, where the weekly radio show he started 47 years ago, `Music
Time in Africa,’ is VOA’s longest-running English-language program.
In Africa, he socialized with presidents, military dictators,
accomplished musicians and tribal villagers. He outwardly steered away
from politics, but under the surface he wove a subtle diplomatic
tapestry based around grooving on tunes.
`So many of them had never talked to an American before,’ Sarkisian
said Friday morning as colleagues gathered around their desks for a
coffee-and-doughnut send-off. `The embassies wouldn’t have cultural
affairs officers, so the embassies would use me.’
Listeners across English-speaking Africa grew accustomed to hearing
the flat A’s of Sarkisian’s Boston accent, teaching them about the
music of their own countries and those of their neighbors.
`He was the man,’ said Peter Clottey, a Ghana native who is now a
reporter for a VOA program called `Daybreak Africa’ and who listened
to Sarkisian’s show in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. `People thought he
was very authentic, and he got to know the musicians firsthand. To
hear your country’s music on an international station is a big deal. .
.?. Nobody had done that before.’
In the words of his wife, Mary, who traveled with him, Sarkisian `just
lucked out.’ He had enviable leeway, going where he wanted and staying
as long as he liked. Often he was met at the airport by dignitaries
and admirers.
`I step out of the airplane, and there are all the fans and the
military escort into the capital,’ Sarkisian recalled of an early trip
to Ghana. `VOA, we were so damn important! This was unbelievable. I
hate to get political, but that’s gone.’
Sarkisian, whose parents emigrated from Turkey early in the 20th
century, had studied art and worked as a commercial artist in New York
and a map-drawer for the Army during World War II.
He took an interest in world music at a time when `foreign music was
kind of a dirty word here,’ he said, and after he wrote a paper on it,
he was hired by California-based Tempo Records to go abroad and record
music for use in Hollywood films.
Marrying in 1949, he and Mary, also a Massachusetts-born Armenian,
started traveling in the Middle East where, `in the mountains of
Afghanistan, in the Hindu Kush mountains, she slept in pup tents while
I made sure that the howling wolves wouldn’t come in,’ he recalled.
With a dapper mustache and a knack for languages, he picked up Farsi
and some Arabic, in addition to the Turkish, Armenian and French he
had learned as a child. As African countries were getting their
independence in the 1950s, Tempo sent him to Ghana and then to Guinea,
where Murrow caught up with him.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/pioneering-collector-of-african-music-retires-from-voice-of-america/2012/09/28/a9c10744-0998-11e2-afff-d6c7f20a83bf_story.html