Channeling the ancestors of the blues in 'Roots'

When, as a child, Scott Sandvik first heard the Beatles, he thought they had invented everything they did. Only later, when he began to study rock 'n' roll history, did Sandvik realize that the band was simply putting its own spin on music that had existed for decades.

"I realized there were tunes they were covering, and their singing and harmonies were synthesizing a lot of different influences," says Sandvik, a guitarist. "But when you're young, everyone thinks that way. The first music they come upon is `sui generis' -- this came out of nothing. Then you start to realize and discover, hopefully, all the music that came before."

That's why Sandvik believes young -- and not so young -- contemporary music fans can connect to the African-American pre-blues music he discovered more than a decade ago. Sandvik, along with his musical partner, singer Vanessa Morris, as well as musician Balla Tounkara, will perform "Roots of the Blues" Sunday at Jamaica Plain's Forsyth Chapel, sponsored by the Forest Hills Educational Trust.

Tounkara, who plays the kora, a fretless stringed instrument similar to a lute or sitar, was born in Mali and now lives in Somerville. He grew up loving the music of legendary bluesmen such as B. B. King and John Lee Hooker, and he sees himself as part of that tradition, though he refers to the music he plays as "the blues before the blues."

"The blues came to America late. All music comes from Africa, and the original blues go back eight centuries, so the blues are older than America," says Tounkara, who will perform a separate set on Sunday. "The original blues began in Segou, a town in Mali."

Those ancient sounds figure prominently in the music of Tounkara, who is descended from a prominent line of Malian griots -- storytellers and musicians who keep their culture alive by passing on their traditions.

"Through our music, songs, and lyrics, we send out the positive messages to people," he says. "You learn about life through my music. My music is not just for Africans or African-Americans. It's for human beings."

While teaching the class Black American Folk Music at the New England Conservatory of Music, Sandvik began to uncover music dating to the 18th century: chants, lullabies, and hymns passed from one generation of African-Americans to the next. These are the songs that gave birth to the blues and would lay the foundations of modern popular music from rock 'n' roll to rap.

"It's all spiritual music," Sandvik says. "What first turned me on was hymn singing, which is called the `surge style,' which is a slow, ornamented style of singing that has a power and a haunting quality that grabbed me.

"It's hard to describe why something is powerful and moving. It just is," he adds. "Something grabs you because it grabs you."

It also grabbed Morris, who met Sandvik when she served as a teaching assistant in one of his classes. After Sandvik performed a solo concert of this music at Jordan Hall, he gave Morris a tape of the music.

"I painstakingly tried to learn the melodies because they're very intricate," she says. "It can be somewhat humbling because you'll listen to like 20 seconds, and you'll be sitting there for hours trying to do something with it."

Once Morris got a handle on enough of the songs, she and Sandvik began performing together in 1999.

"I love the process of these songs, since they come from an oral tradition," she says. "The people just sound so humble, and I like the fact that they were so humble in their approach to music that was passed down to them. They didn't even really realize the significance of it; it was just something they had. And, I liked that a lot of the stuff we studied was sung and performed by African-Americans. I find it inspiring."

This music, much of it documented in the 1950s by ethnomusicologist and record producer Alan Lomax, received mainstream attention in 1999, when Moby tastefully wed some of these traditional songs to techno and electronica beats on his breakthrough album, "Play." While admiring Moby's approach, Morris prefers to maintain the authenticity of the music.

"As a jazz vocalist, I don't want to break out into my scatting," she says with laugh. "And that's hard since jazz singing is comparatively pretty free. You're given a loose framework, and then you're able to put whatever you want into it. Whatever's in your ear you just go for it. With this music, which is based on a set scale with microtones and certain colors, I can't get too far away from that or I feel like I'm putting something else on the tune.

"I want to work with what's there, but still make it creative," she says. "I want to use the same notes, the same colors that they're using, and extract as much as I can from the original melody."

Those melodies, Sandvik says, may sound familiar to listeners because they're "so closely related to things they do know."

"The whole phenomenon of chanted speech is as old as can be in African and African-American traditions," he says. "Rap is a different twist, which has everything to do with technology, and that makes it different. But the basic idea of chanted speech is an old one.

"It's important to know how history works, and the fact that everything comes from something else," Sandvik adds. "All the music you listen to has its own musical ancestors. And there's a special feeling about this music, a quality it has that's lacking in contemporary music. That's partly why I was drawn to it. We want to bring that into the contemporary scene."

("Roots of the Blues" with the Morris Sandvik Duo and Balla Tounkara is at Forsyth Chapel, 95 Forest Hills Ave. in Jamaica Plain, 4 p.m., Sunday; $12 (reservations recommended). For more information, call 617-524-3354.)