Portland’s Parfait Bassale uses the arts to teach empathy

The musician from West Africa has a unique style of music and storytelling aimed at inspiring a better understanding of others

by Emily Green | 17 May 2017

Parfait Bassale is a local singer, songwriter and rap artist who, when he’s not at his day job, produces music out of the basement of his Northeast Portland home.

While virtually unknown in the U.S., he’s become popular in Africa in recent years, with several of his original tracks getting regular radio play across Senegal, Niger and Togo.

With years of practice and study, Parfait has learned to artfully trigger emotional response through his skillful manipulation of lyrics and sound.

But to truly understand and appreciate Parfait’s music is to understand and appreciate the man himself.



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Those close to him say the two are indistinguishable from each other – that he is a truly authentic artist.

Parfait’s melodious journey begins long before he mastered the guitar and began to compose his unique soulful blend of blues, pop, reggae and hip-hop.

It began when he was about 12 years old and was introduced to the poetic beats of French rap.

The French colonized much of West Africa in the mid-19th century, and while most conquered nations regained their independence in 1960, French remains the official language in many areas.

Thus, while the influx of immigrants to France that followed decolonization came from culturally diverse countries, French was a language many already shared.

It was the early 1990s, and African immigrants in French ghettos were creating rhythmic prose as their vehicle for decrying colonialism and the discrimination they were met with in Europe.

Themes of cultural identity and societal ills echoed throughout their politically charged album tracks.

“It was just powerful,” Parfait said. “It was the music of my generation.”

At the time, Parfait was a boy living more than 2,000 miles away in Dakar, the coastal capital city of Senegal.

Radio stations across the small West African nation often played French rap, and he would listen intently.

Like many French rap icons, he too liked to vent his frustrations in written prose. He also knew what it felt like to be an outlier, often facing discrimination at school.

Theirs was an art form that resonated with him deeply.

While business and formal education were still conducted in French, most West Africans spoke their native languages at home and in the streets.

Parfait was originally from Benin, a nation on Africa’s North Central Atlantic coast. Not long after his birth in 1981, his family moved to the larger inland nation of Niger, where Parfait spent seven years of his childhood. He quickly picked up the native language, Zerma, from playing with neighborhood children. At home, his family spoke his mother’s native language, Mina. At school, he was taught in French.

When his family moved to Senegal, it was the third time he had a new native language to learn.

This time, he relied primarily on his French to communicate with his peers, but he spoke it with a funny foreign accent.

The other kids, who all spoke Wolof in the halls at school and on the streets, would say of him, “This is just a gnack.”

It was the term used for immigrants from places such as Benin, the Ivory Coast and Togo. Loosely translated, it means “the savages.”

Parfait couldn’t remember living in Benin, but it was a label he carried with him regardless, and sometimes the label was all that others saw.

“It was a loaded term,” Parfait said. He remembers trying to make sense of what he called the man-to-man cruelty and micro-aggressions he was experiencing.

“We’re all Africans. We’ve all been colonized by the French,” he said. “Why would we have ways of characterizing each other?”

As hip-hop culture spread across the West, rap artists began popping up in Senegal, as well. Some groups rhymed in French, but most used their native language, Wolof, as a way to re-appropriate the genre.

“One of the greatest paradoxes of the introduction of hip-hop music in Senegal is that unlike the United States, where it originated, or Europe, it was the privileged class that first adopted and promoted its lifestyle,” according to an article on Music in Africa Foundation’s website.

Parfait described his family as “lower middle class,” by African standards.

His father, Joseph Bassale, was an air-traffic safety engineer moving up the ranks at his company. It was when Parfait was 9 that his father was promoted to a position that took the family to Dakar, Senegal, where his employer’s headquarters were located.

Dakar’s metropolitan area has a population of more than 2 million. While rural areas of Africa might have fewer amenities, this city was built with modern infrastructure.

There they lived in a four-bedroom, two-bathroom flat, and like most urban Senegalese homes, it was equipped with a telephone line, running water and electricity.

Parfait’s parents drove a Peugeot 504, and unless times were tight, they had cable TV, his window into the West.

Every couple of years, the Bassale family flew back to Benin for vacation.

Aside from the discrimination he faced as an immigrant, Parfait’s childhood was a happy one. He often spent his afternoons playing soccer in the streets with neighborhood kids. At home, he adored the family dog, Wolfart.

They had two mango trees in the front yard that he liked to climb. He would sit among the branches, tearing the skin from the mango with his teeth so he could eat the fruit fresh off the tree.

While 95 percent of Senegal is Muslim, Parfait’s family was among the Christian minority. His mother, Josephine Bassale, sang in the church choir.

“One of the beautiful things about Senegal and other parts of the world was the relationship between the religious communities was really harmonious,” he said. “During Christian holidays, Christians will bring food to their neighbors who are Muslim, and vice versa.”

As a teenager, he wore sagging jeans and oversized T-shirts. High schoolers in Dakar sported Timberland boots and the latest Air Jordans, trends they picked up from Western media.

Parfait found friendship with two classmates who were also the sons of expatriates, Aziz Fall and Wally N’diaye.

When the boys were about 14, like many other teens in Senegal, they formed a rap group. What set them apart was that they rapped in French, a language they all knew well.

They would practice their rhymes together on the weekends, in the bedrooms and courtyards at their homes. After scribbling lyrics in pencil on notepads, they’d recite them to instrumental tracks from more prominent artists.

This pastime was so popular that a handful of local music stores specialized in the instrumental-only cassette tapes they would use for their background beats.

The three friends began to perform at afterschool events and became known at school as the rappers.

Their teachers and parents encouraged them to focus on their studies, but their classmates cheered them on.

They called themselves Sixth Sense.

High school friends Aziz Fall (left) and Wally N’diaye (center) and Parfait Bassale (right) formed as the rap group Sixth Sense.

Photo courtesy of Parfait Bassale

Parfait laughs at the name now. “Sixth Sense – yeah, we thought we had so much to share,” he joked.

He remembers a song they wrote titled ““Le Poids des Noirs,” which he said means “the burden of the black people.”

“In that song, we talked about some of the social challenges we were still seeing, like poverty, and trying to expand it to what we researched and heard about in other places – in America,” he said. “We were trying to make a connection between that experience all across the world, and how that weight can still be felt.”

Parfait’s parents often scolded him for writing songs when he was supposed to be doing homework.

“Very early on, I had to start doing it in hiding,” Parfait said. “My parents were starting to see it as in the way of my studies.”

Both of Parfait’s parents were college educated, and they stressed the value of an education to their children. While finances were limited at times, Parfait’s parents kept their four children enrolled in private schools.

In West Africa, Parfait said, the public schools are not bad, but because of political unrest, there could be long periods of time when the teachers were on strike.

“That’s weeks and months of students not being able to go to school,” he said. “And then the government can invalidate the entire academic year.”

Local colleges and universities had the same problem, so when Parfait’s older brother, Jules Bassale, graduated from high school, he traveled to the United States on a student visa to attend Portland State University.

Jules remembers, shortly before he left for college, being impressed when Parfait’s rap group was the opening act for big-name Senegalese rap group Daara J.

“It was a big deal,” Jules said.

For Parfait, it was a surreal teenage moment: He couldn’t believe he was singing through his idols’ microphone.

In 1999, Sixth Sense was recognized as one of the most promising new music groups in Senegal, making it to the “final five” portion of a national competition that culminated with a concert where the winner was chosen from the top five groups. They didn’t win, but it was an achievement Parfait is proud of.

A year later, Aziz and Wally were no longer pursuing music, so Parfait decided to join his brother in Oregon.

His parents told him they could pay for the first couple of quarters at Portland State University, but after that, he would be on his own.

“I came, hit the ground running, looking for scholarships, looking for all kinds of jobs,” he said.

His brother, majoring in computer engineering, showed him the ropes and helped him find scholarships.

Many international students major in technical trades because company sponsorship is more likely. Like his older brother and his father before him, Parfait declared his major in engineering. A couple years later, his younger brother would do the same.

His first campus job was from 2 to 4 a.m. at the school’s library. From there, he worked any and every campus job he could get. He refereed soccer games, worked in the computer labs and as a teacher’s assistant. He even became a resident manager so that he could get into student housing.

He remembers approaching teachers when he didn’t have enough money to register, telling them that he would be attending their class and turning in homework if they would allow him to do so, promising to pay for the credits before the end of the term.

“It was some of the most humbling times in my life,” he said. “It was hardest when it was a teacher you’ve already taken once – you’re like, oh no, I can’t go and talk to this teacher again.”

The church he was attending in those days, Athey Creek Christian Fellowship in Tualatin, helped pay his tuition a couple of times when he couldn’t come up with all the funds.

He also received scholarship money through PSU’s International Cultural Service Program. In exchange for tuition, he gave 90 hours’ worth of cultural presentations at local grade schools and retirement homes each academic year. The idea was to bridge the gap between Oregonians and different cultures.

His parents sent him artifacts that he would show to often distracted and bored schoolchildren while he clicked through a PowerPoint presentation about Senegal and Benin.

Each quarter, he took a full credit load, sometimes more. Because he was still grappling with English, he would record every lecture and then listen to it repeatedly later in the day, between classes and odd jobs, to decipher what was said.

He said those days he drank so much coffee that caffeine doesn’t affect him anymore.

Meanwhile, he was also adjusting to American culture. Once again, he found himself being characterized by other students as something he was not.

“All of them assumed that because I grew up in Africa, I probably never saw a car, was never on a plane. People asking me, ‘How in the world did you get to America? Did you swim?’ Literally! I was asked questions like that,” he said.

“I’d play dumb with some people and just see how deeply stupid of a conversation we could have. I would say, ‘Yeah, it took me about a month to swim here.’”

He had a hard time making sense of the college drinking culture, and as a Christian, there were aspects of campus life he said he wouldn’t allow himself to take part in.

The U.S. was fast paced, and all the food tasted like it was doused in sugar. He noticed a tension between religious groups that he hadn’t experienced growing up.

He began to feel self-righteous, wondering, “What’s wrong with these people?”

He continued to vent through music, spending hours in his dorm room writing French lyrics. Now that he had a computer, for the first time in his life, he could produce his own beats.

“As I was writing songs to process my own experience, I started to realize that I was being a hypocrite,” he said. “Because in some cases, people didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt, that I could have had rich experiences, that I could actually be an intelligent person behind a funny accent – I realized I was doing exactly the same thing as I was judging cultural traits that are foreign to what I am used to.”

In 2009, he released his first album, composed of French rap songs he had written in his early days at the university. The album is aptly titled “Bonjour Babylon.”

Understanding French is not a prerequisite to enjoying this album.

At the urging of a friend one Sunday afternoon following church, Parfait picked up a guitar at Trade Up Music. It was a Hohner acoustic.

He taught himself to play the basic chords and began to transform some of his raps into song. Eventually, he began to play his more church-appropriate tunes before his congregation, where he was met with resounding support.

He was about two years into his undergraduate degree when, one day, as he was preparing to give yet another one of his PowerPoint presentations on West Africa, he decided to ditch the slide show.

This time, all he brought was his guitar. Instead of lecturing the French class at Lake Oswego’s Lakeridge High School that day, he sang his songs and talked to the students about why he wrote them.

“The response from the audience was something different,” he said. “They were attentive. I knew I was onto something.”

He eventually changed his college major to business, and then went on to earn a master’s degree in conflict resolution, also from Portland State University.

In the course of his studies, he began to research empathy, realizing it was the missing link that, if achieved by opposing sides, could solve all conflicts.

Jules explained the way he saw his little brother adapt as the family moved from country to country, and as they eventually found themselves in Portland, was different than the way others might adapt. Rather than gravitating toward people of the same background or keeping to himself, he said Parfait always sought to find similarities he could use to bring people from different backgrounds together.

Figuring out how to teach empathy while staying true to himself became Parfait’s personal mission. He knew storytelling helped to build empathy, and he realized that the best reactions came when the stories were told through music.

“In academia, music is looked at as its own language,” he said. “When you put monitors on people’s brains and you’re looking at their responses as they are listening to music, it actually triggers a side of the brain that is slightly different than when you are speaking their language. It triggers emotion, affects moods – if you are intentional about the composition, if the goal is to get them contemplative and introspective, you can achieve that.”

He wrote his thesis on story- and song-centered pedagogy. By the time he’d finished, he had created an educational framework that uses songs, stories and reflective questioning to increase empathy with an audience.

Parfait Bassale sings at his home studio in Portland.

Photo by Joseph Glode

Since graduating in 2013, he’s used this interactive format to teach empathy at hundreds of workshops in various contexts, from high school assemblies and corporate functions to community events. In February, he taught schoolteachers in Haiti through song and music.

“A large part of Parfait is social justice and community awareness and community building, and that is very prevalent in his songs,” said his longtime friend and mentor, local jazz musician Dominic Castillo. “There is no divide between him as a community member and him as a musician and an artist. They don’t exist in separate boxes.”

Six years ago, Parfait married his college sweetheart, Karima, who now works as a naturopath for Central City Concern. Since then, the couple have added two boys, Aushti and Nouri, to their family.

In addition to his musical pursuits, Parfait works full time as a project manager for Rubicon, and education-focused tech company.

It was through his employer’s foundation arm that he was able to teach his empathy workshop in Haiti. After his first visit to the earthquake ravaged island in 2010, he wrote a song inspired by a little girl he met who had asked him to take her with him when he left. It’s called “Nou Tout Haitiens,” or “We are all Haitians.”

Parfait Bassale's first visit to Haiti was in 2010. He has since returned to teach an empathy workshop for schoolteachers using music.

Photo courtesy of Rubicon

Parfait can also be found performing shows at local wine bars and coffee shops from time to time, purely as an entertainer. He performed regularly at the Tea Zone’s Camellia Lounge in the Pearl before it closed in 2016.

Dominic remembers seeing him perform there about a year ago.

“Halfway through I realized that I was in his living room. His personality just filled the space. The person singing up there was exactly the guy I know from lessons, exactly the guy I know from helping to create the album. It was wonderful to see that kind of authenticity in a musician,” Dominic said. “Typically, to varying degrees, musicians have to wear some kind of mask when they get up on stage. Either because they think the audience needs it or they need it. That’s not the case with Parfait.”

In many instances, Parfait sings the same songs during his workshops that he performs professionally, and he switches between English and French, rap and soulful pop.

Today, many of his tracks also feature the instrumental and vocal talents of other Portland-area musicians.

His most recent French language single, “Cette Femme,” was released earlier this year and is making the rounds at radio stations in West Africa. He said it’s a song about feminism – and he imagines it must have sparked a few conversations in cars and around dinner tables in Dakar.

It will be on his next album, which he said will have a theme based on reflection. It’s loosely due for release this winter and will contain a mix of French and English language songs. Sometimes he weaves the languages together in the same track.

His first overseas hit was the title track of his 2015 album, “Finally.” It’s somewhat of a personal anthem that he bellows beautifully in English.

In March, Parfait was named a finalist in the Bridging the Music Presents: Oregon Solo Artist Awards at the Hawthorne Theater.

Email staff writer Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org

PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE

Empathy Workshop: In the Shoes of an Immigrant

What: Parfait Bassale

When: 12:30-2:30 p.m. Saturday, May 20

Where: Paragon Art Gallery

Portland Community College Cascade Campus, 815 N Killingsworth, Portland

Cost: Free

Portland Concerts in the Park

What: Parfait Bassale Band

When: 6:30 p.m. Saturday, July 8

Where: Kenilworth Park, Southeast Holgate Boulevard and 34th Avenue, Portland

Cost: Free

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO UNEXPECTED VENUE CLOSURE: Portland Soulful Pop Night

What: Parfait Bassale, Jonathan Pierce and David Pollack

When: 8-10 p.m. Friday, May 26 CANCELLED

Where: Portland Abbey Arts, 7600 N Hereford Ave., Portland NOW CLOSED

Cost: $7; tickets at Eventbrite.com

Live at the Art Constitutional

What: Performance in conjunction with St. John’s Farmers Market

When: 11:45 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 9

Where: St. John’s Center for Opportunity

8250 N Lombard St., Portland

Cost: Free

Find up-to-date listings of Parfait’s concerts, listen to his music, and learn more about his musical workshops on empathy at parfaitonline.com.

Tags:

Planet Portland, music, Immigrants and Refugees