“People started dancing, the musicians were happy and that’s when we knew: We got something.”

That’s how Serge Massama Dogo, also known as Dogo du Togo, describes the moment during a underwhelming recording session when the band he was leading fused the “alagaa” rhythm of his homeland with his own guitar-driven, psychedelic rock songwriting. “The energy was not there,” he remembers. “Then somebody says, ‘Massama you talk about alagaa, right? Drummer, play alagaa on it.’ Oh, my goodness. We were like, ‘Okay, now we got it.’ The energy was right there.”

Born in 1972, Dogo grew up in Lomé, the capital of Togo, and emigrated to Washington, D.C. in 2000. While the move was initially academically motivated, music soon took center stage for Dogo, and in 2006, he founded the energetic Afropop band, Elikeh — the Ewe word for unity. “With Elikeh, we worked more on the Ghanaian style of music,” Dogo notes, “because we share the same tribes and culture.”

Nestled between Ghana and Benin with the Gulf of Guinea to the south, Togo extends north all the way to Burkina Faso, making for lengthy longitudinal borders and lots of exposure to cultural and linguistic variety along the way, both inside and outside of the country. Though French has long been spoken in government and educational settings, more than 40 other native languages can be heard among the Togolese. The result? A land with many identities and musical threads to follow, from the hugely influential Afrobeat emanating from nearby Nigeria to the sounds of neighboring Ghana.

Elikeh drew from those shared traditions, but Dogo, who now gets airplay on radio stations and national TV in Togo, wasn’t satisfied with amalgamating popular styles. His drive to find a more authentic sound — one representative of Togo itself — led him to found the Alagaa Beat Band, named after the trance state he saw his bandmates enter when he fused the guitar-driven melodies he’d been playing with a rhythmic approach that’s specific to the musical and spiritual practices of his homeland. “That double beat on the snare, it went well,” he says.

This freshly concocted recipe is so new that attendees of the Richmond Folk Festival will be among the first stateside to see it in action. The Alagaa Beat Band — initially comprised of childhood friends and his former guitar teacher — was featured on the 2024 album, “Avoudé.” Assembling the band in America and Europe has been a challenge, however, owing to visa restrictions. “It’s hard,” he says. “Togo, right now, is banned.”

But a new ensemble with the necessary passports and existing visas will bring Dogo’s vision for an original Togolese sound to life this weekend. “Even in Togo, the Alagaa Beat Band is more of a collective than a tight band, [where] everybody will come in and follow the direction of the alagaa beat and our cultural stuff. We played a few shows already in the U.S., and it was great… I think they said the crowd was entranced.”

Style Weekly: Have you played Richmond before?

Serge Massama Dogo: A long time ago, I played with my other band, Elikeh, in Richmond, in a club. I can’t remember the name anymore — not even sure the club is around anymore. I also played a few festivals in there. There was a multicultural festival organized by [Virginia Commonwealth University] that I played one time with my band, Elikeh. Dogo du Togo and the Alagaa Beat Band, the way it is right now, is really the first time the band is playing the U.S., actually.

I read that convening the Alagaa Beat Band was a challenge in the past. How did you assemble the current lineup?

There’s a Togolese guy — he’s got an American passport but he lives in Africa. He’s a drummer. So I brought him back because I think he understands the music very well. And there’s a keyboard player that I have known for a while in Togo who also had a visa already. So he’s in the country. So they are the people I’m working with right now… The guys I’ve played with for so long in Togo — all of them are not here, but it’s not going to change anything for the show and for the energy.

What made it so important to work with other musicians from where you grew up when first forming the Alagaa Beat Band?

I knew them as musicians. My guitar teacher — I knew working with him, we will understand each other. There were other musicians in Togo I could decide to work with, but they are more into a modern, R&B style of music. I really wanted to work with people I grew up with. What we had in common is the traditional side of the music. We wanted really to focus on traditional music instead of focusing on the new wave of Afrobeat style that is going around right now. So getting those guys I knew, we’re gonna have this understanding.

Tell me about the trance-like state your music induces.

At the beginning of the project, I wanted to do something really acoustic. But after we released an album in 2022, I figured out, “We need to [get] something going in terms of beats.” I didn’t want to play regular funk on top of the Vodun melodies that we have, which is a little different than the regular pentatonic or the regular diatonic stuff… I found a way to get parts that are found in almost every rhythm in Togo. I used that part, which is the double hit on the snare, but now we move it up a little bit. It can be two or three now, or sometimes four — it depends. But when we started playing that on top of the acoustic sound we had already, the energy was just different. It was so high energy that when the people were recording it and the musicians were dancing, they were dancing like [they were] in a trance… So that’s the reason why I give it that name — “trance,” [or] “alagaa.”

What inspired you to pick up the guitar? Do you remember what your first guitar was?

When I was very young, in our house, there used to be a guy who was a great guitarist, known in the whole [of] Togo as a great guitarist… He played for top musicians, and they toured a lot in Ghana at the time, and I think in Nigeria. So he was in our house, and bunch of musicians were [there]. I believe that might be the beginning… Later on, my cousin that was a drummer, I was following him around. I’m pretty sure that’s how the music thing came. Because in my family, no one was into music. They were into something else, like politics.

So what did my first guitar look like? I can’t tell, because usually you go borrow somebody’s guitar — the next day, somebody else will come borrow it [laughs]. There is a guitar that really [doesn’t] belong to anybody, but belongs to the area. Or there would be two or three or four guitars that everybody would play. So now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t think I had any guitar, really, for me, that I bought in Togo, until I came to the U.S.

Was there a moment when you realized that playing music was what you wanted to dedicate yourself to?

Maybe a few events. But the main thing — when I came to the U.S., I figured out Togo is not represented. You can hear people talk about music from Nigeria [but] people will not say “Togo” and think of music. But people will do that with Senegal, will do that with Nigeria, Ghana. So when I came to the U.S., one of my goals was to find a style of music. That’s one reason why I started Elikeh… But then many years after, I’m like, “Man, I’m not gonna get it like that. Something else needs to be done.” That’s the moment where I believed. “I need to get something done, so when people think of Togo, they think of the music.” But after all these years, I believe it’s only now that I got it.

There’s so much joy in your music — even a song with heavy subject matter like “Xenophobia.” Can you tell me about what inspired that song?

Xenophobia is not African. That’s basically what the song is saying. When somebody comes to Africa, the first thing the person will notice, even if the person is coming from another tribe or is coming from another country — white, whatever — the African people are very welcoming. They will offer you stuff to drink, to eat. Even if you said no, they’re like, “No, no, you have to…” I know today can be a little bit different in the cities, but at the root of it, that’s how Africans react to things. They will not see you with a bad eye, trying to be like, “We don’t like this guy who came to our territory.” And that’s the feeling that got me to write that song…

Now that we are talking about it, I think it’s that sense of welcoming all the time that got them get invaded and enslaved — because they’re never fearful, or worry like, “I need to be careful.” They welcome everybody. I think that’s basically why Africans got taken away and taken advantage of.

“Immigré,” the closing track from your self-titled album, the journey is reversed. What inspired writing that one? 

It’s pretty close to “Xenophobia…” You go to Togo, you belong there. But at the same time, you’ve been out so long that people see you also as a newcomer like, you don’t really belong. But at the same time, when you are in the U.S. — for Africans who are in [other] countries like in Europe and stuff like that — they can be there for a long time, they can be paying their taxes and do whatever, somehow they are being looked at like they don’t belong there. So the song is basically saying, “I’m from here and I’m from there, I’m from there and I’m from here — basically not from anywhere anymore.” That sense of not belonging to a specific place can be very difficult, because an African guy who lives in the U.S. — even for a year — when he goes back [he] might not been doing certain things anymore, and then people from his village or his city in Africa can be like, “Oh, he’s like a white boy now… This guy doesn’t belong here.” So that’s why I wrote that song.

What’s it like to see people encounter your music for the first time?

I spent a lot of time, maybe 20 years, thinking about what’s going to be the best music for an African like me. I don’t want to be this African musician who plays this music that is loved only by Westerners. There are also musicians in Togo, for example, when they come to the U.S. to perform, the only people who go are Togolese people. I didn’t want to be that kind of musician myself. So I wanted to be this musician who can get everybody… That’s what I wanted to achieve for the longest time.

The Richmond Folk Festival runs from Friday, Oct. 10 to Sunday, Oct. 12 along the riverfront downtown. Admission is free with a suggested donation. On Friday, Dogo du Togo & the Alagaa Beat Band will perform at 9 p.m. at the Dominion Energy Dance Pavilion. On Saturday, the band will perform at 3:45 p.m. at the Dominion Energy Dance Pavilion and at 8:30 p.m. on the Atria Stage. On Sunday, the band will perform at 5 p.m. on the Atria Stage, and it will be part of the African Crossroads in the Americas performance at 1 p.m. on the Carmax Stage.

For more information, visit richmondfolkfestival.org. To hear and purchase Dogo du Togo’s music, visit dogodutogo.bandcamp.com.