10/11 - Today in Ethno

Pretty cool, right?

Yup. We watched West African videos all day, and even though I was pretty sleepy, I stayed awake and loved every minute of class today.

That's Bassekou Kouyate, one of the finest ngoni players in West Africa. Ngoni, as well as akonting and and instrument called xalam, are all multi-stringed instruments that are thought to be predecessors of the American banjo. Music really makes its way around the world.

A few of you might know of my admiration of Bela Fleck, the banjo player; he started as a bluegrass guy, and made his way over to the funky side of things, started his own group called the Flecktones, and has played with Victor Wooten, Chris Thile, Zakir Hussain, Edgar Meyer, Tony Trischka and all sorts of cool people. He's one of my favorite musicians of all time.

Not only is he an outstanding player, but he appealed to my ethnomusicologist side by going to Africa and producing a documentary called "Throw Down Your Heart." His mission was to find the roots of the banjo, and on his way he jams with all sorts of African musicians... mothers at work, a blind kalimba player, an ensemble centered around a huge marimba built into the ground, and some ensembles that had ngoni and akonting in them, and, well, they were very similar.

In Mali, and West Africa in general, there are musicians called griots, that are almost always families, where the tradition of music is passed down from generation to generation. In the past, griots would accompany higher, warrior-class families, and the two were inseperable; every emperor or warrior family must have a griot, and every griot must have an emperor. So they were pretty high-class, and for good reason, because the griot were not only musicians, but they were poets, translators, spokesmen, and storytellers too.

These griots produced some pretty amazing musicians, on all sorts of interesting instruments, and I'd like to share a couple with you.



Toumani Diabate is playing an instrument called the kora, which is pretty similar to a harp. It has 21 strings that can be tuned by sliding the rings around the "neck" higher and lower. It is played with two fingers on each hand, the thumb of the left hand for the bass, the thumb of the right for the melody, and the two index fingers for improvisation. Good kora players should be able to carry the bass line and the melody while improvising on top of that, and I think that's amazing.

I talked about the gyil much earlier in this blog, but that specific instrument falls in the balafon category of idiophones. Balafons are similar to marimbas, but the resonators are made with gourds, and the gourds have spider's eggs attached to them.



Notice that it doesn't have any accidentals, which would make playing easier, but in relation to a western mallet instrument, it's backwards. The higher notes are on the left side, perhaps to give the bass line more importance? I really don't know. What amazes me is the speed of some of his runs and his ability to keep two different rhythms and ideas going at the same time so fluidly.

Let's not about the spider's eggs, either. They produce a rattle in the resonators that is characteristic of African sound. The keyboard instruments do it, kora usually have beads attached to the strings to make them rattle and buzz, and some African influenced musicians have found ways to get the buzz in their sound:



There is a very strong vocal tradition in West Africa, as there is in all of Africa, and my favorite African singer is Oumou Sangare, who was in Bela's documentary:



West African vocal music is interspersed with plain-spoken thoughts, ideas, or messages a musician would like to add to a song. A singer could say that they are happy that they are singing today, or make a dedication, or state their opinion about politics in any song, and it would be just fine. I like that.

This is the best example I've shown you that has a hint of Islamic music culture in it, and there's a reason why. Spain, Morocco and much of West Africa was influenced by Islam much earlier than it was influenced by Christianity, and there's been enough time for Islamic music traditions to work their way into West African music. Notice in Ms. Sangare's singing and in the vocals of the Ngoni Ba, there are ornaments and melisma that are very reminiscent of Islamic prayer chant, and the kora and balafon have found ways to add these ornaments into their music as well. The Islam-influenced music accompanies danced celebrating Islamic gods, and West Africans often read the Qu'ran. That's definitely not what I thought of when I first heard anything about West Africa.

I want to make all of these instruments. I'm going to look into how much it would cost to find the parts.

M