Traditional African music blends concepts and experiences in ways that never run out of riches. The more deeply you explore it, the more rewarding it becomes.
John Miller Chernoff’s African Rhythm and African Sensibility is an excellent introduction to traditional African music. Dance, sculpture, ritual, and music often blend enough to be inseparable. Chernoff noted that people who have played recordings for Africans and requested their opinions have been asked what they’re supposed to do with them. They’re used to dancing to music and relating to each other through it rather than passively listening to a consumer product or a classical opus.
Ruth Stone and Janheinz Jahn noted that music and movement are often inseparable in Africa. Jahn wrote that Africans often perceive rhythm by being in motion rather than just hearing a beat or tapping a baton. For most Westerners, rhythm’s more abstract, but for many traditional Africans it’s more immersive and interactive. People move with each other so that rhythm is experienced communally.
Many traditional Africans have thought of walking as more than getting from point A to point B. Some cultures have a rich range of words for walking. The Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana classify more than 50 ways to walk. One term refers to slinking furtively and gently like a cat, another alludes to a small man’s brisk gait, and a third refers to searching for something. Another means having to have a bowel movement.
A tall, slender man I met in Mauritius sure didn’t remind me of the last term. He walked by tracing long graceful arcs with his legs. His entire body swayed when he turned. He moved with an elegance that rivaled Thai classical dance. For many Africans, walking is not just linear; it can express personal style and enable community members to synchronize their physical rhythms with each other. It can also allow people to synchronize themselves with ancestors and nature spirits. Music thus accompanies dances in which folks communicate with them. A dance can embody a spirit by incorporating movements that express his personality.
So African music often mixes many ideas, including dance, ritual, the community, ancestors, and nature spirits. This mixture adds many dimensions to rhythm. Chrenoff writes that rhythm is the most basic element of African music. Westerners often focus more on melody and harmony, but Africans more often seek rhythmic patterns and ways that they intermingle and contrast. Dynamic interrelationships between beats give music its life. Music that focuses on melody and harmony and holds rhythm to a static structure can seem as mechanical a military band.
Most Western music is poorer in rhythm. We usually see it as a static and abstract frame that melodies and harmonies are played within, and we treat the latter two as the most creative elements (even jazz songs are usually in simple 4/4 meters, which Dave Brubeck noted when he wrote “Take Five” in 5/4). We admire Beethoven for composing his towering Fifth Symphony by constructing variations on its first four notes. But Africans have associated a larger range of concepts and experiences with rhythm.
Robert B. Fisher, in West African Religious Traditions, wrote that drumming is sometimes considered a message from the ancestors. It expresses the community’s traditions, and it elevates people’s thoughts to their founders’ heroism and dignity. Many societies also associate it with the king’s majesty, and their royal palaces house a group of drummers.
Drumming sometimes expresses a community’s history. Many languages on the Gold Coast are tonal, and a few beats can thus be identified with a name or an event. A percussionist can thus tell a story. Talking drums can make tones rise and fall by being squeezed around the side; percussion thus approximates human speech.
Drumming is like human dialog in yet other ways. Fisher noted a large variety of percussive instruments in African performances. Large, midrange, and small drums create contrasts, but timbres, rattles, xylophones, and scratchers add many more sounds. All together resemble a community in conference.
Obo Addy is a drumming master from Ghana, and in his CD Afieye Okropong, all instruments are exquisitely balanced. Nothing dominates anything else. The deep drums come in and go out; they have their say in rousing flourishes, and then fall silent while the other drums chime in. As this conversation ensues, the high pitched timbres clatter above the drums. And of course people are clapping their hands. Their singing is also finely balanced between a single man and a group in call-and-response fashion. The whole recording thus gives every sonic identity its space, but in ways that complement the other sounds. All members of the universe celebrate its harmony.
Chernoff wrote that the Ewes in northern Ghana sometimes imagine their drums as a family. One is the mother, one is the elder brother, and another is the little brother. The master drum is the father.
Many Africans treat the guitar as a percussive instrument. The two instructors who first taught me to play focused on scales and chords. But the African guitar teacher Folo Graff says that the right thumb and fingers form two units when they pluck the strings, and that the player should put both in a dialog. The notes are interrelated as elements of rhythm as much as they are by harmony.
Some of the first African music I heard seemed to lack drama. An old record of a Zanzibar band featured thumb pianos, drums, a singer, and a bass guitar. I loved their interlocking rhythms because they were very sensual. But there were no songs. Nothing was pre-composed. I thought a good song has sections that contrast. The Beatles’ Yesterday is in an AABA pattern. The B starts when Paul sings “Why she had to go I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.” George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm is also in an AABA pattern, which is very common in jazz standards from the 1920s through the 1940s. The lack of this pre-arranged structure made many of the first African performances I heard seem impoverished. But I soon found those simple melodies to be woven into such rich rhythmic textures that another world was opening up to me. The dynamics between different sounds and different beats are as meaningful.
A well-known example from Western popular music is “19th Nervous Breakdown” by the Rolling Stones. Keith Richards played driving major chords with two fingers on his left hand, and used the other two to add extra notes in a danceable rhythm. At the same time, Brian Jones played single notes with lower tones and used a different rhythm. The contrasts between high and low notes and between the rhythms make the sound seem immersive and physical so that you can feel that you’re dancing between the two guitarists. I’ve often felt that the sound in many Rolling Stones songs is bigger than overtly harder rocking bands’ sounds. Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, and Metallica have often tried to pound the listeners into submission, but the Rolling Stones more often pull the listeners into their sensual world, enticing them to dance along.
A band played every night in my resort’s outdoor bar, and its drummer mesmerized me so that I couldn’t take my eyes off him. His style reminded me of Tony Williams, who has often emphasized symbols. He was downplaying the bass drum and tom-tom, which emit loud booms that are great in rock, and stressing lighter sounds of symbols, high hats, and snares. He deftly interwove them with the other musicians in the band. Even in the slow songs, he was constantly in motion, brushing all the skins in different ways. He never did the same thing for two consecutive seconds. He was so absorbed in his music that he didn’t seem to notice anything else. Drumming was meditation for him.
Chernoff wrote that measures in Africa are open—they allow more and more participants to join. The key for the new person is to give everyone else his space and to play a beat that adds to the mixture. The number of players is unlimited. A new performer can always add a beat. The measure is thus more of a community than an abstract framework for a main melody. The different beats are related to each other rather than to a fixed temporal framework, which most Westerners expect.
Africans’ openness to more players allows each to expresses his own personality and complement the others at the same time. No one should overwhelm anyone else. A person who cuts loose with an intense solo can alienate everyone else. I made this mistake with the group of singers and guitarists on a Mauritian beach. Many Westerners want to show liveliness when playing with Africans, so I jammed aggressively, with lots of fast note runs. One of the others stopped playing, exclaimed, “This guitar is shit!”, and put it down. I only later realized that I wasn’t giving him room to do anything, and that he was too polite to tell me. Everyone must be sensitive to how the whole community sounds.
An Ethiopian guitarist, singer, and songwriter, told me that we listen to music differently. I asked, “How so?” and she said, “You listen holistically. You relate what you hear to the structure of the whole song, the chords, and the social background that the song was written and performed in. I listen to the groove and the singing.”
Africans define a musical sound more broadly than the Western idea of a regular pitch, like a C note. Many types of sounds can be musical as long as they complement the ensemble. Dancers often wear ankle bells or belts of cowry shells. People strike shields and stomp feet. Buzzing sounds are often popular, and performers sometimes attach buzzers to musical instruments. All these sounds maximize contrast so that the community’s full richness comes out.
Many African cultures treat the body as a musical instrument. It produces several sounds which add to performances. Hands, feet, wrists, ankles, waists, and voices make unique noises. This prolific use of the body in music is interwoven with the focus on dance.
Performances often spontaneously change. The master drummer senses that it’s time to alter the beat or play a new motif. Everyone must immediately hear him and find his place.
So the variables in a performance are infinite, and they can change according to the occasion. Chernoff argued that African drumming is one of humanity’s greatest artistic creations. No argument from me.