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Mali, and other African nations' music. The insistent drumming, complex yet different, is a constant on that continent.
In Brasil and the Carribbean, the same beat is apparent.
How did African-North Americans "lose" that?
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Have any of you ever attended a pow-wow? A very similar percussive style - not to mention an often call-and-response type of singing - pre-dates the arrival of Africans in North America. The two groups of cultures, American Indian and African-American, mixed early and heavily once Africans arrived. The syncopation, beats, and rhythm patterns can as easily be traced to Amerindian influence as to African influence.
... is that, for all practical purposes, all western popular music comes from African rhythm and Celtic melody and how they repeatedly re-met and married across the world.
... amongst other things... is the influence that spread from In dia, through the Middle East, across North Africa (picking up the minstrels and troubadours travelling with the crusades en route) entered Europe through Spain with the Moorish invasion and just kept going.
Of course that muddies the waters of a very clear simple and possibly wrong (!) headline argument.
rasa sounds come from.
... since the acid wore off?
fg
from the the master musician Kwaku Dadey, who hails from Ghana, and teaches at a local community college. You could play ANY type of music and Kwaku - not only a master drummer but a well-studied musicologist - could isolate what region of Africa (often the western portion) that the basic rhythm pattern emminated from.This included many forms of "Salsa" that developed on the East coast of this country (mostly via Cuba), and of course jazz. He could break down complex time patterns to an understandable explanation, and play such for you. Kwaku, amongst his other accomplishments, recorded with Louis Bellson.
Basically, with drum/rhythm patterns/styles nothing has been lost over the eons, only altered and ammended to. The roots of it all are there in the music. The more drum/rhythm intensive musics you listen to, the more apparent this becomes. There is nothing "lost" in music by African North Americans, it's only different...
"I always play jazz records backwards, they sound better that way"
-Thomas Edison
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--How did African-North Americans "lose" that?Ever heard of jazz music? Check it out...
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Addicted to content-free jazz music.
here for centuries.
In listening to old black music, I've never heard that syncopation which is so prevalent in many African, Carribbean, and S. American countries.
Perhaps slave owners prohibited it here but the Brasilian ones allowed drumming?
...for the most part over time for the reasons stated just below. (As an aside, it's interesting to note that steel drums came about as the result of a similar policy in Trindidad.) I think more significant than this though, is that in the Carribean and South American countries the African music was mixed primarily with Spanish and Portugese European traditions, two things that were largely absent in North America until fairly recently. Add to that the fact that each group of transplanted Africans was isolated from each other for centuries, and it seems natural enough that different traditions would morph from each of them.
dh
... well not actually, but Spanislamic... actually that's not so bad!
A lot of what we think of as Spanish is in fact the Islamic music (and before that Indian I think) that arrived with the Moorish invasion.
"There were two types of slave music in the United States: a secular music that consisted of field hollers, shouts, and moans that used folk tales and folk motifs, and that made use of homemade instruments from the banjo (which became a standard American instrument in the 19th century, largely through minstrelsy), tambourine, and calabashes to washboards, pots, spoons, and the like. From the 1740s, many states had banned the use of drums in fear that Africans would use them to create a system of communication in order to aid rebellion. Nonetheless, blacks managed to generate percussion and percussive sounds, using other instruments or their own bodies."From the PBS archives
True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.Kurt Vonnegut
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