West
African Harps
West Africa has produced
a great diversity of harps, which are consistently uniform in certain respects.
From the three- or four-stringed bolon that incites warriors to battle and
to the six-stringed donso ngoni or seven-stringed simbi which provide music
to protect and impassion hunters, to the twenty-one-stringed kora that symbolizes
the royal synthesis of indigenous and Islamic cultures, all calabash spike
harps are a major feature of traditional and even modern music in West Africa.
The pentatonic sound of the donso ngoni is reminiscent of African American
blues tonality, and its use in modern electric ensembles in Mali makes for
some of the most fascinating popular music in Africa. Wooden-box-resonator
spike harps of the forest regions farther south do not enjoy the widespread
distribution nor the documentation of their northern relatives and may be
in a state of decline.
The peculiarity
of West African harp construction has until quite recently prevented scholars
from realizing that these instruments are harps and not a hybrid kind of
harp lute. By articulating the distribution of these harps, as well as their
morphological features, I hope to have laid the groundwork for future comparative
studies which might investigate with increasing sophistication the diffusion
of musical instruments.
West African guitar
playing
Mande guitarists are active players in an unbroken and still-vibrant tradition
that goes back to the thirteenth-century founding of the Mande, or Mali,
empire. That tradition is primarily guarded by jelis, hereditary professional
verbal/musical artisans. The acoustic guitar was first picked up in the
1920s or 1930s by jelis who began an Africanization process by adapting
their balafon (xylophone), nkoni (lute), and kora (harp) repertories and
playing styles to it. The rise of modern Mande music and of the electric
guitar began with the independence of Guinea in 1958 when the new government
launched a sweeping modernization policy in which European musical instruments
(including electric guitars) were handed out, musicians were made civil
servants, and a network of regional and national orchestras was established.
Mali soon followed suit. Jelis used the electric guitar as the main vehicle
for transferring their local repertories to these new urban electric groups.
The process of traditional musicians (jelis) embracing, Africanizing,
and integrating the guitar into their music culture, and then using it
to move their music into the international arena of popular dance music
is the focus of this article.
A Guide to the
Jembe
The jembe
(spelled djembe in French writing) is on the verge of achieving
world status as a percussion instrument, rivaled in popularity perhaps
only by the conga and steel pan. It first made an impact outs ide West
Africa in the 1950s due to the world tours of Les Ballets Africains
led by the Guinean Fodeba Keita. In the few decades succeeding this initial
exposure the jembe was known internationally only to a small
coterie of musicians and devotees of African music and dance. In the U.S.
interest in the jembe centered ar ound Ladji Camara, a member
of Les Ballets Africains in the 1950s, who since the 1960s has
trained a generation of American players. Worldwide, a mere handful of
LP recordings were released up to the mid-1980s, most containing just
a few selections of jembe playing.
Since the late
1980s international interest in the jembe has t aken an unprecedented
turn. Well over a dozen CD recordings exclusively featuring jembe
ensembles have been released in addition to as many recordings featuring
the jembe in mixed ensembles. Tours of national ballet troupes
from Guinea, Mali, and Senegal, and former drummers from these troupes
are playing to swelling crowds. Jembe teachers are proliferating,
with some of them leading study tours to Africa, and major drum manufacturers
have recently found a market for industrially produced jembes.
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