African Drum Research Articles

Rhythmic musical intervention improves response time of memory tests: A pilot study on the application of a digital cognitive assessment.

Memory complaints are the early symptoms of cognitive impairment, and they usually bring anxiety about cognitive deterioration among the elderly population. Musical interventions were demonstrated to relieve dementia symptoms. This pilot study investigated the potential benefits of rhythmic musical intervention, African drumming, on cognitive function and mood status with traditional and digital assessments for elderly participants. Participants were recruited through social media. The musical intervention was arranged by drumming instructors certified by the Hong Kong Association of African Drumming. Participants joined regular training classes with eight lessons, which covered rhythmic clapping and drumming, power control, and overall performance with songs. The inclusion criteria included the following: (1) age over 50; (2) self-reported complaints of memory loss; (3) the ability to use digital devices, such as a smartphone; and (4) can understand the content of questionnaires and follow the intervention schedules. Those with hearing impairment, failure to use Chinese, and active psychosis or dementia were excluded. Cognitive function was measured by the Hong Kong version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (HK-MoCA) and a digital platform, ScreenMat. Anxiety and depression levels were assessed by the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15). All assessments were performed before and after the drumming classes. The outcomes were compared using the Wilcoxon signed rank test with 0.05 as the significance level. Twenty-two participants joined this study with an attendance rate of 90%. The overall cognitive function of the participants was good with an average score of 27 for HK-MoCA. After eight sessions of African drum intervention, the cognitive function did not show a significant improvement, but the response time of answering the digital cognitive questions was significantly faster than before the intervention (-39.9 s, p = 0.03). The response time for the short-term memory function was most significantly reduced (-13.5 s, p = 0.017). The anxiety and depression scores (i.e. STAI and GDS) also significantly improved (p < 0.001) after the intervention. Rhythmic musical intervention is not only effective in improving emotional status, but also potentially good for improving cognitive symptoms, including the response time of the memory test. Digital behavioral analysis may bring new insights for future research on cognitive assessment.

Rhythmic Musical Intervention Improves Short‐term Memory Function in Healthy Elderly: A Prospective Pilot Study of a Group‐based African Drum Training

AbstractBackgroundMemory complaints are the early symptoms of cognitive impairment, and it usually brings anxiety about cognitive deterioration among the elderly population. Musical interventions were demonstrated to relieve dementia symptoms1. This study is to investigate the potential benefits of African drum intervention on cognitive functions.MethodParticipants were recruited in July 2022 through social media advertisement. Classes were organized in a drumming activity center in downtown, Kowloon. Participants joined 8 sessions of African drum training which covered rhythmic clapping and drumming, power control, and overall performance with songs. The inclusion criteria were participants (1) aged over 50 years old and (2) able to use a smartphone. Participants who could not understand Chinese or had been diagnosed with active psychosis or dementia were excluded. Cognitive function was screened by an online platform, ScreenMat2, for short‐term and long‐term memory, orientation, calculation, visual function, and followed up with the Hong Kong version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (HK‐MoCA). Anxiety and depression levels were assessed by State‐Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) and Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS). All assessments were performed before and after the drumming classes (Figure 1). The outcomes were evaluated using Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test with 0.05 as the significance level.ResultTwenty‐four participants joined this study with an attendance rate of 83%. The overall cognitive function of the participants was good with an average score of 27 for HK‐MoCA. After 8 sessions of African drum intervention, the cognitive function did not show significant improvement (p = 0.108), but the response time of answering the digital cognitive questions was significantly faster than that before the intervention (‐39.9 seconds, p = 0.03) (Table 1). The response time for the short‐term memory function was the most significantly reduced better after the African drum training (‐13.5 seconds, p = 0.005) The STAI and GDS scores also significantly decreased (p&lt;0.001).ConclusionRhythmic Musical Intervention, such as the African drum, can improve the response time of cognitive tests and also relieve anxiety and depression levels.1. Tsoi et al. J Am Med Dir Assoc. 2018;19(7), 568‐576. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jamda.2017.12.0092. Lam et al. In Proceedings of the 51st HICSS. 2018. doi:10.24251/HICSS.2018.353

Fishing for complements with chord, scale, and rhythm nets

The aim of this paper is to argue that complementation is an operation similarly fundamental to music theory as transposition and inversion. We focus on studying the chromatic complement mapping that translates diatonic seventh chords into 8-note scales which can also be interpreted as rhythmic beat patterns. Such complements of diatonic seventh chords are of particular importance since they correspond to the scales popularized by the Jazz theorist Barry Harris, as well as to rhythms used in African drum music and Steve Reich's Clapping Music. Our approach enables a systematic study of these scales and rhythms using established theories of efficient voice leading and generalized diatonic scales and chords, in particular the theory of second-order maximally even sets. The main contributions of this research are (1) to explicate the correspondence between voice leadings and rhythmic transformations, (2) to systematize the family of Barry Harris scales, and (3) to describe classes of voice leadings between chords of different cardinality that are invariant under complementation.

Aïda Muluneh's Homebound: A Journey in Photography &amp; Addis Foto Fest: Nine Years Survey

Aïda Muluneh's Homebound: A Journey in Photography &amp; Addis Foto Fest: Nine Years Survey

Extreme precision in rhythmic interaction is enabled by role-optimized sensorimotor coupling: analysis and modelling of West African drum ensemble music.

Human social interactions often involve carefully synchronized behaviours. Musical performance in particular features precise timing and depends on the differentiation and coordination of musical/social roles. Here, we study the influence of musical/social roles, individual musicians and different ensembles on rhythmic synchronization in Malian drum ensemble music, which features synchronization accuracy near the limits of human performance. We analysed 72 recordings of the same piece performed by four trios, in which two drummers in each trio systematically switched roles (lead versus accompaniment). Musical role, rather than individual or group differences, is the main factor influencing synchronization accuracy. Using linear causal modelling, we found a consistent pattern of bi-directional couplings between players, in which the direction and strength of rhythmic adaptation is asymmetrically distributed across musical roles. This differs from notions of musical leadership, which assume that ensemble synchronization relies predominantly on a single dominant personality and/or musical role. We then ran simulations that varied the direction and strength of sensorimotor coupling and found that the coupling pattern used by the Malian musicians affords nearly optimal synchronization. More broadly, our study showcases the importance of ecologically valid and culturally diverse studies of human behaviour.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Synchrony and rhythm interaction: from the brain to behavioural ecology’.

Creating Love for Reading via Inclusion of African Talking Drums in School Library Media Centre Activities

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; The African drum is an important instrument of communication in traditional African societies which serves as the voice of the whole community and it communicates desired information. Children that do not come to the school library media center can be attracted through the inclusion of African drums in her activities. This paper discusses ways through which children could be attracted to the school library media centers for her readership campaign programs through the use of the African talking drums. African drums can be used through role plays, songs, dances and dramas of literature such that children would get interested in reading accessible books in their library. The paper talks about who plays the drum and the indigenous African stories that include the use of drums as a medium of communicating story themes. The paper also highlights some activities carried out by a school library media center in Nigeria (with graphic details) on how some of these drums were utilized. Pictorial examples and presentation of the African drums would be presented during discussions. The African Drum should be seen as a significant technique that could be used in attracting children back to read in the school library media center.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Conceptualising integrative exchanges: marginalisation, music and identity of African diaspora in Hong Kong

This paper examines the integration process among African diaspora in Hong Kong. It explores how they negotiate an identity by performing African drum music at various places in the context of marginalisation as it exists in the city. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation with a group of Africans in Hong Kong, this paper proposes ‘integrative exchanges’ as an analytical tool to reveal migrant’s agency that creates an appropriate space for meaningful contact with majority population. This research argues that African drum plays important functional and symbolic roles in their ongoing integration process. Functionally, Africans use their traditional culture to break down social boundary, which offers a favourable context for building friendship. Symbolically, by playing African drums at various places, Africans consciously engage in identity politics. Integration is a process requiring willingness to engage and change by the local population and the migrants. The concept of ‘integrative exchanges’ highlights the importance of a tool the migrants utilise that triggers the exchanges to occur during the integration process, and the motivation and benefits to engage in the intercultural contacts.

Pulsing with Music

Pulsing with Music Bryon Dickon (bio) Moxie Alex Poppe Tortoise Books www.tortoisebooks.com/store/moxie-presale 240 Pages, Print, $16.00 Alex Poppe's debut novel, Moxie, is part dog story, part cultural criticism, and part portrait of New York City. The novel is a multisensory experience capturing the sights, the smells, and the sounds of the city. Whether it is a panhandler leaning against the wall with a guitar or an African drum ensemble striking up in the park, the pages of Moxie are pulsing with the rhythm of music. It is a music that fittingly accompanies the rich cityscapes, snappy dialogue, and multicultural characters. Moxie is a novel that reminds readers that music, dance, and community can invoke a kind of healing power, even against a haunted past and an uncertain future. The protagonist of Moxie, Jax (or Jacinda Lewis), is a former cover model, half of whose face has been disfigured in a motorcycle bombing in Marrakesh. Having lost the only livelihood she knows, Jax turns to alcohol and sex as she struggles to make sense of life after her former success. Jax offers Moxie a bold and gritty voice that fixes her unforgiving gaze on the violence and oppression faced by women, transgender people, and immigrants. Her voice is at times a rhythmic staccato and, at others, a crescendo of self-awareness, adding to the flowing soundscape of the novel. It is a voice that begs to be read out loud, every shout, whisper, and exclamation in equal measure. Through Jax's voice, the reader is transported through sometimes dissonant descriptions such as this one which portrays the scene of her accident in Marrakesh, "Everything quiets to a vibration as a motorcycle pauses down the lane. The vibration grows to a rumble to a thunder to silence as the motorcycle cartwheels apart." Descriptions such as this one bring the reader just short of an emotional connection with Jax and the places she has been. In this novel, reading is hearing, and hearing is listening. Moxie is remarkable in its ways of telling, especially of conveying emotion through descriptions of sound, giving it a place among novels that are just as much experienced as read. In Moxie, sounds and motion blend with colors as "trumpets beseech in indigo" and "music slows to silver before the bongos kick in a stealthy underbeat." Motion too takes on colors as well, as Jax dances to the music on the street: "My hips gyrate in magenta, my torso undulates in red and orange flames, my arms float up in a peach-pink cloud of a piano interlude." When Jax dances, she becomes instinctual and deliberate, both within and outside her body, her contradictions and rough edges being resolved in a flourish of color. Jax's dancing becomes a metaphor for the reclamation of her body. Through music and dance, Jax, who describes herself as "half-dark, half-light: two-faced when turned-cheek" is able to become whole again. Jax finds moments of healing in which her emotional turmoil, if only briefly, melts away in a euphoria of sounds and colors. In Moxie, music is an expression of community. It may be that dance, music, and community is the meaning that Jax seeks in her new life, but more than that they are opportunities to heal from her not-so-distant past. Jax has another musical connection with a panhandler with her guitar on the street, a young woman—half-busker, half-panhandler—screeches some vintage PJ Harvey in front of the fountain at One Worldwide Plaza. Eroticism and restraint, ethereality and brutality careen from the guitar chords. She wails of sex and death and pain until the weight of the songs threatens to crush her. Like the music in this paragraph, "erotic and restrained," "ethereal and brutal," Jax is a character full of contradictions that make her, in her own words, "singular." The fact that this silent (?) encounter closes out a section of the book punctuates the scene with a poignant and symphonic significance. The conversation between the women is wordless, but Jax is able to see the woman's "child self, singing, euphoric." This scene occurs in...

Street-Level Multiculturalism: Cultural Integration and Identity Politics of African Migrants in Hong Kong

AbstractMulticulturalism is about co-existence of diverse cultures. Current literature on multiculturalism mostly uses a top-down approach to examine how the governments adopt different policies to manage cultural diversity. However, how the migrants use their own culture including music to enhance integration is often neglected. This paper uses the experience of African migrants in Hong Kong to reveal an alternative account of multiculturalism. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation with African drummers, this paper examines the role of African drum as a means of cultural integration. It raises the concept of “street-level multiculturalism” for analysing how African migrants experience and negotiate cultural difference on the ground. It argues that African drum music promotes intercultural contact by arousing curiosity and creating friendly atmosphere. Africans’ engagement in identity politics is based on their marginal status. Their ability to negotiate their African culture and their Hong Kong experience is a politically conscious process.

I drum, I sing, I dance: An ethnographic study of a West African drum and dance ensemble

The purpose of this ethnographic study was to investigate the Montclair State University’s West African drum and dance ensemble. Analyses of the data revealed three themes related to individual participants and the “lived reality” of the group as a whole, and to the social-cultural teaching–learning processes involved: spirituality, community-as-oneness, and communal joy. My motivation for undertaking this inquiry arose from the fact that, beginning in the 1960s, music education scholars in the United States have been concerned about the widespread marginalization of non-Western musics in American music teacher education programs. This situation is still a major concern because American undergraduate and graduate music teacher preparation remains overwhelmingly dominated by Western classical styles. This situation runs contrary to the massive social, cultural, situational, and musical diversity of American students’ lives. As one small effort to advance musical diversity in my own university music school context, I developed the proposal for and initiated the Montclair State University’s West African drum and dance ensemble.

2015 AERA Presidential Address Morally Engaged Research/ers Dismantling Epistemological Nihilation in the Age of Impunity

This article presents Joyce E. King’s 2015 AERA presidential address, which artfully combined scholarly discourse with performance elements and diverse voices in several multimedia formats. In discussing morally engaged research/ers dismantling epistemological nihilation, the article advances the argument that the moral stance, solidarity with racial/cultural dignity in education praxis, policy, and research, is needed to combat discursive forms of racism. The lecture opened with African Americans and Native Americans performing culturally affirming traditional ritual practices. An African drum processional and a libation honored revered Black ancestors—scholars, artists, and activist intellectuals—Maya Angelou, Ruby Dee, Amiri Baraka, Vincent Harding, and Asa G. Hilliard, III (Nana Baffour Amankwatia II). An intergenerational Native American delegation offered a traditional welcome prayer, gifting of tobacco, and ceremonial drumming and dance performance. Dr. King began her address by acknowledging that the 2015 AERA annual meeting was taking place in the ancestral lands of the Pottawatomie Nation.

‘Knot-working’ of traditional music across the globe: A case study of African drumming in Ioujima Island, Japan

Abstract The paper explains how a West African drum called djembe has been introduced and settled in Ioujima, a small island in Kagoshima, Japan. The drum and its music were brought in the island by Mamady Keita, who is a world famous djembe drummer from Guinea, in 1990’s. There has been established an international djembe school named ‘Mishima Djembe School’ in the island, and it attracts the musicians domestically and internationally. The music is contributing to revitalize the depopulating and aging island community. There are several reasons why the island has accepted the music from opposite side of the earth and the music has become an important part of the islanders both culturally and economically. One reason relates to the unique history of djembe music. Another reason is the way the island has accepted and made the best use of the cultural resource to vitalize its social-economy. The events regarding djembe in the island used to be solely managed by the municipal office. However, the music became a joint project of the municipality and a music-related company. What the two stories explain is that transformation from ‘net-working’ to ‘knot-working’ has happened in the music and the islanders’ way of accepting it.

Ideology and the crisis of affiliation and association in the professional life and career of the Drum School writer, Can Themba (1924–1968)

ABSTRACTThis article sketches a background of some 10 years of ‘Drum School’ history in the former black freehold township of Sophiatown, Johannesburg. By the term ‘Drum School’, I refer to a group of South African writers who worked under the aegis of the African magazine Drum, during that period of South African history which has come deservedly to be known as the Fifties. One of the arguments largely commented on in the popular discourse about this group of African writers is that their worth to South African society and institutions can be judged by the professional skills and qualifications they had as members of the educated African upper class: the writers represented a new class, a middle class – so the argument runs – which emerged to take its rightful place in the mainstream paradigm of the dominant culture of South African society, providing the strongest example for Africans’ transition to western culture and civilisation. The Drum School history is also approached as a topic of ideological history. The continuing interest in the writers comes from their importance for South African society as the chief exponents of the Christian humanistic tradition of the Church, which constituted a development of missionary ideas from the middle of the nineteenth century. Part of the problem with the ideological school of the Drum School history, it will be argued in the article, is that it ignores any explanation of human behaviour attributable to human agency. The implications that the cultural dilemma of the Drum School holds for the narratives of protest and resistance are also ignored. The argument about human agency and the cultural dilemma of the Drum School will be made based on the example of Can Themba (1924–1968).

DRUM-PD: The use of a drum circle to improve the symptoms and signs of Parkinson's disease (PD).

Physical therapy can improve motor function in patients with PD. Music performance may be used to improve motor skills by rhythmic entrainment. Drumming has long been a part of traditional healing rituals worldwide, and is increasingly being utilized as a therapeutic strategy. This pilot controlled prospective cohort trial assessed feasibility and effects of twice-weekly group West African drum circle classes for 6 weeks on PD patients' quality of life, symptoms, motor findings, cognition, and mood. Ten patients with PD were recruited into the drum circle group. Ten patients with PD were matched pairwise to each of the drum circle participants, and enrolled in a no-intervention control group. Both groups completed the PD-specific Parkinson Disease Questionnaire (PDQ)-39 quality of life assessment and the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS), and underwent motor and cognitive assessments by a rater blinded to group at baseline, 6 weeks, and 12 weeks. Drummers had significantly improved PDQ-39 scores from baseline to 6 weeks (-5.8, p=0.042), whereas the control group's scores were unchanged. Walking performance was significantly faster at baseline for controls; after 6 weeks of drumming this difference was no longer significant, and remained non-significant at 12 weeks. The drummers trended (p=0.069) toward improvement in walking from baseline to 12 weeks. Other outcomes did not significantly change from baseline to 6 or 12 weeks. Drum circle classes significantly and reversibly improved quality of life in patients with PD. This pilot trial's findings merit larger controlled investigations comparing drumming classes to established interventions in PD, such as physical therapy.

West African Drumming and Dance in North American Universities: An Ethnomusicological Perspective by George Worlasi Kwasi Dor (review)

West African Drumming and Dance in North American Universities: An Ethnomusicological Perspective. By George Worlasi Kwasi Dor. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. [304 p. ISBN 9781617039140 (hardcover), $60; ISBN 9781496802583 (paperback), $30.] Illustrations, appendices, glossary, bibliography, index. This 300-page book was written by a Ghanaian musicologist who for many years has directed the University of Mississippi's Ole Miss African Drum and Dance Ensemble. He examines the growth of West African drumming in North American universities since the 1960s (which began in 1964 at UCLA and Columbia University). These programs were followed by Wesleyan, Berkeley, Toronto, and Tufts Universities, and drumming is now taught in approximately forty American and Canadian universities that host liberal arts, music and dance, African studies and world music programs. Dor supplies a useful table of the first such seventeen university units (p. 45). Dor first examines the reasons for the suppression of African drumming in the Americas during the era of slavery, including the Christian (and particularly Protestant) hostility to African drumming and culture in North America; however, slaves were able to perform African-influenced music within their independent black churches, with their spirituals, ring dances, and pats, in which African drum rhythms were transferred from drums to hand claps. Despite the abolition of slavery in the U.S.A. in 1865, in the Post-Reconstruction Jim Crow era with its accompanying scientific racism, the negative attitude to African performance as backwards, savage, and primitive continued to exist. Nevertheless, there was a growing interest in traditional African performance from the 1930s, reflected by six key personalities whom Dor discusses. The first was the Sierra Leonean Asadata Dafora Horton, who studied art music and opera in Europe and then in 1930 formed his Federal Theatre African Dance Troupe in Harlem. He was followed by the African American dancer Katherine Mary Dunham, who studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, researched Caribbean voudoun (voodoo) dance, became the first black choreographer for the Metropolitan Opera, and set up her own Ballet Negres in the 1940s. Pearl Primus was a dancer and choreographer from Trinidad who was born into a Santeria family and studied anthropology at New York University. She carried out ethnographic research in West and Central Africa, and her first dance production was in 1943. Dor mentions three West Africans who became important for the African drum culture in the U.S. during the 1950s and 1960s. One is the Ghanaian percussionist Guy Warren (Kofi Ghanaba), who in 1957 released the first of his several African jazz albums and worked with African American jazz musicians Max Roach and Thelonius Monk. Likewise, in the 1950s, the Nigerian drummer Michael Babatunde Olatunji set up a college African drumming group in the United States; he later released records including Drums of Passion and worked with John Coltrane and Art Blakey. The sixth pioneering figure is the djembe drummer Ladji Kamara, who came to the States in the 1960s with the Ballets Africain (of the newly-independent Guinea) and became the father of the American djembe movement. Besides the roles of these six figures, Dor offers four other reason for the acceptance of African drumming in the American academy, the first being the role of African and Africanist scholars who from the 1950s and 1960s onward reassessed the importance of African culture and music: John Blacking, David McAllister, Mantle Hood, and A. M. Jones; and the West Africans, J. H. Kwabena Nketia, Akin Euba, and Chiekh Anta Diop. Secondly, there was the impact of West African independence that resulted in Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea's Sekou Toure establishing touring drum and dance performance groups like Les Ballets Africain and the Ghana Dance Ensemble (set up in 1962 by Kwabena Nketia and Albert Mawere Opoku). …

Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic

Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic

Okigbo's Drum Elegies

This article appraises Ben Obumselu's examination of Christopher Okigbo's conception of his poetry as music as particularly insightful. Okigbo's intent to make a music of words, evident in his denunciation of poetry of denotative statements, and reverent invocation of his favorite impressionist composers, and of Stephane Mallarme as models or even Muses notwith- standing, Obumselu discerns an underlying reference in every poem to events of Okigbo's life and even to contemporary Nigerian/African politics. This article extends the examination of Okigbo's poetics by investigating his exploration of funeral African drum music as an absorbing idiom of abstrac- tion consistent with surrealism. Discussing the African elegiac tradition, it privileges in the pivotal drumming event a conflation of lamentation with a rousing heroic tradition that illuminates Okigbo's practice in "Lament of the Drums" and "Lament of the Masks" and links many of the last poems in Path of Thunder together in significant unity. Moreover, the interpretation of the poems offered here is linked to the trajectory of the Okigbo narrative and the poet's heroic temper.

Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude

Research Article| December 01 2014 Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude Shane Graham Shane Graham Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) 60 (4): 481–512. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-1006 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Shane Graham; Cultural Exchange in a Black Atlantic Web: South African Literature, Langston Hughes, and Negritude. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2014; 60 (4): 481–512. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2014-1006 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Rhythms of Culture: Djembe and African Memory in African-American Cultural Traditions

An intriguing cultural phenomenon has been developing over the past forty years in dance studios and festivals in the United States and abroad: traditional African culture is being diffused through formal and informal instruction in the African arts. Among the most notable of the cultural arts being taught are drum and dance traditions. Because of the efforts of Africans who have migrated to other countries and the work of their students, the djembe drum has grown from relatively obscure origins (among the Mandingue people of West Africa) to become the most popular African drum of thousands worldwide (Charry 2000). (Master drummer Mamady Keita estimated that just a thousand but a million people listened to his teaching regarding the djembe [Keita 2011]). This phenomenon has not only exposed non-African populations to traditional African cultural practices, it has also become a vehicle by which people of African descent have reconnected with African roots--values of ancestors from which there has been significant separation due to the transatlantic slave trade. In the United States, few African Americans are aware of the extent to which they participate in the stream of African culture. However, through African-American musical forms, African musical idioms have become dominant in world music (Chernoff 1985,3). African Americans have taken a leading role in establishing African cultural influences in the world. One reason for this is that many musical realizations contain elements that are directly related to African cultural practices. In addition, many connections with core values of the culture were established through early involvement with movements that emphasized African drum and dance in the United States. By examining certain developments in African-American music with an emphasis on African drumming (and an added emphasis on the djembe), I will substantiate some of the recognized connections between African and African-American musical practices. My perspective will be that of a cultural anthropologist who studies the cultural products of the African Diaspora and who is also a practitioner--one who has performed as a drummer for the better part of her life, with experiences ranging from playing drum set (gospel, jazz, and reggae) to intense studies with a renowned master drummer from the Malinke tradition. This perspective has informed my readings of African cultural continuities in significant ways. The History and Location of Mandingue Djembe and Dunun Drumming Traditions In West Africa, the contemporary center of the djembe and dunun (three bass drum) orchestra runs along the upper Niger River from Faranah, Guinea, to Segou, Mali, with extensions stretching east into Burkina Faso; south into Cote D'Ivoire, southwest into Conakry, Guinea; and west toward the Malian cities of Kita and Kayes (Charry 2000,214). The primary urban centers of djembe drumming are the capital cities of Guinea (Conakry) and Mali (Bamako); however, one also finds djembe orchestras in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and Dakar, Senegal (Charry 2000, 214). The djembe is associated with a large ethnic group collectively known as the Malinke or Mandingue. This ethnic group migrated throughout a large region of West Africa associated with the old Mali Empire, a kingdom bordering the Sahara desert in the northwest region of Africa that reached the apex of its development between 1300 and 1500. Although I focus on the djembe/dunun orchestra, it is noted that Mandingue musical culture incorporates a variety of musical instruments that have also been influential in the spread of African music in the West. These instruments include the krin (a tuned wood drum), the balafon (an African predecessor to the marimba or xylophone), flutes, and horns. Also included are a rich variety of stringed instruments such as the harp-like kora (a twenty-one stringed harplute), the bolon (a three-stringed instrument connected to a gourd drum), the ngoni (a purported ancestor of the African-American banjo), and a variety of other instruments (Charry 2000, 10; Allen 2011). …

Energetic beating of the dyembe (African drum) as a cause of acute renal failure.

Energetic beating of the dyembe (African drum) as a cause of acute renal failure.