African Drum Research Articles

Labelle: Funk, Feminism, and the Politics of Flight and Fight

For now he knew what Shalimar knew: if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.Toni Morrison, Song of SolomonFlyyyyyy!Patti LaBelle, Somewhere over the RainbowPart I: Flight-Breath, Movement, ElsewheresLabelle, the powerful funk/rock/soul group that performed and recorded from 1971 to 1977, had the power to shake up the room. Make the walls thump with their voices. Liftfolks up till they soar. On a 1975 appearance on Soul Train, at the height of the group's popularity, the audience watches transfixed, forgetting to pose. Listening, they move together, individuality somehow melded into one more coordinated body. The bass thumps in their chests and carries them out and onto the dance floor, and we, too, feel the beat deeply. It carries even thirty-five years later. These are not some demure girl group. These are some kind of funky jungle birds, soaring, flying over the audience with their voices, giving them chills.Within moments of constraint, often linked to the material world of sexism, poverty, and loneliness, we find a consistent sonics of flight and transcendence in 1970s R&B/ funk/rock trio Labelle's music and performances. We hear the sonics of flight in Labelle's voices: Patti's long-held, soaring opening notes, the use of Sarah and Nona's background voices to circle, support, and uplift, the driving use of repetition and improvisation in the songs' endings-all aspects of virtuosity, an African-derived aspect of the jazz aesthetic. In Labelle's distinctly Afrofuturistic and feminist work, the black female body itself becomes a technology for flight. As Mark Dery defines it in his influential essay Black to the Future: Afro-Futurism 1.0 (Dery, 1995), Afrofuturism is the self-conscious appropriation of technology in black popular culture in order to think out problems of imaginative freedom in the past, present, and future. We might think of this technology in familiar terms-images of space travel, computer enhancement of voice like vocoders-or in less obvious ways-the African drum, the phonograph, the microphone. Labelle's use of voice, as well as rocking funky dance, combined with incisive lyrics bring to Afrofuturism a black-feminist informed critique of race, sexuality, and gender. The technologies of their highly theatrical performances, including elaborate stage shows and costumes-and not the least, the microphone-make heightened use of the black body, bringing to the fore its survival and flourishing. At the same time that Labelle makes outrageous and amazing use of technologies, they could not do so without the body itself-the body's movements, its sensuality, the body's breath as it lifts others and sends them into flight. We see in Labelle's vocal and dance performances the ability to transcend the merely human toward the spiritual. Labelle uses these powerful tools to move across the constraints of genre, and to push past racialized codes of gender, drawing from the styles and histories of the past, and envisioning a freed-up future for its audiences.In many ways, Labelle's ability to capture these moments of flight come from the hard work and insight from a career of struggle and deep immersion in the business of making music. Interviews with the group reveal a foundational sense of neighborhood and family for each of the women, but also experiences of struggle and risk: childhood poverty and violence for Hendryx, losing family members to cancer and diabetes for Labelle, and for all three, navigating the often financially and emotionally exploitative aspects of the music business, handling racial segregation on the road, and the sometimes sexism of the chitlin' circuit.Patti LaBelle, born Patricia Louise Holte on May 24, 1944, began singing at age fourteen, at the Beulah Baptist Church, where she soon began garnering solos. She formed the Ordettes, her first group, in 1958, where she was joined by her future Labelle partners, Sarah Dash and Nona Hendryx, in 1959. …

Photojournalism, media freedom and democracy

In the teeming Negro and colored shantytowns of Johannesburg, where newspapers and magazines are a rarity, a truck piled high with magazines rumbled through the unpaved streets last week. Wherever it stopped, hundreds of people swarmed about it, buying the magazine: The African Drum. (extract from 'South African Drumbeats', TIME Magazine, 1952) This short article is based on an address I offered at the opening of the 'G.R. Naidoo: a generous eye' photographic exhibition held at the Albert Luthuli Museum in Groutville, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, on 18 June 2010. (1) The travelling exhibition celebrates the work and life of G.R. Naidoo, a photojournalist who was committed to reporting on South Africa's freedom struggle in the 1950s. The Drum Decade (1950s), as the moment is known, has a special place in South African popular memory. This was the time and the place that a whole generation of black journalists and photographers cut their teeth, and went on to become the subject of university classrooms and academic books on literature and films for well over the next seven decades. So powerful was the writing and imaging that emerged from the period, that no other moment in South African journalism (or photography) has eclipsed it. From a reading of English literature course entries, some might think that journalism in South Africa stopped when Drum had passed its primo in the mid1960s. Drum became the most widely read magazine in Africa at the time. A 1959 TIME article, entitled 'Drum beat in Africa', stated that 240 000 copies of Drum were distributed across Africa, to countries like Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The magazine was so popular, in fact, that illiterate people allegedly paid educated friends to read them the magazine. What Drum launched, of course, was a whole generation of engaging writers and cultural workers whose sociology of everyday township life became the model for many disciplines. That their output was written during apartheid, and that they were nevertheless able to generate their stories, photography and act in films like Come back Africa (1959), is testimony to the idea that even the most repressed can tackle their conditions through creativity, resilience and intelligence. Adversity generates the best in people: they create, they cooperate and they generate--ideas, stories, histories, and so on. It is in these kinds of moments that journalism becomes a means to a social end. Journalists and photographers change the world. Think of the pictures of war and how single photographs have rattled the global conscience: * The young naked girl burned with agent orange, fleeing towards the camera during the war in Vietnam; * The picture of Hector Pieterson being carried horizontally during the Soweto uprising; * The Kevin Carter photograph of a baby in Rwanda desperately trying to get to a place of safety as a nearby vulture eyes it; * And, the euphoria as we saw Nelson Mandela for the first time in 26 years in February 1990. Who can fail to be affected by such evocative, historically significant images? Photographers always take sides, they don't just take pictures. And, if they think they are just picture takers, then I would refer you all to the film Under fire, where the photographer changes his defensive catchphrase: 'I don't take sides, I just take pictures.' The pictures, he learns, 'take sides', even as they are appropriated by different constituencies struggling for different--even opposing--outcomes. Photographers are part of what they document; they also often pay the price for their compassion. Kevin Carter committed suicide soon after he took the picture of the baby and the vulture. Many reporters have paid the price of their profession they are shot, captured, assassinated, jailed, threatened and interrogated. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that reporters, journalists and photographers have more than just a theoretical understanding of the idea of human rights and social justice. …

Kinetisk kulturanalys

Kinetic Cultural Analysis is following the object's movement in time and space and from context to context. To follow "African drums and dance" in this sense is to structure the field. To follow the object's paths is a fieldwork practice as well as an analytical method of interpretation. It could also account for the energy transferred to the analysis and interpretation procedures when change exceeding the boundaries between groups, genres and cultural contexts are as interesting as defining the existence of definable "cultures". In this article, our point is to discuss how this "stalker process" helps qualitatively oriented researchers to navigate large and complex fields. We have been able to look back on the pioneers who introduced African drum and dance in Sweden and investigate the object's motion, and the energy it generates in the cultural process which at the same time enhances the transformation of the context.

Lessons Learned From the Investigation of a Cluster of Cutaneous Anthrax Cases in Connecticut

In 2007, two cases of cutaneous anthrax associated with West African drum making were reported in Connecticut in a drum-maker and his child. Although both cases were due to exposure to naturally occurring Bacillus anthracis from imported animal hides, ensuing investigative and remediation efforts were affected by the intentional B anthracis attacks in 2001. To share our experience of responding to an outbreak of anthrax in the biologic terrorism preparedness era, we summarize Connecticut's investigation and describe lessons learned. Laboratory capacity to rapidly assist in diagnosing anthrax, collaborative associations between epidemiologists and law enforcement personnel, and training in use of the Incident Command System, all these a result of public health preparedness, enhanced the initial recognition and subsequent investigation of these anthrax cases. However, without established guidelines for environmental risk assessment and remediation of private residences contaminated by B anthracis, challenges were encountered that resulted in a conservative and expensive approach to remediation. Without a more rigorous approach to ensuring that B anthracis spore-free hides are used, the making of animal hide drums is likely to pose a continuing risk for anthrax to those working with contaminated hides and those exposed to subsequently contaminated environments.

Las Krudas, Spatial Practice, and the Performance of Diaspora

Abstract This essay argues that female rappers Las Krudas are, with their music, engaging in trangressive spatial practice. Las Krudas are especially helping to disrupt the classificatory eye's orientalist gaze—which visually and aurally disciplines space through the distribution of bodies and voices—through their public performances. In the tourist zones the classificatory eye looks upon a sanitized space, producing, in concert with the ear, ordered visual and aural landscapes evocative of the “authentic” Cuba. I suggest that sound can make visible spatial practice. Las Krudas perform music and theater—aimed at disrupting the definition of who is authentically Cuban—in the heart of the tourist zone. Widening the “circle of the we,” the space Las Krudas' music elaborates is seemingly heterotopic in that it may not be represented physically, yet it presupposes a “system of opening and closing that both isolates . . . and makes [it] impenetrable” (Foucault 1986, 26), making the heterotopia a space that erects its own fluid and autonomous boundaries. Las Krudas' music also expands diasporic space, transgresses geographic borders, and links sound to place: La Habana. In La Habana, Las Krudas borrow from shared diasporic resources (hip-hop culture/rap music, African drum rhythms and chants) when fashioning a musical aesthetic that allows for the articulation of the “local” as well as the “global.” Finally, I move beyond Foucault's spatial model of disciplinary power by citing de Certeau's walking in the city as analogous to the agential speech act. I suggest that the creation of sound/aural landscape/music is a particularly powerful productive tool for speaking back to and ultimately destabilizing disciplinary power.

Aural and written music traditions: a drumming ensemble case study

This essay focuses on a transcription of a recording of ‘Creative from Guinea’, a piece composed and taught to me orally by Atsu Dagadu of Ghana. The transcription is innovative, combining West African drum language mnemonics and the Time Unit Box System in a hybrid transcription system which I devised. I drew on my experience as a student of drumming as well as a single recording in prioritising transcription decisions. The transcription draws attention to the structure and arrangement of ‘Creative’, and provides an accurate score for educational use to correct memory errors. I discuss transcription as facilitating internalisation and understanding, fitting together with transmission, memory and preservation of music.

‘Re-storying’ Africa: The harvest festival in Chadian writer, J.B. Seid

This article reads the harvest festival in the preface to Joseph Brahim Seid's 1962 Au Tchad sous les étoiles (Told by starlight in Chad) as ‘re-storying’ Africa. The coming together at harvest-time as well as the exchange of produce, evidence of social cohesion is read as reflective of the communal nature of African societies. The exuberant energy, which characterizes the evening ritual, suggestive of the ‘life surge’ or vitality associated with African people, is read as reflective of African ways of being. Sound metaphor conveys an African drum aesthetic that is read as reflective of African sensibilities. Vivid imagery and heightened poetical prose suggest ‘possession’ or transcendence and is read as reflective of the sacred or spiritual function of dance in the context of ritual. Ogunba's (1978) discussion of the festival, Kubayanda's (1990) scholarship on ‘Africanness’ and Senghor's (1993) ideas on the cultural values of Africa, provide the theoretical underpinnings that inform this article.

One Nation Under a Groove: A People's History of the Drum

Drummers of African descent have long considered African drumming as a means of healing and empowerment for both themselves and their communities. The African drummers who have met for over 30 years to play at Washington, DC's Malcolm X Park still play the African drum for their people, despite attempts to have them removed from the park, to obscure the history of their tradition, and to disregard the underlying significance of the African drum for African people.

A modern version of the African drum

A modern version of the African drum

‘‘Greenotation:’’ A system for representing African drum sounds and techniques

Within the past few decades technology has made it possible not only to write African music on paper like western notation, but also to retrieve and perform it from the printed page. In this paper I will present an overview of and demonstrate a system for writing African music I designed and tested over the past 20 years. Greenotation (after my name, Doris Green) was created for percussion instruments of Africa because Western musical notation could not notate the nuances and actions found in percussion music. Greenotation can notate the music of bells, rattles, drums, talking drums, sticks, stamping tubes, xylophones, hand clapping, and water drums; it is also able to represent dance movements that are integral to many sub-Saharan African drum and dance traditions.

African Talking Drums and Oral Noetics

erable interest to anthropologists, linguists, and others, for on these instruments Africans have produced probably the most highly developed acoustic speech surrogates known around the world.' Various cultures have developed acoustic surrogates or sound substitutes for ordinary spoken words, using gongs or drums or whistles or bells or other instruments, as well as special sounds produced by the human voice itself, to communicate verbalized messages, often at a distance greater than that which articulate speech itself can cover. (Writing systems or scripts are also speech surrogates, but visual rather than acoustic, and we are concerned only with acoustic surrogates here.) Sometimes an acoustic speech surrogate is a code, that is to say, a system of sounds which essentially have no similarity to the sounds of the speech they represent: the Morse code used on an old-style telegraph is a standard example here, for the clicking buzz of a telegraph does not sound at all like speech and is not intended to. An African drum language is not such an abstract signaling code, but rather a way of reproducing, in a specially styled form, the sounds of the words of a given spoken language. Only recently have knowledgeable descriptions of various drum languages been worked out, and our knowledge of most such languages is still somewhat defective. To arrive at an understanding of how drums operate, one must first have a command in depth of the normal spoken language which the drums adapt, and then discover the principles governing the adaptation. That is to say, to understand African drum talk, one must know the spoken language being used-for one drummer will drum his native Duala, another Yaounde, another Lokele-and, in addition, one must discover the way in which the language is adapted or styled for the drums. A drum language is not understood ipso facto when one knows the spoken language it reproduces: drum language has to be specially learned even when the drums speak one's own mother tongue. To the not inconsiderable literature about the drums, much of it highly technical, there has just been added an invaluable small book (121 pages) in French, partly a translation but also an updating and magisterial streamlining of an earlier book in English by the same author.2 Although it honors existing linguistic, anthropological, musicological, and other scientific work, this new book is not in itself highly technical. But its author, Dr. John F.

Afrikanske smede

Afrikanske smede

Further Note on a West African Drum

Further Note on a West African Drum

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Book reviewed in this article:ISLAM AND MISSIONARY POLICY: Toward Understanding Islam. By Harold Gaylord Dorman, Jr.A SURVEY OF ISLAM: Mohammedanism, An Historical Survey. By H. A. R. Gibb.THE DIVINE PREPARATION AND NON‐CHRISTIAN FAITH: Le Mystère de l'Avent. By Jean Daniélou.A CENTURY OF HOME MISSIONS IN GERMANY: Ein Jahrhundert Innere Mission. By Martin Gerhardt.WILLIAM PATON: William Paton. By Margaret Sinclair.THE UNIVERSITY AND A WORLD MALAISE: The Crisis in the University. By Sir Walter Moberly.CHRISTIANITY IN A WORLD PERSPECTIVE: The Prospect for Christianity. By Kenneth Scott Latourette. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. 6s. 1949. (American title: The Christian Outlook.The Christian Understanding of History. By Kenneth Scott Latourette.OECUMENICITY AND THE PARISH: The Wholeness of the Church. By Oliver Tomkins.THE 'BASIC BIBLE: The Bible in Basic English.THE BATTLE FOR CHINA'S INTELLIGENTSIA: The Chinese Student Movement. By Wen‐Han Kiang.EXPERIMENTS IN CHINESE FAMILY LIFE: Family Life in West China. By Irma Highbaugh.ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE PHELPS‐STOKES FUND: Negro Status and Race Relations in the United States, 1911–1946. The Thirty‐Five Year Report of the Phelps‐Stokes Fund. By Anson Phelps Stokes.AFRICAN SECRET CULTS: Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland. By George Schwab.AFRICAN DRUM LANGUAGE: Talking Drums of Africa. By J. F. Carrington.IN THE HEART OF THE DARK CONTINENT: No Coração da Africa Negra. By Augusto Maio.NEVILLE TALBOT: Neville Stuart Talbot, 1873–1943. A Memoir. By F. H. Brabant.SHORTER NOTICES: Nests above the Abyss. By Isobel Kuhn.How to Lead Moslems to Christ. By George K. Harris.

The ancient East African Bantu Drum

The ancient East African Bantu Drum