Refuting the myth that Black American music/culture is "Europeanized".

[IllmaticDelta]

I'm interested to hear the rest. especially about the lack of a polyrhythmic focus in the music. because funk music lays it on thick. proceed homie, my interest is piqued.

There are African rooted ideas to ryhtym in the USA. Hand drumming was banned so you get old style conga/bongo drumming but you can display percussive ideas in other ways. Article below hits on some of them


What yall know about Aframs keeping the African influence alive in drumming even though hand drums were banned?

Steve Smith :: Confessions of a U.S. Ethnic Drummer

MD: Did you consciously put yourself into a scholarly frame of mind to do this project, "Drumset Technique/History of the U.S. Beat"?

STEVE SMITH: That mindset of exploring the history of U.S. music is just something that I've been living for a long time, so I've been in that headspace for quite a few years.

MD: Then this project was merely formalizing something that you've been thinking about anyway?

SS: Yeah, exactly. I guess the place to start is the Vital Information album "Where We Come From." Before we did that album back in 1997 I had spent some time investigating Afro-Cuban music. I realized I could learn the patterns of that style of drumming and I could play it to a degree but I didn't really play it well, in my opinion, because I didn't grow up in the culture. I realized that the best musicians of the genre are literally all from Cuba or Puerto Rico or somewhere in the Caribbean and most of them know the history of their music and culture. This inspired me to focus on the music of my own culture and use that same approach. I had to admit that as a U.S. drummer I didn't know a lot about the origins of my own music. I knew some jazz history and I had lived through '60s rock and the fusion era but I didn't know a lot about early jazz or the early rhythm and blues, blues, country and gospel and all that. And at a point I really started seeing myself as part of a lineage, a U.S. ethnic drummer playing the percussion instrument of the United States -- the drum set.

MD: And that triggered your whole investigation of the past?

SS: Definitely. I wanted to be informed about my own past and what I was connected to. I became very engrossed in learning about the whole U.S. music scene in general and the development of the drum set in particular. So now I really do see myself as a U.S. ethnic drummer that plays all the different styles of U.S. music, not that I'm a unique person doing it because I think there's a lot of guys doing it but they may not have identified themselves as that. It's been helpful for me to think of myself as a U.S. ethnic drummer. It's a bigger perspective than "a jazz drummer" or "studio drummer" or "fusion drummer."


MD: It's like the machine was emulating Gadd, and then the next generation emulated the machine.

SS: Yeah, it's a real twist and a real shift. And so, to me, there's not a lot of new drum vocabulary since the '70s, the emphasis became execution -- perfection. Different music's have developed since then but a whole lot of new vocabulary isn't necessary to play it. You can pretty much recycle everything that developed up until the '70s to play the music. For example, drum 'n bass is basically funk drumming speeded up and hip-hop is funk slowed down. And both come directly from James Brown, it's still essentially the same rhythms and beats that the James Brown bands developed in the '60s and '70s. So even though some things have evolved and changed, it remains the same. Hopefully some new things will evolve but for the most part the lion's share of the vocabulary is already there for drummers.

MD: What were some of the surprises that you had in researching the early years...even the African connection. Were there any revelations about how this music developed as you found out about it in your research?

SS: I think what was significant to me is that in the United States there's no hand drum tradition, which in fact led to the drum set becoming the rhythmic voice of the African American community. Whereas, if history had played itself out differently and let's say we had a hand drum tradition in the United States, the drumset may have never been a necessary invention because we would've had a whole percussive orchestra just with hand drumming. But because of the no-drumming laws that were enforced during the time of slavery, the hand drum tradition that develops directly out of African drumming was squelched in this country. It is true that slaves in New Orleans were allowed to play hand drums once a week at Congo Square. But when you look at that in the scope of how long slavery existed in the United States, which is from the 1500s until the mid 1800s, Congo Square only represents about 40 years in the scheme of things. It began in 1817 and lasted until the mid 1850s. I think in some ways the significance of Congo Square has been a bit overemphasized. Congo Square had the drumming legally but there were other places in Louisiana and all over the South that had the African polyrhythmic percussive concepts still being practiced illegally or underground for the entire history of slavery in the U.S. There's a great book by Dena Epstein called "Sinful Tunes and Spirituals," which is a documentation of everything she could find on the African polyrhythmic concept surviving in the United States throughout the years of slavery. She found that people kept the African pulse alive in many ways such as playing washboards, jawbones, beating sticks on the floor, or stomping their feet on the floor. Even some African hand drums or African styled drums that were made in secret here in the U.S. have been found.

MD: And you make an interesting point in the DVD about the polyrhythmic style of "patting juba" leading to the development of the drumset.

SS: That's another percussion instrument, so to speak, that was developed in the U.S., where the person is playing with feet and hands, incorporating all the limbs just like the drumset. It's an African polyrhythmic concept and it was eventually applied to the drumset, which is the only percussion instrument in the world that uses all four limbs. So in effect, the slaves being deprived of hand drums set the stage for the African American community to embrace the drumset. Without hand drums they were forced to adapt to the European percussion instruments that were available in the1800s, the snare drum and the bass drum, so they were comfortable with the individual instruments that would make up the drumset. I find it real interesting that basically the invention of the drum set is the invention of the bass drum pedal. After that happened in the late 1800s, basically the drum set wasn't used for any other purpose than playing jazz, which was a creation of the African American community. So when people first played the drumset they wanted to play with that concept -- one person playing a snare drum and a bass drum with that African American swing rhythmic concept. The drumset could've just as easily been used in a symphony orchestra but it wasn't. It had some applications in, say, vaudeville and maybe a few situations here and there other than jazz but they never took off as playing concepts. The playing concept that we now take for granted is essentially an African American concept of how to use the instrument. This concept has been so thoroughly assimilated into the culture that most people don't even think about it or question how it came to be. Today the drumset is an instrument that's been accepted all over the world but it is quintessentially a U.S. instrument that developed from our unique history and culture.

http://www.vitalinformation.com/news/drumtalk/md1.htm

 

[IllmaticDelta]

SS: I started off by putting out the concept of being a U.S. ethnic drummer instead of being a "rock" drummer or a "jazz" drummer or some other sub-category of U.S. Music. I went through that to give the students a point of reference of how I think about the drumset and the music I play. Then I went through the rhythmic common denominator of all U.S. Music...the swing pulse, the U.S. Beat.

I played my exercises with the bass drum and hi hat playing the 3/2 2/3 rhythms. Then we got into some of the technical ideas.

One thing I got into pretty deep, which I didn't get into at all on the DVD, is how people playing rhythm evolved out of nature -- the natural phenomenon of rhythm. I'll probably write about it in depth in the book that I'll work on over the next year.

Here is the idea: First of all, let's look at why do we have 12 pitches, 12 tones to work with in music? The reason that we have them is that they exist in nature. If you got back to Pythagoras and how he discovered (as far as the Western world is concerned) the overtone series or what is know as harmonics, he discovered that if you divided a string by 2/3rds you get the fifth (or the dominant). If you divide that dominate by 2/3rds you get another fifth, and so o; what we now call the cycle of fifths. You go through the cycle of fifths until you come all the way around again to where you started, let's say you started at C, you end up at B# and you've played 12 notes. In those days the B# was a different note than C, but after the scale was tempered they became the same note.

The Western world developed harmony so eventually the scale was tempered so we could play chords and play in all the keys on one instrument without retuning between songs, in nature as you continue up the scale the notes are sharper and sharper. The twelve tone tempered scale is a man made creation based on the fundamentals present in nature. So the reason we have 12 tones is because they exist in nature, they were "polished" by man, but they are not an arbitrary creation.

The reason that we have rhythm is based on the same phenomenon -- rhythm exists in nature as a result of the overtone series. What is a pitch but a vibration that occurs at a certain speed? A440 means a sound pulsing at 440 beats per second. If I could play 440 beats on the snare drum in a second, it would sound like the pitch A440. If you slowed that down, you will start to hear the pulses present in the overtone series. That's rhythm.

Rhythm is the same as pitch... but slowed down. If you speed the pulses up fast enough you get radio waves and even faster they become light. As you slow the pulses down, you hear them as pitches (well, the pitches us humans can hear) and as you slow them down more they become rhythm. You can slow them down even more but you can't keep track of them unless you have a watch or a calendar.

With the overtone series first you hear the fundamental, next you hear the octave, then the fifth above that, then the fourth above that, then a major third and a minor third above that. When you slow them down to a point where you hear them as rhythm, the fundamental is beat one and the octave is twice as fast. So you have "one" and then the octave being twice as fast is "two over one" which is basically "one" and "two." The fifth vibrates one third faster than the fundamental, which is "three over two," then the fourth above that is another octave, which is four times faster than the fundamental, it's the rhythm four over three. And the major third is five over four and so on.

That's why we have what we call quarter notes, triplets, 8th notes, 5's, 6's, 7's, etc. again they are present in nature. But they are not tempered, that is why African drumming sounds so loose and funky to us. But our Western ears are now becoming used to the sound of "Tempered Rhythm" which is what quantizing and having "perfect" time is all about, tempered rhythm.

In the master class we talked about this phenomenon, that rhythm is essentially and naturally polyrhythmic because it occurs that way in nature. The whole concept of linear drumming is an intellectual fabrication. It doesn't exist in nature. Polyrhythmic pulse exists in nature. Or polyrhythm is vibrations slowed down to the point where they appear as rhythm and since harmonics are multi-layered, they sound polyrhythmic. So it's a natural principal that rhythm and pulse is polyrhythmic... that's why African music developed the polyrhythmic base that it did, it was just a response to nature. It wasn't a fabrication... "Ok, we're gonna play three over two here." It's just the way pulse is. It's the way vibration and frequencies work.

When we look at all the music that was derived from the African diaspora, it's essentially all polyrhythmic. The foundationary rhythms are based on the most basic polyrhythm that exists in nature, three over two... the polyrhythm of the perfect fifth. So it all makes sense. And we U.S. Americans have our interpretation of that, which is the swing rhythm. The Afro-Cubans have their interpretation, which is clave, just as the Brazilians have their interpretation of it and the Africans themselves have their own interpretation of the same phenomenon.

http://www.vitalinformation.com/news/drumtalk/md3.htm

trying to keep our natural African polyrhtym instincts alive w/o having hand drums caused us to invent the modern drum kit that your fav music is played on

 

[K.O.N.Y]

Face Jugs: African- American Art and Ritual in 19th-Century



http://mam.org/exhibitions/details/face-jugs.php

Georgia Museum of Art to show 19th-century African American face jugs



A History of American Face Jugs



http://river.chattanoogastate.edu/orientations/ex-learn-obj/Face_Jugs/Face_Jugs_print.html


A Brief and General History of the Face Jug



http://www.kuehnpottery.com/facejughistory.htm



Kongo in the Americas Workshop: Face Jugs in South Carolina

Breh this right here is some next level aa history shyt

 

[Poitier]

Breh this right here is some next level aa history shyt

I want to buy one!!!!

 

[Luke Cage]

This is going to be a long ass thread with me trying to debunk some many misconceptions. And not trying to cause any division, but what made me want to create this thread is because I see a lot online that Africans, Caribbeans and whites have this big fallacy that Black American culture is largely "Europeanized" due the African traits being erased during slavery. This is not true. One can point to the Gullah's and Creoles as proof of Black American culture not being Europeanized, but I'm gonna go deeper.

Also many(not all of them) of them sometimes assume that Black American don't even have our own distinct culture(music, cusinine, dance, folk tales, ceremonies etc.) or that simply American pop/urban culture is only Black American culture, which couldn't be further from the truth. American pop/urban culture takes bits and pieces from Black American culture(mostly new age) NOT the other way around. But all, not even most, aspects of Black American culture are necessarily mainstream, nor is most of it based in "urbacenters", seeing as Black American culture is largely rooted in rural traditions of the US south, and fairly recently moved and evolved in big urbacenter(NYC,CHI,L.A., etc etc) with the great migration of Black American people to large metropolitan areas.

But the second paragraph is not the point, because we do know us Black Americans DO HAVE our own distinct culture in America that is not only "Urban". But is it "Europeanized?" The answer is no and actually the other way around. The oppressed influencing the oppressing. Yes Black American culture is influenced Europeans/whites in some way, BUT the influence on American culture by blacks in America trumps the European influence on blacks in America. One can point to the many music genre's. To me that does not indicate that Black American culture is "Europeanized." Is Black American culture African? I would say Black American culture evolved into something different, but it is JUST as African influenced as any other black culture of the diaspora; Jamaican, Afro-Brazilian, Haitian, Afro-Dominican, Afro-Cuban, Bahamian,etc,etc,etc...

I'm gonna start with music since:
1. Its easiest for me to address.
2. Music plays a big part in Black American culture.
3. Music seems to be the root of the misconception.

To me the reason why people outside AA's like Africans, Caribbeans and whites think our culture is "white-washed" or "Europeanized" is because Black American music isn't exactly polyrhythm/percussion heavy like that which is found in among other people in the African diaspora. Something like this...




As we know almost all percussion playing music was banned among slaves in North America, largely due to the Stono Rebellion of Angolan slaves in South Carolina, excluding Congo square New Orleans on Sundays(the French and Spanish had a slightly different more lenient system of slavery than did the Anglo-Americans). So, the heavily percussion based Lower West African and Central African styles of music eventually died out in North America for the most part, except among a few key styles and places in North America ie South Carolina Gullahs, Southern Louisiana creoles, Northern Mississippi fife and drum blues(though that isn't Lower West African or Central African derived, but from polyrhythmic Fulani flute and drum music), and African-American southern spirituals.

So with the low amount of African polyrhythm/percussion in North America, one would question HOW IS Black American music African influenced and not just largely Europeanized?


To be continued in next post:

if anything i feel like its been the other way around. music on a global scale has been heavily influence by black artists.

 

[K.O.N.Y]

I want to buy one!!!!

breh our history is just

The genius American slaves had was just

 

[How Sway?]

this thread is cray I remember my sister was talking about something like this a few yrs ago.

 

[How Sway?]

This is Gonje (Gonjey) music from the Talensi people who are located in the Upper Eastern Region of Ghana and in Burkina Faso. The Talensi are sometimes referred to as the "Frafra" people, which is a colonialist term which can have pejorative overtones when used. The songs sung in this selection are in Talni,, which is the language of the Talensi.
The Gonje is made from a gourd, lizard skin, stick and horsehair. It is bowed with a horsehair bow,
Filmed and recorded in Ghana, West Africa by Nana Kimati Dinizulu.

his recording was made July 2002 in Banjul and shows a Jali/Griot Xhalam lute player.The Xhalam is semi spike lute that has been used in West Africa for more than 1000 years. Visit my Blog site for more info www.myspace.com/banjoulf

alot of the music from this region use a lot of strings and intruments with a key(and some drums which i didn't show). which is different from other areas where its all percussion

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Breh this right here is some next level aa history shyt

One of those things many aren't aware of

 

[How Sway?]

very different from the poly-rythmic drumming and call&response music south of the Sahara.

 

[The Amerikkkan Idol]

breh our history is just

The genius American slaves had was just

I know, right?

These folks were doing homemade inoculations to prevent tuberculosis and shyt.

How did they know?

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

 

[Supper]

A Very Unique Take on the Ring Shout in North West Louisiana

http://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/veaster-porter.html
http://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/veasterrock1991.html
(Other video media which I can't post)

 

[IllmaticDelta]

A Very Unique Take on the Ring Shout in North West Louisiana

Good stuff