Fusion

I was privileged on Thursday to experience something of the music scene in Ouagadougou. My friend and SIL colleague, Mary, is an ethnomusicologist in Burkina. She’s also a great flute player with whom I get together when we’re in the same place (3 times in Ouaga and once in Nairobi so far) to play through flute duets. We spent about 2 hours on Tuesday evening doing just that, ploughing our way through books of Telemann and Kuhlau. It was great! She’s also a saxophonist, and it’s predominantly with the sax (though the flute does come out occasionally!) that she gets to play in various jazz groups in Burkina. One of the groups that she plays with has a concert in Bobo, about 5 hours from Ouagadougou this Saturday, and they’ve been practising for that this week. Thursday night was the dress rehearsal in which they performed on the roof of a bar in downtown Ouaga. I got to tag along. It was fascinating, and very enjoyable. As well as electric guitar, bass, drum kit, keyboard, trumpet and sax, there were some traditional West Africa instruments: djembe, a talking drum and a kora (see note below). Rhythms seem to come naturally to most Africans. The complex rhythmic patterns that they came up with would have taken me some time to figure out, and get in my head let alone play. If they’re coming from within, I guess that’s less of a problem! I loved the interchange between the instruments, the mix of traditional and modern, and the sheer enjoyment on the faces of (most of) the players. And of course, it was improvised (a skill which is as yet, out of my range), nothing being written down. A great night out. I’m sure there must be such things going on in Nairobi. I’ve just not been a part of that particular music scene.

From www.britannica.com:- kora, long-necked harp lute of the Malinke people of western Africa. The instrument’s body is composed of a long hardwood neck that passes through a calabash gourd resonator, itself covered by a leather soundboard. Twenty-one leather or nylon strings are attached to the top of the neck with leather tuning rings. The strings pass over a notched  bridge (10 strings on one side of the bridge, 11 on the other) and are anchored to the bottom of the neck with a metal ring. In performance the instrument rests on the ground in a vertical position, and the musician plays the instrument while seated. He plucks the strings with the thumb and forefinger of each hand, while the remaining fingers hold two hand posts drilled through the top of the gourd. Possessing a range of just over three octaves, the kora is tuned by moving the leather rings located on the top of the neck.
From Wikipedia:- The talking drum is an hourglass-shaped drum from West Africa, whose pitch can be regulated to mimic the tone and prosody of human speech. It has two drumheads connected by leather tension cords, which allow the player to modulate the pitch of the drum by squeezing the cords between his arm and body. A skilled player is able to play whole phrases.