Djembe Rhythms from West Africa

Category: West African drumming

  • Latin Meets African

    Latin Meets African

    At a weekly market in San Pancho, Mexico (a small town up the coast from Puerto Vallarta), a musical trio called Caravan provided the live entertainment for the day. A talented flamenco-style guitarist, a versatile female singer, and a conga player. The drummer had an improvised kit of sorts, as he sat on a cajon, with one foot operating a cowbell pedal, and the other a pedal for cymbal. But for the most part he stuck to a simple tumbao pattern on the single conga:

    H t g d H t P t

    I have long known of this rhythm as a staple of the Afro-Latin genre, but never noticed it being relied on for virtually a whole set of diverse popular, classical, and Latin-style songs.

    The repetitive nature of this particular rhythm reminded me of another concert I witnessed in Victoria, BC about twenty years ago. Juno Award-winner Alpha Yaya Diallo (on guitar and vocals) fronted a band featuring a talented djembe player, likely also from Guinea, who occasionally was set loose to show his chops. But for 90 percent of the show, I was amazed to see him confined to the same simple accompaniment rhythm, which any beginning djembe player will recognize as the basic part for Kuku:

    G – g d – – P –

    I was struck by the similarly confined role of both of these talented drummers separated by time, geography and culture, given the emphasis of the music they were supporting. And now for the first time I realized the universality of the rhythm they both played, as the tumbao and the Kuku part are essentially the same archetypal rhythm.

    Both start grounded with the bass downbeat on the 1, follow with a double tone upbeat, an understated downbeat on the 2, and a final upbeat slap.

     

    It’s a proven formula, suitable for virtually any 4/4 song, to provide both a stable downbeat structure and an uplifting offbeat counterpoint. The unstressed extra notes on conga (unbolded, below) serve only as timekeepers.

    To explore further the many overlaps between traditional African and Afro-Latin rhythms, choose from any books in the Roots Jam series. And let me know what other lookalikes you discover! 

  • How We Practice

    How We Practice

    Last spring, after a couple of years off from playing West African music, the local dance teacher reached out to see if we could start some regular practice on traditional dundun rhythms.

    Yes!

    So we began, with a few others trying out until we settled on a core study group of four to six players. The dance teacher has learned some of the rhythms before and knows what she likes from dance classes; otherwise it mainly falls to me to share parts from my store of resources and experience.

    As with drum students everywhere, the written notation works for some and not for others. I bring notes to rely on and support my porous memory, so at least I can model all the parts accurately for others to learn. For those students who relate to it, the notation serves both to follow along closely when learning beat by beat, and to reference visually the single or multiple bars of a pattern.

    We usually have three separate dunun players (traditional style with bells), and once they get rolling, I practice djembe parts, traditional solos, breaks, and improvisation. With the following notation you can share what we’ve been grooving with. All the rhythms have traditional sources, but at this stage they are mixed and mingled, adapted to our circumstance and taste.

    Pro Tip: Lately there’s so much good stuff to choose from (beyond the projects of Bolokondo and Dunungbe), so for the next rhythm to practice, we pick from a hat.

    For written notation and audio tracks for your solo and group practice, see the Roots Jam collection (4 volumes to choose from) at Amazon.com or the DjembeRhythms.com order page.

  • Performance Debrief

    Performance Debrief

    Last weekend I had the opportunity to play in two drum groups for a young friend’s going-away party at a community hall. Our fledgling West African drumming practice group got invited to kick off the festivities, followed later by the established batucada group, Samba du Soleil. The former group consisted of three dundun players and me on djembe, while the samba group had nine members playing a full complement of Brazilian instruments, and a well-rehearsed arrangement of five pieces.

    The first set was hampered by our sangban player missing from sickness, replaced on the spot by a talented transplant from the samba group. It was going to be informal anyway, layering in part by part until the dun parts meshed, then adding in traditional and original djembe solos.

    After Soko, I said to the crowd of twenty-some twenty-somethings, who had been merrily gyring around the floor, that our music was “not intended to be a flashy performance, but just to groove… which you’ve been doing anyway, so, let’s keep doing that.”

    What I should have said, would be to introduce the music and say we were a practice group, joined by a sangban player who was taking on these rhythms for the first time. Layering in worked well to establish the groove, but then I went right into the sequence of traditional solos, as if there were some invisible West African dance class in the room instead of the gyring hippies who just wanted to flow and connect with the music.

    Some of the solos went smoothly, some a little rough, and I relished as always the tapestry of variations, largely from my overdriving mental catalogue of schematic notation, with maybe ten percent of free soloing, usually riffing off fragments or mistakes from the traditional solo phrases.

    What I should have done was to honor my intention to connect with and play from the groove, to the audience in that room, from the heart of the music rather than from my extensive ethnographic program. I realized this oversight in my bodily sense while walking, the next day, each step marking the cadence with the beats still tracking in my brain and infusing the blood… Coming from that place of organic motion, those fragments could spring more organically from the music, connecting also with the vibe of the dancers.

    Learning from the experience, I could use these tools in future to enhance local community, rather than to project as if on a screen the flavors of an imported culture. Likewise, in preparation for such an event, it could be more productive to visualize a holistic experience with the audience and the venue, instead of simply practicing and memorizing the notation and handing of the rhythms themselves.

    Bottom line, it’s not about the rhythms for their own sake, but about the interactive experience that the rhythms are tools for unlocking. And even just in terms of the music itself, the point is not to try to recreate “traditional” solos faithfully (ultimately an impossible task, especially for a person not of that tradition), but rather to use them as guideposts to the territory, leading to and from the heart of the music: the pulse and the texture created by the duns.

    In addition, we had a shaker and percussion player from the samba band standing by trying more or less successfully to follow and fit in, along with a stray djembe volunteer from the audience. Instead of making an effort to help them follow the pulse and engage them in the group, I largely ignored them because they were late additions to the mix and I was, again, too fixated on my own program of solo sequencing.

    Thankfully, the samba performance later was more satisfying. Though I was entrusted with leading the arrangements, my own part as a timbau player was integral more than prominent, even when I carried off competently a sixteen-bar set solo during Samba Reggae. The overall mix was balanced and dynamic, feeding and feeding off the room’s enthusiastic dance energy.

    So, the point of this exercise isn’t to tear myself down or build myself up, but just to share some useful debriefing of how things can go during performance, and how they might improve.

    I hope you find this mini-lesson helpful for your next show!

    For more tips, lessons, and rhythms for West African and Brazilian drumming, see Roots Jam 4: World Beats.

  • Polyrhythms Simplified

    Recently I have been emailing a school student working on a music project, answering questions about West African rhythms. His latest query asked for exercises or tips for mastering polyrhythms.

    Polyrhythms, in a nutshell, are combinations of rhythms using different time signatures, played together.

    Here are some prototypical polyrhythms:

    With any 4/4 pattern…the Afro-Latin clave:

    x – – x – – x – x – – x – – x –

    Note the predominant triplet feel in the swing of the clave, played over a 4/4 bar.

    With any 6/8 pattern, you can overlay a binary cross-rhythm. The following is a common kenkeni part for 6/8 rhythms like Soli…

    x – o – o – x – o – o –

    or Dununba:

    O – x – O – x – O – x –

    My latest deep exploration, inspired by the Drum in the Sun camp in Thailand run by Michael Pluznick and Tim Dabrowski, plays with the elasticity of a single djembe pattern, in the field between the artificial polarities of 4/4 and 6/8. For example, try each of these as 6, then as 4, then back and forth, with more subtlety, in the middle:

    [right, left: G, D = bass; g, d = tone; P, T = slap]

    Sunu

    as 6: g T P D P d g T P D P d

    as 4: g – T P – D P d g – T P – D P d

    Djole

    as 6: G d g D P T G d g D P T

    as 4: G – d g D – P T G – d g D – P T

    4/4 bell: x – x – x – x – x – x – x – x –

    One further note on polyrhythmic timing. There are two ways to overlap 6 on 4. For example in Djole (which is normally played in 4) instead of leaving spaces as in the 4 variation above, you can instead stretch the triplet notes of the 6 variation evenly across the phrase, so for example the G d g will take the same time as the x – x – of the bell pulse.

    As always, mastering these overlapping timings in ensemble can be tricky. Try it with a drum track for practice, and explore the elastic space available with your solo practice.

  • How to Play Dununs: 2 New Free Drum Lessons On YouTube

    After a long hiatus, I have recorded and uploaded 2 new free drum lessons to my popular YouTube channel – the Djembe Lessons Playlist. In these video lessons I present the basic techniques and patterns needed to play a selection of common patterns for dununs, particularly kenkeni and sangban, in the traditional style with mounted bells.

    Dunun Basic Video 1: How to Play Dununs: Basic Technique and Patterns. For a beginner I break down the elementary bell patterns and how they fit with the stick beats, and demonstrate the open and mute notes with the stick hand. You can see the various combinations of single and double bell and stick beats in action with seven sample tradtional rhythm parts.

    Dunun Basic Video 2: Kenkeni Part for Dununba. A second lesson presents a basic and advanced version of the challenging kenkeni part for the Dununba family of rhythms, beginning with an onbeat “training wheels” version and moving on to the traditional offbeat feel.

    Below you will find notation for the seven traditional rhythm samples in the basic beginner’s lesson:

    Notation Key:
    x = bell without stick played
    o = open hit with stick (and bell)
    m = mute (closed) hit with stick (and bell)

    Makru: o – x – o – x – 
    Yanvalou (Haitian): o – x – m – 
    6/8 ride: x – x x – x x – x x – x
    Mendiani: o – x x – x o – x x – x
    Bolokonondo: m – x m – x m – x m – x
    Sorsornet: x – o x – o x – o x – o
    Kassa: x – o o – x m – 

    For more notation see my Roots Jam rhythm collections (3 vol.) with optional audio files (CD or MP3 downloads) at DjembeRhythms.com, or more free lessons at Alternative Culture Magazine website.