Djembe Rhythms from West Africa

Tag: parade

  • Candomble and the Parade of Lost Souls

    Candomble and the Parade of Lost Souls

    This past Halloween, the samba band I play with, Samba du Soleil, got to take part in the annual Parade of Lost Souls event in Vancouver. We were stationed at the entrance gate to open the festivities, playing for half an hour before the city’s own Carnival Band came marching up with horns blaring and drums pounding, to lead the crowd off into the night.

    Our band had a captive audience to begin, though it was still daylight and they hung back, only a few of the usual brave souls dancing to break the ice. Our usual opening number, Baion, was lively enough, but the next tune, a more mellow Bollywood jam, was less practiced and failed to energize. So we switched it back up to our rocking Samba Reggae, to get everyone up and moving as the Carnival Band arrived.

    First they played over top of our tune, then gave signals to follow their musical lead. It was all pretty chaotic and loud and fun as it should be, with the costumed crowd fully engaged now and ready to amble out of the square on the Carnival Band’s coattails. Samba du Soleil held our positions beside the exit passage where the crowd column, five or six wide, continued streaming past.

    In the transition as the other band faded from the scene, our band kept the pulse going with a steady trance pulse. The surdo and percussion were supporting the groove as I improvised a funky two-bar walking beat on the timbau:

    My choice of beats wasn’t premeditated or decided consciously, it just arose out of the energetic of the moment, the pace of the crowd walking past, the bounce of the vibe. Once locked in, I had to keep it going, until finally the flow of people dwindled after twenty minutes.

    Needless to say, that rhythm stayed with me for the next two days and nights, hammered into my bones and humming in my cells. Then on the third day, when thinking about the band’s work in progress, Candomble, it hit me: that was the essential feel I was channeling in Vancouver. A closer look at the notation confirmed the unconscious link to the rhythm I was working on the week before.

    I had thought I found a new mine shaft to the mother lode of ritual music, but it proved to be an avenue well traveled before, even a familiar one, only obscured by other itineraries, agendas, and maps of the mountain.

    —

    For more rhythms to play with a samba or batucada band, be sure to see my latest books in the Roots Jam series, Roots Jam 4: World Beats – Rhythms Wild! and Best of Roots Jam: African & World Drum Rhythms (available from Amazon in print, or the DjembeRhythms.com order page for PDF versions and optional audio files).

  • Drumming and Protest

    Drumming and Protest

    As a fledgling drummer and burning out environmental activist back in the ‘90s, I was happy to support the watershed logging protest camp at Hasty Creek with some conga beats by the campfire. Everyone has a role. Politics gets tiresomely verbal, and dangerously serious; yet those who stand must speak… so what better medium than the ancient drum?

    It runs into politics too. Like the time an elderly British lady watching cricket on the field across where we were practicing for dance class with duns, bells and djembes, came up to complain, “It’s very distracting, you know!” Yes ma’am, that’s the point. It’s not a soothing, but an activating instrument, disturbing the peace with purpose.

    And then there’s the cultural appropriation arrow. It needn’t be argued here; it goes as deep as one wants to go. At bottom, it’s about sound and frequency, vibration and magic, that comes from beyond and inside of us and means to enliven our common humanity on this earth. In that simplicity is so much power. Power that is set aside, like elemental fire, in the canon of things legal and appropriate in our civilized decorum. So the power joins parades to demonstrate our allied needs, singing back to natural harmony, unity, beauty.

    This week there’s talk of coming out of hibernation with the local island samba band, Samba du Soleil, to join a BLM march. Hooray! We’ve been stewing all winter waiting to gather and practice again, every week as we normally do, but only just begun with two sessions. With the lockdowns we wondered if there would be any protests or marches this summer to join and animate… perhaps even a protest of the lockdown itself? Probably not, as band members were split, feelings divided. But we all wanted to play together again—if only to bask in its glow in our group bubble, outside in the sunshine.

    As for the rusty rhythms, most are picking up pretty well where we left off, those many hours of muscle memory close at hand. Even our newest piece, just introduced in the fall, Candombe.

    Here are the two parts I was given to play on timbau by our band leader, Sam Miller. Shaped somewhat cone-like, it’s basically a synthetic ashiko; so I play it like a djembe and the usual notation applies:

    1. G – – T P – d – G – – T P d g(d)

    No, that’s not a misprint with that first tone (d). It just helps to loosen things up if a pattern permits, to play with the opposite hand from usual when alternating. So instead of three hits in a row with the right (P – g – G -), why not play a left-hand beat (d) instead?

    The last (d) of the bar is optional. You might want to try a two-bar pattern with that beat as a rest, the first time around, and throw the extra beat in on bar two for the quick turnaround.

    1. P – – T G – P d g – P d G T – d

    This part starts the same as the first part, but switches the [bass… slap] opening to a [slap… bass.] There’s a lot going on after that, so alternate hands and focus, starting slow.  It’s pretty funky when it gets rolling.

    I hadn’t played Candombe since back in those early days of the ‘90s. It was the main rhythm I learned in my first full drum workshop, with Joseph “Pepe” Danza from Uruguay, in Nelson, BC. Trying to invent a notation on the fly, I tinkered with it to where I thought that’s what Pepe taught; but later he supplied his own notation. Naturally, they were fairly different, if in the same feel. But then as Pepe says, “There are many parts to Candombe. It’s incredibly rich and complex.” Candombe, after all, is itself “a transformation of rhythms that come from Nigeria and/or Congo.” (See more notation and discussion in my post, “Uruguayan Trance Rhythm.”)

    Give it up to the drum. And as with the drum… Take it with respect, and run with it, powered by the heart.

    ————-

    For more samba and batucada (street band) music notation and arrangements see the latest in my series of drum lesson books, Roots Jam: World Beats! – Rhythms Wild.