The Asahi Shimbun Displays
Objects In Focus
12 August – 10 October 2010 / Room 3 / Free
Akan drum playlist
Commentary by Devorah Romanek, Exhibition curator
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1. Ceremonial drums, Unknown artist
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The drum tells the story of the creation of numerous forms of music
and dance, starting with the drumming and dancing of West Africa
through many variations of dance and music born of the enormous
impact of slavery in the Americas and particularly in mainland
North America.
2. Akonoday, Unknown artist
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Drums are essential in most forms of African music. They are played
in West Africa for ceremonial, celebratory and social occasions,
carrying and communicating great spiritual, social and political
power and significance.
3. Boll Weevil, Irvin (Gar Mouth)
Lowry
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The work song is sung about the specific work at hand, such as
picking cotton. The boll weevil, a menace to cotton crops, arrived
in the USA in the late nineteenth century and by the 1920s had
infested all cotton-growing areas to devastating effect. However,
such a song could also carry a strong subtext, with the implication
of a troublesome pest being meant to portray an overseer or slave
or plantation owner.
4. Job Job, Vera Hall and Dock Reed
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After the abolition of slavery the number of African-American
churches grew quickly, and at this time the Spiritual moved from
fields and meeting houses into these churches, to eventually become
Gospel music.
5. 2-stepping place, Othar Turner and The
Rising Star Fife and Drum Band
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Fife and Drum is one of the most widespread forms of African
creolised music across the wider Americas. It was and is played
alone, or as part of the larger celebration known as Jonkonnu,
Junkanoo, Jonkanoo, Jankumu and John Canoe. The origins of this
celebration are in the name of a West African Chief and it is
related to modern winter-time carnivals and festivals.
6. Georgia Buck (Georgie Buck) (Never let a woman have
her way), Banjo, Dink Roberts
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The banjo is an instrument that developed from the African
instrument the Banza. In addition to new forms of music arising
from the experience of slavery, new forms of dance were born, such
as the buck dance of this banjo piece. Buck dances and buck and
wing dances picked up the rhythms of drumming, particularly as
drumming became widely banned on plantations in the American
colonies beginning in the 1740s. Buck and wing dancing was
ultimately supplanted by its later cousin, tap dance.
7. The fox, Unknown artist
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Variations on African-American slave music proliferated onto urban
streets, with migration to Northern cities, particularly after the
Civil War. These proliferations took a wide range of creolized
expression, from double dutch jump roping to bucket drumming.
8. Let 'em jump, Pete Johnson
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The two most well known genres to emerge from the history of
slavery are the Blues and Jazz. Blues and Jazz are distinctly North
American musical evolutions, but carry with them influences from
all geographic regions of the African Diaspora in the Americas,
having strong reliance upon such African-based musical devices as
call and response, syncopation and improvisation. This particular
piece is an example of a type of Blues known as Boogie Woogie,
being more up-beat than most forms of Blues, and forming a bridge
to Big Band style Jazz.
9. Good Golly Miss Molly, Little Richard
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Rock ’n’ roll is the marriage of blues, gospel and country music,
with added instruments and electric amplification. It was
African-American artists such as Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Chuck
Berry and Little Richard who originated this music, which was later
popularised with white audiences by white musicians, such as Elvis
Presley and the Beatles, when they began ‘covering’ the work of
African-American artists. Rhythm & Blues, born in the 1930 and
40s, is an urbanised form of African-American music, taking hold in
large Northern cities, such as Chicago and New York, where Jazz had
earlier found a home.
10. Keep that Hi-De-Hi in your soul, Cab
Calloway
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Big Band Jazz began in the 1920s and was popular through the late
1940s, with New York City, Chicago and Kansas City being the urban
centres for this style of Jazz – the Cotton Club in Harlem, New
York City being perhaps the best known venue for this type of Jazz.
Big Band Jazz features large ensembles of instruments, and is
highly scored, with the least amount of improvisation of all of the
types of Jazz, though there usually are improvised solos by
musicians and singers. One type of improvisational singing in Big
Band Jazz is called ‘scat’, a type of singing for which Cab
Calloway was famous.
11. I have a dream, spoken word, Martin Luther
King Jr
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The African-American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s has strong
links to spirituals and gospel music, and has been described as
‘the greatest singing movement’ ever to happen in America. Many of
the movement's great orators and activists were also preachers, or
were influenced heavily by the preaching in African-American
Baptist churches. One hears this influence in the cadence and
references of impassioned oratories of people like Dr Martin Luther
King Jr. or Fannie Lou Hamer.
12. Bitches Brew, Miles Davis
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Jazz has travelled and continues to travel many roads. One of the
greatest Jazz musicians and innovators is jazz trumpeter Miles
Davis. Miles Davis helped to develop Bebop, Cool Jazz, Modal Jazz
and Jazz Fusion, and his work is full of, to quote Jazz historian
Reuben Jackson, “...funky, sqwauling and introspective glory...”.
There are many groundbreaking aspects to this release, but Bitches
Brew’s greatest innovation is probably its dense and layered
rhythms, with the use of two or three drums as well as other
instruments taking up the rhythms in this piece.
13. Foxy Lady, Jimi Hendrix Experience
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The music of Jimi Hendrix, sitting within the genre of rock music
of the 1960s and 70s is often not thought of in the larger story of
African American music. Still, his story and his music in many ways
exemplify the complexities of the African-American story and
musical experience. Born James Marshall, Jimi Hendrix was of
African-American and Native American descent. Though the music he
played tends to sit outside African-American music history, his
role as an innovator and improviser sits firmly in the middle of
that story, having begun his musical career playing blues, and
moving on to rock and psychedelic rock.
14. Papa's got a brand new bag, James
Brown
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James Brown began his musical career singing gospel in South
Carolina at a time when Jim Crow, the term used to refer to the
laws that enforced segregation in America, was still going strong.
He later began to perform R&B music, and the sub-genre of
R&B, Soul music – Brown was later known as 'The Godfather of
Soul'. It was with this song, Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, that the
further subgenre of Soul, Funk music, was born.
15. Single Ladies (put a ring on it),
Beyoncé
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Contemporary R&B is of course related to the earlier
African-American genre of R&B, but reflects many of the
influences of music, mostly African-American music, that have come
in between, such as rap and hip hop.
Image: Akan drum. Made in West Africa and collected in the American colony of Virginia probably between 1710 and 1745.‘The drummer is calling me’ is a quote from the poem Limbo by Edward Kamau Brathwaite (b. 1930). In it, he likens the practice of ‘dancing the slaves’ to a limbo dance in Africa.
