As a child of mixed Senegalese and French heritage who grew up in Mali, Senegal and France and whose journey led him to teach Jazz in the United States of America, I was always fascinated and intrigued by the level of cultural amnesia and the dearth of academic information that existed with respect to the socio-cultural contributions that West Africans taken from their continent through slavery had brought to the United States of America for 350 years.
As an outsider looking in, I was often puzzled by and sought to understand why European Americans generated dance moves and rhythmic expressions on the dance floors of the US that were closer in aesthetics to those of West Africans than the original dance moves of their informed European ethnic heritage from Vienna or the Paris Opera.
I struggled to figure out why the African American community clapped on beat two and four when expressing the rhythmic pulse of the music it created and how it was able to drive a whole nation whose majority was of European descent to integrate this sense of groove in its cultural norms, to the point where people would give you strange looks at a night club or a church if you were found clapping on the wrong beat, i.
e.
beat one.
It was particularly interesting to me since I know that in West Africa we clap on beat one and that Europeans also use beat one as their starting rhythmic referential point in the metric system of measures that codify their music.
In the absence of academic information, I tried to grasp why the vocal tonalities, inflexions, bent notes and rhythmic instrumental patterns of the rural Blues of the Mississippi Delta were so eerily reminiscent of the sounds of the ngoni, the songs of the Djalis and the melodic systems of the Soundiata Keita repertoire of eleventh century West Africa.
Lastly, I wanted to find out why the United States of America, a nation with an ethnic majority from Europe would incubate a music so vastly different from that of Baroque, Classical and Romantic European styles, that its identity markers laid in the bent and blue notes of its vocal stylings and instrumentation, the syncopation of its rhythms, the swing feel of its expression and the harmonic and melodic tonalities of its oldest instrument of African descent, the banjo.
One of the issues confronting the assessment of the cultural relevance of West African contribu- tions to North America and the world in general, was that the great majority of books or articles depicting such contributions had been written and published mostly by Europeans in academia, who although well-intended, were not issued from these sub Saharan African societies and thus lacked perspective and access to the knowledge, cultural foundation, subtleties, and sensibilities that only heritage in such traditions can inform soundly.
Other European scholars writing about Africa and Africans for Africa, Africans and the world were simply blinded by their own prejudices and overtly promoted a sense of European cultural supremacy in line with the colonial thinking of the times.
As early as the mid-nineteenth century, West Africa as a whole was mostly under French and British colonial rule from Senegal to Gambia, Guinea to Mali, Ivory Coast to Benin, Togo, to Tchad, Niger to Nigeria, Cameroon, etc..
..
As expressed by African scholars Senghor, Cesaire, Diop, Leakey, Mazrui and echoed by British scholar Basil Davidson, it is of foremost importance that Africans define their heritage from the wealth of their languages and the horizon of their traditions.
The pur- pose of this book is to look at the West African musical contributions and standards of aesthetics that have informed the music and the culture of the Mississippi Delta, in an effort to bridge this cultural and academic gap born out of a culture of indifference promulgated by former colonial institutions, out of respect for the unimaginable suffering, and in the memory of the millions of West Africans taken from their native lands for a period approximating three hundred and fifty years, and whose children paradoxically and intuitively created in the United States, drawing from the depths of their collective souls the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic foundations of the musical traditions of the Mande, as expressed through the sonic landscape of the fieldhollers and worksongs, the Gospel and the Delta Blues, America's only indigenous artform Jazz.
Jazz in its aspirations and its blues, in its despair and its hopes embodies through creative rhythmic intuition the African forms of expression and the cultural standards of aesthetics of the African continent exacerbated by the poignantly violent and bloody socio-cultural experience of Africans and African Americans with American slavery, lynching, Jim Crow laws of segregation, economic, political and academic oppression in the United States.
The essence of Jazz steeped in the concepts of liberation, freedom and the highest cultural standards of aesthetics has ensured that Jazz will remain the symbolic art form of expression of oppressed people around the world.
This journey began on the mighty banks of the Niger River..
..
As an outsider looking in, I was often puzzled by and sought to understand why European Americans generated dance moves and rhythmic expressions on the dance floors of the US that were closer in aesthetics to those of West Africans than the original dance moves of their informed European ethnic heritage from Vienna or the Paris Opera.
I struggled to figure out why the African American community clapped on beat two and four when expressing the rhythmic pulse of the music it created and how it was able to drive a whole nation whose majority was of European descent to integrate this sense of groove in its cultural norms, to the point where people would give you strange looks at a night club or a church if you were found clapping on the wrong beat, i.
e.
beat one.
It was particularly interesting to me since I know that in West Africa we clap on beat one and that Europeans also use beat one as their starting rhythmic referential point in the metric system of measures that codify their music.
In the absence of academic information, I tried to grasp why the vocal tonalities, inflexions, bent notes and rhythmic instrumental patterns of the rural Blues of the Mississippi Delta were so eerily reminiscent of the sounds of the ngoni, the songs of the Djalis and the melodic systems of the Soundiata Keita repertoire of eleventh century West Africa.
Lastly, I wanted to find out why the United States of America, a nation with an ethnic majority from Europe would incubate a music so vastly different from that of Baroque, Classical and Romantic European styles, that its identity markers laid in the bent and blue notes of its vocal stylings and instrumentation, the syncopation of its rhythms, the swing feel of its expression and the harmonic and melodic tonalities of its oldest instrument of African descent, the banjo.
One of the issues confronting the assessment of the cultural relevance of West African contribu- tions to North America and the world in general, was that the great majority of books or articles depicting such contributions had been written and published mostly by Europeans in academia, who although well-intended, were not issued from these sub Saharan African societies and thus lacked perspective and access to the knowledge, cultural foundation, subtleties, and sensibilities that only heritage in such traditions can inform soundly.
Other European scholars writing about Africa and Africans for Africa, Africans and the world were simply blinded by their own prejudices and overtly promoted a sense of European cultural supremacy in line with the colonial thinking of the times.
As early as the mid-nineteenth century, West Africa as a whole was mostly under French and British colonial rule from Senegal to Gambia, Guinea to Mali, Ivory Coast to Benin, Togo, to Tchad, Niger to Nigeria, Cameroon, etc..
..
As expressed by African scholars Senghor, Cesaire, Diop, Leakey, Mazrui and echoed by British scholar Basil Davidson, it is of foremost importance that Africans define their heritage from the wealth of their languages and the horizon of their traditions.
The pur- pose of this book is to look at the West African musical contributions and standards of aesthetics that have informed the music and the culture of the Mississippi Delta, in an effort to bridge this cultural and academic gap born out of a culture of indifference promulgated by former colonial institutions, out of respect for the unimaginable suffering, and in the memory of the millions of West Africans taken from their native lands for a period approximating three hundred and fifty years, and whose children paradoxically and intuitively created in the United States, drawing from the depths of their collective souls the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic foundations of the musical traditions of the Mande, as expressed through the sonic landscape of the fieldhollers and worksongs, the Gospel and the Delta Blues, America's only indigenous artform Jazz.
Jazz in its aspirations and its blues, in its despair and its hopes embodies through creative rhythmic intuition the African forms of expression and the cultural standards of aesthetics of the African continent exacerbated by the poignantly violent and bloody socio-cultural experience of Africans and African Americans with American slavery, lynching, Jim Crow laws of segregation, economic, political and academic oppression in the United States.
The essence of Jazz steeped in the concepts of liberation, freedom and the highest cultural standards of aesthetics has ensured that Jazz will remain the symbolic art form of expression of oppressed people around the world.
This journey began on the mighty banks of the Niger River..
..