African musical traits in African American music

[pcastag]

Actually this is what he plays. listen to the tom accents right after the press roll
..x..x..x..x..x. you have the first down beat on the one which is incorrect, it's exactly the same as the clave used in bossa nova,it is not implied it's actually played. It's also not five duples grouped in three , for the beat to repeat itself in 4/4 time the last one ( which begins on 4 of the second bar) has to contain a grouping of four eighth notes to fall on the two of the following measure, which it does. He does that twice, then plays

..X..X..X..X....XX then of to the wood blocks

That as I stated is not implied, its a clear 2/3 figure that is clearly stated at the beginning of the solo.

PC,
Thanks for correcting my placement of the cross-pattern. If it was a clear 2-3 [clave] figure, wouldn't that second stroke come one subdivision earlier?

I really think this figure developed independently in afro-american music unless there is evidence to the contrary.

I find the evidence to lean towards periodic Cuban influence, but I'm open to having my mind changed. It's a fascinating subject. Historically, the pendulum has swung from that influence being denied, to more recently, being over stated. Overall, it's difficult to make absolute statements on the matter, because there's a considerable amount of subjective interpretation involved.
-David

Well, I think what I'm referring to is the idea of a repetitive pattern that follows a 2-3 concept, for example in Brazil they have many different variations of it, the fact that the second beat is displaced by an eighth note doesn't change the concept does it? it is still a functional 2-3 figure which then forms the foundation for rhythmic improvisation, much like the tamborim in batucada or the partido alto part played on pandeiro. Still follows the same concept even though the pattern is not exactly the same.

PC

[davidpenalosa]

Hey David, you should also check out "tom tom workout" by baby dodds, both solos are on the album Talking and Drum Solos/Country Brass bands I can email you the MP3's if interested.

In the tom tom workout solo his riff that he builds the solo around is

X.X..XX.X..X.... repeating, with the first four notes on the high tom and the last two decending creating a bombo type effect.

OK, this is a clave-like figure starting on the two-side! Very Cool! Thanks. Please send me those MP3s. I would appreciate it very much. I was getting very frustrated last night looking for my one Baby Dodds CD. Couldn't find it.

he them goes to a more tresillo type riff including bombo

X..X....X..X.... again first note mid tom then second note low tom then back to the first riff..

This shows how African American drummers were very early on phrasing around either a distinctive 3/2 or 2/3 pattern OR tresillo riff, the very same common themes found throughout the african diaspora.

Earlier in this thread I offered examples of tresillo in NOLA and traditional African American music. Tresillo can be heard in the drum and fife music that arose after the Civil War. It's the two-celled clave-like patterns that I'm looking for. Thanks for your contribution.
-David

[davidpenalosa]

... the fact that the second beat is displaced by an eighth note doesn't change the concept does it?

It can (depends), but I take your point. Besides, in your subsequent posting you provided an example of an unambiguous 2-3 pattern. Well done sir!
-David

[pcastag]

Here's a link to the record, baby dodds played with all the original new orleans cats so he is a virtual link to the beginnings of jazz drumming in the US. I really don't see the Cuban link , a lot of folks talk about the cuban new orleans link but if there was a caribbean influence it more likely would have come from the many haitian slaves (in mu opinion only) that were brought during the time of french colonization. A lot of scholars also point to the haitian influence on Cuban misic that was the reult of many french haitians escaping during the war for independence in Haiti, obviously the haitian infuence is very strong eastern part of cuba.


http://www.folkways.si.edu/albumdetails.aspx?itemid=177

[pcastag]

X.X..XX. X..X....

This is clearly a two cell phrase including the bombo note in the second phrase which to me really is the "key" to the clave matrix. At least that's how I feel it.
PC

[congamyk]

pcastag ,congamyk
Just a comment on the word Oakie some whites consider it as a racist remark or insult and here is a one of the definition's of the word ''Oakie''


'"The second to lowest possible social level for a white person. Second only to trailer trash. People who collects hub caps and hang them on their house or fence, tape their windows instead of replacing them, and have a large collection of random shit scattered in their yards, in a seemingly organized chaos. They are generally a bit more shifty and withdrawn.'' ''

Yeah, I acknowledged that (above) and called him out on it.
The term "oakie" came later (after the land rush) and was created as a derogatory term for those seeking free land.
pcastag was using it in a racist and derogatory way.

[blavonski]

Hi david,
your response is typical of the Acacademics/pedagogic's obsession with being right.

I have engaged and challenged you on two specific points where I strongly disagreed with your direct statements and claims, I have no where stated that you were wrong about anything. I have intelligently and thoughtfully offered examples to support my arguments. But, it's music David, it's art and it needs to be lived to be understood and I don't think it aught to be disected until it's reduced to a mathematical formula. That's been going on for 90 years already and it still Don't mean A thing if it ain't got That Swing.

Also, I really offered no true scientific analyses of Swing, I can't, I'm not a scientist, I'm an artist and musician and I simply shared, as cogent as I could, my understanding of it based on it being apart of my personal cultural/musical heritage. That's why I didn't bother to clock my examples of Dunlop's playing down like some sporting event as you requested, that's your job, not mine. I'm playing the music, dancing to the music, loving the music. And if you are unable to hear and feel between the lines to glean the african musical elements in question that are, for historically relevant reasons that Jorge actually touched on someplace here, nuanced and subtly executed in JAZZ, and not only drumming, but all the instruments and singing as well; well, so be it.

"You have chosen to have an intellectual conversation with me, about something I have a life-ling relationship with. Instead of conceding points when you are shown to be wrong, or offering a rebuttal, you deny the validity of the very analysis you are involved in."

You have actually confirmed most of my rebuttles David. And I actually began my involvement in your research project by stating that I agreed with much of what you previously wrote. I'm not one of your students that you expect to agree with every utterance from your esteemed lips my friend. And how in the name of Pinetop Smith can I deny the validity in this dialogue when I'm right here dukin' it out with you? You've made plenty of valid points, I just happen to not agree with some of them.

"I still disagree with your analysis of the Dunlops solo, but I’m happy to have watched it. It's a great piece of music."

That's fine with me, you don't need to agree with me. Also, this is part of what I'm getting at here, You write watched dunlop play, did you hear dunlop playing? ...rhetorical question.

. . . the Hi-Hat does in fact constitute a multi part counter-Rhythm analogous to whatever African diapsora musics you want to name.

"This is clearly a place where we disagree. Your analogy breaks down beyond the broadest generalities. Have you studied, or played any type of traditional African, or Afro-Cuban drumming?"

You've said that before............ And what can be more broad and general than that one statement of yours.
But, it doesn't matter to me, like I said, you can have your science and I'll keep my music, thanks.

No, I don't play any African drums. I play JAZZ (Kit) and Afro-cuban Bongó and have been practicing with a cuban conga player in whom's band I'll be playing saxophon,flute and percussion with in a few days. My roots are in JAZZ and african-american music....the full spectrum and I have been playing, singing, dancing and writing poems to and about it my entire life. I also listen and play to plenty of West African/lots of other african diaspora music. But, admittedly,, even if i become fluent in African-cuban rhythms on the bongó, clave, melodic accenting etc.. I doubt that I will feel it the way my that cuban friend does, but who knows, I may be wrong about that too.

It's been real David. No hard feelings mate....Good luck with your lectures.

Good Vibrations,
Blavonski

[davidpenalosa]

It's been real David. No hard feelings mate

Same here. All the best,
-David

[davidpenalosa]

X.X..XX. X..X....

This is clearly a two cell phrase including the bombo note in the second phrase which to me really is the "key" to the clave matrix. At least that's how I feel it.

Great example!
-David

[Mike]

Hey, David and blavonski have agreed to disagree. Real progress there!

[davidpenalosa]

Several of the figures sounded in Cozy Cole's solo on "Topsy" (thank you PC) can certainly be considered to be in-clave. It's date of 1958 though, places it more than a decade beyond the beginning of the Cuban mambo's influence in NOLA.

The phenomenon of "New Orleans mambo" is well known and documented.

"Cozy's Mambo"

In this photo of Cozy Cole, we see him flanked by two Cuban drums—the bongó and the tumbadora.

Cole performed one of the first recorded jazz drum solos on Jelly Roll Morton's "Load of Cole" (1930). That 1930 solo contains none of the clave-like characteristics of his 1958 solo. These two recordings ("Load of Cole" and "Topsy") neither prove or disprove the extent to which Cuban music influenced Cole; they return us to the tricky question—when did unambiguous clave-like figures first enter into NOLA drumming?

The 1946 solo by Baby Dodds (thanks again to PC) is a powerful bit of evidence. I'll try to post other samples and info in the coming days.
-David

[davidpenalosa]

I see the mambo's role in the development of New Orleans music as something like a Cuban ingredient added to the musical gumbo; as soon as it's mixed in, the gumbo is richer, but it's still gumbo. The NOLA musicians weren't masters at replicating the mambo, as much as they were masters at incorporating Cuban elements in order to make something their own, or, reinforcing what was already there.

From what I hear, the classic 2-3 funk riff:

X . X . X . . X . X X . X . . . —arose from the New Orleans “mambo” and “conga.” It’s essentially the conga bell pattern with an emphasis on the backbeat (B):

X . X . B . . X . X X . B . . .

The “NOLA conga” pattern is heard on records being played by the piano, drumset, or congas.

On “Oh Cubanas” (1949) Dave Bartholomew’s incorporation of mambo sounds rather awkward.

Hear it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-umILYn45h4

Bartholomew did create much more cohesive Cuban-influenced grooves on other recording from that era, particularly on “Country Boy” and “Carnival Day,” which I posted earlier in this thread. The NOLA “mambos” of Professor Longhair have endured as classics of the genre.

“Big Chief” by Professor Longhair

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhYyFnFP ... re=related

"Go To The Mardi Gras"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wAMr3V5 ... re=related

Cuban rhythms particularly affected a school of blues pianists who developed the New Orleans sound of rhythm and blues. The Latin inflections that Professor Longhair melded with blues were the remarkable rhythmic syncretisms of Spanish and African music cultures that evolved in Cuba; such Afro-Cuban rhythms have been evident in New Orleans since the nineteenth century. . . . Longhair acknowledged his interest in Latin rhythms, which he said was stimulated by hearing some Latin groups during a short stint in one of Roosevelt's public works projects in 1937. In an oft-quoted interview he described his playing as a mixture of rumba [a common misnomer for son], mambo and calypso . . . Robert Palmer reports that, in the 1940s, Professor Longhair listened to and played with musicians from the islands and 'fell under the spell of Perez Prado's mambo records' The Hawketts, in 'Mardi Gras Mambo' (1955) (featuring the vocals of a young Art Neville), make a clear reference to Prado in their use of his trademark 'Unhh!' in the break after the introduction.

“Funky Drummer: New Orleans, James Brown and the Rhythmic Transformation of American Popular Music” by Alexander Stewart. Popular Music, v. 19, n. 3. (Oct., 2000), pp. 293-318. You can read the entire article here:

http://web.mac.com/smhsmusic/Music_Theo ... rummer.pdf

Eventually, musicians from outside of New Orleans began to learn some of the rhythmic practices . . . Most important of these were James Brown and the drummers and arrangers he employed. . . . Alfred 'Pee Wee' Ellis, Brown's bandleader and arranger after 1965, credited Clyde Stubblefield's adoption of New Orleans drumming techniques: “If, in a studio, you said 'play it funky' that could imply almost anything. But 'give me a New Orleans beat' - you got exactly what you wanted. And Clyde Stubblefield was just the epitome of this funky drumming.” . . . 'I've Got Money' (1962) is the first recorded example of Brown's shift to a funk style based on sixteenth-note rhythms. In composing this tune, Brown relied heavily on the contribution of a new drummer from St Petersburg, Florida: Clayton Fillyau. . . . Brown supported Fillyau and eventually hired a bass player more adept at handling the syncopation. He also became so possessive of Fillyau's rhythms that he put him under contract and told him not to share his ideas with other drummers (in contrast to customary New Orleans practice).

[Mike]

That is really fascinating and thorough information you supply here, David,
thanks a bunch!
Despite some nitpicking by other board members I can only say wow,
your wealth of knowledge and the abundance of materialand sources is awesome!

In other words, pretty cool thread!

[davidpenalosa]

Thanks Mike. It appears to be a sort of "hot button issue," but I find it fascinating, and I learn something new, nearly every time I engage in a discussion about it.
-David

[davidpenalosa]

African cross-rhythm originated in the greater Niger-Congo linguistic group, which resides south of the Sahara desert (shaded area on map). You can find the single-celled 3:2 and “tresillo” rhythms in virtually any corner of this region.

The Greater Niger-Congo linguistic group.

A. M. Jones, the father of African music studies, observes that the “music of Africa south of the Sahara is one main system”—Studies in African Music (1959: 222).

Studies in African Music

C.K. Ladzekpo

CK.jpg (15.73 KiB) Viewed 6698 times

Master drummer and scholar C. K. Ladzekpo affirms the “profound homogeneity” of sub-Saharan African rhythmic principles:

During my professional career as a master drummer and scholar of African dance drumming with the Ghana National Dance Ensemble and the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies, I have had the privilege of participating in several elaborate research and study residencies in many cultures across the sub-Sahara. In these residencies of intense participation in dance drumming very much different from my own ethnic origin, I have had the rare opportunity of comparing my Anlo-Ewe experiences as remarkably similar with the shared concepts of these other sub-Saharan cultures. The surface structures or sound-products among all these ethnic groups were indeed very diverse but the undercurrent principles demonstrated profound homogeneity. (African Music and Dance 1995: Web)

Rhythms governed by a two-celled key pattern (guide-pattern, or timeline pattern) such as “clave,” constitute a rhythmic organization that is exponentially more complex than single-celled structures. Africa’s “clave belt” is represented by the darker shaded area on the map, and extends from the Senegambia in the northwest, to Mozambique in the southeast, with Nigeria and the Congo roughly in the center.

It is fascinating to me is how often two-celled phrases are heard momentarily in tresillo-based music, and how some tresillo-based genres eventually evolved into two-celled structures.

The tresillo-based Cuban contradanza (‘habanera’) emerged in the early 1800s. The two-celled, clave-based Cuban danzón (1879) was a logical evolutionary step for the contradanza. The tresillo-based Trinidadian calypso evolved into panorama (steel pan orchestra) music which often uses this basic 2-3 clave vamp:

. . . . X . X . . . . X . X X .

In recent decades, “clave” has embedded itself above and below Africa’s “clave belt” due to the proliferation of afro-pop records from West and Central Africa. A few years ago, Amanda Villepastour, author of Ancient Text Messages of the Yoruba Bata Drum; Cracking the Code, was traveling in South Africa collecting musical instruments for a museum. Villepastour emailed me to let me know that clave had made it to South Africa.

The Cuban habanera was the conduit through which tresillo and its variants—the tango, cinquillo, etc. were incorporated into popular music worldwide. The rhythms of the African American cakewalk and ragtime were significantly influenced by the habanera.

In 1896 the ragtime boom began with the success in New York City of a pianist named Ben Harney, who the following year, published a ten-page booklet, Ben Harney’s Rag Time Instructor, in whose introduction we read: ‘Ragtime (or Negro Dance time) originally takes its initiative steps from… the… Habanera’” The Music of Cuba (2004:325).

[The] habanera was a minor, but permanent part of African-American popular music for all of the 35 years during which ragtime and proto-jazz were forming and developing” (Latin Jazz 1999:16).

Despite the ascension of the clave-based Cuban danzón at the end of the nineteenth-century, American ragtime remained in a single-celled structure. Even so, some ragtime phrases sound like they are in-clave. It’s only logical that some tresillo-based phrases would be answered by a rhythmically opposed measure (the two-side of clave is derived from a diametrically opposed tresillo). “The Entertainer” by Scott Joplin employs alternating phrases to such an extent that it could be considered to actually be in-clave. Clap 3-2 son clave throughout the piece and you will hear what I’m talking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQNo1feJCNg

Scott Joplin

With the exception of scattered cases of “clave-isms,” African American music consistently remained in a single-celled structure until the 1950s. Wynton Marsalis said it plainly when he compared clave-based Cuban music to the music of his hometown: "In New Orleans, our ‘clave’ goes: X . . X . . X . X . . X . . X . [tresillo]"—Marsalis (60 Minutes, CBS. 1/2/11). Watch:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7206311n

There is . . . the very specific absence of asymmetrical time-line patterns [key patterns] in virtually all early twentieth-century African American music, except where those patterns were borrowed from Puerto Rico or Cuba. Only in some New Orleans genres does a hint at simple time-line patterns occasionally appear. . . These do not function in the same way as African time-line patterns (Africa and the Blues 1999: 51).

The son montuno/mambo was the first popular Cuban music genre in which several interlocking contrapuntal parts were layered in ways similar to drum ensembles. A strong case can be made that the mambo inspired the two-celled structure of funk (see previous post). Originally inspired by clave-based music, the “NOLA conga,” the original funk pattern, is easily adaptable to Cuban rhythms. Songo and timba bands have used funk to great affect. Eddie Palmieri fused the funk pattern with the mozambique rhythm on “Condiciones Que Existen” (1976). Hear:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PVQVWaTzGA

The circle is complete once again with the Cuban incorporation of funk. Jumping ahead to present day, this solo by Cuban drummer Jimmy Branly exhibits a wealth of influences. See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1Atv6af ... re=related

Jimmy Branly