New Conga Book

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New Conga Book

Postby ricky linn » Sat Oct 01, 2011 2:24 pm

a
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby ricky linn » Sat Oct 01, 2011 2:29 pm

a
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby davidpenalosa » Sun Oct 02, 2011 8:04 am

Nice work Ricky.

I just have some comments on your clave section. The theory that the 4/4 clave patterns are descended from their 6/8 analogs is often repeated, but is not supported by the research. It has been repeated so often in English language literature on Cuban rhythms, that it is basically accepted as gospel. The truth is that both the 6/8 and 4/4 versions of what we call son clave and rumba clave are found over a vast area of Africa. 6/8 and 4/4 rhythms are heard in the oldest known repertoires of traditional music in Africa.

The 6/8 form of "son clave," which you show, is referred to by Anthony King as the "standard pattern in its simplest and basic form," and cites "its widespread use throughout Africa" (Yoruba Sacred Music from Ekiti 1961: 14). While its use in Afro-Cuban music is rare, to say it is "never used" is inaccurate. You can hear the 6/8 "son clave" in the makuta "Lupemba" (Congos) from the boxed set Antologia de la Música Afro Cubana from Egrem. If you don't have it, PM me and I'll send you an MP3 of it. The pattern is used in some Cuban-Haitian ('Haitiano') rhythms: vodú-radá, vodú-gada, and nagó (Percusion Afro-Cubana v. 1 Musica Folklorica Adrian Coburg 2006). You can also hear it in Libre's "Bamboleate" at 5:14 (Con Salsa... Con Ritmo 1976).

These are relatively small points in regards to the material you present, but are nonetheless important if addressing the different forms of clave and their African origins.
-David
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby ricky linn » Sun Oct 02, 2011 8:14 am

Thanks for the input David, why not send me a PM and I can send you the entire book for a look.

Thanks

Ricky
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby davidpenalosa » Sun Oct 02, 2011 8:17 am

Done!
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby congamyk » Mon Oct 03, 2011 4:31 am

"the best of European musical culture (melody, harmony, some instrumentation) and the best of African musical culture (advanced rhythmic concepts, drums and percussion, call and response vocals, form, some instrumentation) came together to form many of today’s popular musical styles. Jazz and subsequently Rock (in North America),..."


Specifically, which African instruments are used in the styles specifically mentioned; "Jazz and subsequently Rock"?
(Please do not try use or compare an African instruments that were not the actual instruments used in these styles. Examples; stringed gourd, thumb piano, hoe/guataca, ashiko or other wood hand drum).

I can't think of a single African instrument that could even be considered remotely used in the formation of either music style.
Original Jazz instruments -all European
American Banjo (5 string, gourdless), tuba, clarinet, cornet, bugle, cymbals, snare, bass drum. Later instrumentation: piano, guitar, bass viola, drum kit, Sax, trumpet, trombone.

Jazz Chords and melodies were all European church modes.

Vocal Language: mostly 99% European English and American slang.

"Form"... the original formation of jazz dorm was developed from a mix of Black spirituals, Delta blues, Missouri ragtime music, American folk and early marching band styles. These influenced jazz far more than anything "African".

"Call and response" exists in all musical cultures including European. It is not uniquely African.

"Advanced rhythmic concepts" existed in many European folk music styles; Irish, Turkish, Czech, Klezmer, etc.
These all used complex time signatures and "advanced rhythmic concepts".
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby davidpenalosa » Mon Oct 03, 2011 6:13 am

Congamyk,

I agree with what you say, with these exceptions:

• Black spirituals, Delta blues, and Missouri ragtime music are Afro-Euro hybrids. Rhythmically, there are some elements in jazz that clearly originated in Africa, rather than Europe.

After the Civil War, African Americans were able to obtain surplus bass and snare marching drums, and fifes. This was probably the first expression of the African American-style drumming tradition. A common underlying rhythmic motif in African American drum and fife music is the figure the Cubans call tresillo:
X . . X . . X .
The tradition had survived in Mississippi until rather recently.

“It is probably safe to say that by and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz, even in transformed cross-accents, because they could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions . . . It may also account for the fact that a pattern such as [tresillo], so common as a ground pattern in African music, has remained one of the most useful and common syncopated patterns in jazz”—Gunther Schuller. Early Jazz v. 1, Its Roots and Musical Development (1968: 19).

early jazz.jpg
Gunther Schuller. Early Jazz v. 1, Its Roots and Musical Development


"In New Orleans, our clave goes: X . . X . . X . X . . X . . X . [tresillo]"—Wynton Marsalis (60 Minutes 1/2/11).

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

• The use of call-and-response in African American music shares traits with the call-and-response heard in sub-Saharan and Diaspora musics.

• Academics have long lumped jazz harmony into Western music theory, and while that certainly is valid, the tendency has been to ignore the African harmonic element of this Afro-Euro hybrid. The most obvious example is the blues, which while an African American original, owes a lot to the music of the Sudanic belt shown in the map below.

blues traits.jpg


This map shows those areas in sub-Saharan African where blues traits are found in traditional music. From Africa and the Blues by Gerhard Kubik (1999).

Jazz pianists of the mid-20th century were certainly familiar with the repertoire of European art music. It stands to reason then, that the sophisticated harmonies in jazz are often attributed to the harmonic revolution of the European Impressionistic era at the turn of the 20th century. It has been pointed out many times that jazz uses some of the same harmonies found in Impressionistic compositions by the likes of Claude Debussy. However, music theorists and educators may have sold the African influence short, by neatly fitting jazz harmony into the greater European harmonic matrix of Western music theory. Kubik posits that the fit is in reality, not that neat, and we must look to the blues if we are to fully comprehend jazz harmony:

“To understand what happened in the development of bebop, it is useful, therefore, to delineate some areas of maximal divergence from Western diatonicism:

1. The blues tonal system clashes with the Western diatonic system most prominently in the latter's dominant-based fuctionalism. While the subdominant mode is acceptable, it is by now well known that many blues musicians in the Deep South have avoided the dominant seventh chord that was imposed upon their predecessors through Western folk and popular music in the nineteenth century (Kubik 1999a, 127). Bebop musicians had the courage to reject it even more radically. The progression dominant to tonic, its leading tone long avoided melodically in jazz, now became the target of substitution. The chord D, (7) was often used as a substitution chord and resolved into Cmaj (7), for example. Or the dominant chord was extended upward, for example, G (13).

2. Comparable to melodic and harmonic progressions in African music (and in the blues), movement of chord sequences in bebop emphasizes resolutions in a downward direction, eliminating all memory of the European leading-note tonality.

3. Shifting chords downward in parallelism and semitone steps was, of course, already current practice in swing jazz, such as Em (7) to E[flat] m (7) to Dm (7), the last chord replacing the dominant seventh chord in the third line, measure 9 of a twelve-bar blues; but in bebop, this system of moving in narrow steps downward was much more expanded. In Africa, this is familar practice; such progressions are common in equiheptatonic tunings, often ending on a "raised tonic," as for example in the Cuambo and Khokola mambila xylophone music that I recorded in Mozambique and Malawi. (25)

4. The upward extension of triads in bebop follows two very different principles, both inherited from African practices. One could be called "the central African model" of piling thirds on top of each other; the other principle is the selective use of upper harmonics, an auditory experience in African-American traditions transmitted through the blues. Because higher partials cannot be played exactly on a piano, the pianist chooses optimal approximations. Upper partials are what Charlie Parker must have heard internally when he tried to work out something new over "Cherokee." Thus even within the tuning of the European tonal system, C (9) in bebop and earlier blues-based jazz can be taken as a column of harmonics incorporating partials 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9; and its cognate, [C.sup.+11], the augmented eleventh chord, is but a representation of the harmonic series up to partial 11. Because that partial stands at 551 cents, its pitch value cannot be played accurately on a keyboard instrument; soft is used to represent it. That note fulfills its task much better than f, because f would simply corroborate the diatonic scale.

5. The central tonality of the blues provided another important foundation for bebop. The more bebop musicians had dismantled the dominant-tonic cliche, the more jazz returned to an auditory awareness of a strong tonal center. A decade later, in Ornette Coleman's free jazz, functional harmony would even be abandoned while the twelve-bar blues form would be maintained as a mold. This signifies the de facto return to a non-Western, possibly west-central Sudanic concept of tonality and perhaps to a type of blues structure sung to rift-like accompanying patterns devoid of any functional European folk harmony. (At a later stage, Ornette Coleman also abandoned the counting of the twelve bars)”—"Bebop: a case in point: The African Matrix in Jazz Harmonic Practices," Black Music Research Journal (Gerhard Kubik 3/22/05).

“One of the signs of the increasing ambivalence the young musicians of the 1940s felt toward diatonicism in jazz was their recourse to the blues tonal system. This was a foundation on which one could build. The blues tonal system, based on the retention and cultural transmission of auditory materials of non-Western origin, has found expression in jazz history in the most diverse ways and on various instruments. Shortly before the rise of bebop, Jimmy Yancey, Meade Lux Lewis, and others had brought a hitherto-unknown blues-related African legacy to the surface: boogie-woogie. Some left-hand bass lines could have been a reminder about blues tonality's background in west-central Sudanic traditions, and so would boogie-woogie's specific swing and "walking" bass figures that alternate the fifth and sixth scale degrees”—Kubik (3/22/05).

Below: Banda-Dakpa Horn Orchestra, Central Africa (top), and Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing three saxophones simultaneously (bottom).
Banda-Dakpa Horn Orchestra, Central Africa (top), and Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing three saxophones simultaneously (bottom)..jpg


The bottom line is that jazz is an original Afro-Euro hybrid and to deny either the African or European contributions is a mistake.
-David
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby congamyk » Mon Oct 03, 2011 1:43 pm

David~

davidpenalosa wrote:Congamyk,
I agree with what you say, with these exceptions:

• Black spirituals, Delta blues, and Missouri ragtime music are Afro-Euro hybrids. Rhythmically, there are some elements in jazz that clearly originated in Africa, rather than Europe.


I agree that there are African inflections in these musics, black slaves and their decendants created these styles out of the existing music culture and language. These decendants had already been influenced by American culture and music by the time these styles developed. I believe that European & American musics had far more influence on the spirituals, blues and ragtime, which are the foundations of jazz. These styles are all uniquely American, thus my point that jazz is also uniquely American. Maybe I'm missing something, is there a specific African music style(s) that directly affected jazz in the same way that Delta blues, Black spirituals and ragtime did? Can we here that "style" somewhere?

davidpenalosa wrote:“It is probably safe to say that by and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz, even in transformed cross-accents, because they could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions . . . It may also account for the fact that a pattern such as [tresillo], so common as a ground pattern in African music, has remained one of the most useful and common syncopated patterns in jazz”—Gunther Schuller. Early Jazz v. 1, Its Roots and Musical Development (1968: 19).

"In New Orleans, our clave goes: X . . X . . X . X . . X . . X . [tresillo]"—Wynton Marsalis (60 Minutes 1/2/11).
• The use of call-and-response in African American music shares traits with the call-and-response heard in sub-Saharan and Diaspora musics.
This map shows those areas in sub-Saharan African where blues traits are found in traditional music. From Africa and the Blues by Gerhard Kubik (1999).



1) Transformed cross-accents, (2)tresillo and (3) call and response, that's a clear summation of apparent African inflections.
Those are definitely there, we hear them. But again, European musics brought over by immigrants had these characteristics.

From Delta blues (to bebop - wow) the chord and scale system used is European, not African.
Just because Delta bluesmen didn't use the prevailing western motiff(s) doesn't mean they were not still playing European chords and notes, they were.

I also don't see a disdain for Western modes or the Dom 7 by bebop musicians, weren't they just seeking a new sound different from the prevailing popular jazz style?
Thank you for the exhaustive writings of theories on how Africa may have influenced early jazz. Not a single existing African music style or a single African instrument was used in the development of jazz music. It still seems that the overwhelming evidence of jazz and rock music origins are in European chords, instrumentation and language. I don't deny the African inflections of jazz as African descendants created the style, but it is limited to romantic theories.
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby jorge » Mon Oct 03, 2011 4:00 pm

I am not sure what happened to the original posts on the new conga book, they seem to have been deleted, replaced by a lower case "a". Ricky, did you delete them in your edits?
Following the topic that has emerged and this current discussion, off topic as it may be, I need to respond to one of Congmyk's assertions.
congamyk wrote:...Not a single existing African music style or a single African instrument was used in the development of jazz music...

Congamyk, we agree that jazz is uniquely American and that actual African instruments were not used in the development of jazz music. Here I assume you are referring to past centuries, not continuing development of current jazz which does include traditional African instruments. There is a reason African instruments were not used in the early development of jazz. When African slaves were imported to the Americas, the African musical instruments did not fit in the slave ships, which were pretty tightly packed without them. For a given volume of cargo space, musical instruments would have provided the slavetraders less return on investment than an equal volume of living slaves, even considering that many of the slaves died during the journey. Once in the Americas, slaves who were caught making and playing African drums were often murdered or worse by slaveowners. The slaveowners worried (correctly) that secret forms of communication among the slaves would result from allowing preservation or re-creation of the African instruments, religions, language and music. The same thing happened in Cuba, although not as severely, and the practice of African religions, speaking of African languages, and playing of African music on boxes or furniture survived, more due to the ignorance of the slaveowners than to any humanitarian tendencies they may have had. In north America and later the US, even this crude form of preservation was prohibited, and the African slaves and their descendents were forced to make their religions look as much like the Euro-American religions as possible, to speak English, and to adapt their music to European and American instrumentation. The instrumentation in many cases forced the use of European scales and chords. Limitations of human memory and the rarity of perfect pitch in humans caused the intonations of the African roots to be mostly fit into the scales and chords available on European and American instruments, but some sense of the African intonations remained in what you are calling inflections. So the European and American influences in the development of jazz do not only represent artistic choice, some of those influences were forced by historical events in the Americas.
This is an interesting discussion, but is off the topic of the new conga book, and should really be continued in a new thread.
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby davidpenalosa » Mon Oct 03, 2011 4:01 pm

hey congamyk,
Since this thread has digressed, I moved it over to a new thread I titled "African musical traits in African American music," in the Open Discussion section.
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby congamyk » Mon Oct 03, 2011 5:37 pm

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Re: New Conga Book

Postby jorge » Mon Oct 03, 2011 7:01 pm

Ricky, can you put back your original post, or at least the reference to how people can get your book? The announcement of the book seems to have gotten trampled by the discussion that followed it, which focused on a few sentences out of the book and then took that on a tangent. I apologize for my contribution to the hijacking of the thread, but I could not let the incorrect and distorted idea that no African instrumentation or music style was used in the development of jazz music stand without comment. You may want to start a fresh thread to shed the baggage generated in this one.
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby ricky linn » Mon Oct 03, 2011 7:20 pm

Thanks Jorge

I have replied to the comments on the new thread but felt that the 'hi-jacking' was not really going to help generate any interest in my publication and therefore it had ruined my original intent. As I have said on my posting in the new thread I understand that generalisations are a dangerous thing but they serve a purpose in education, at times. I'm sure all of us who teach generalise all the time out of necessity, i.e. clave has a 3 bar followed by a two bar or vice versa, yes there are examples of this being broken, but when teaching a beginner these are not relevant and are will only serve to confuse and diminish the rule which is being taught at the time. My book, which I stand by, contains a couple of statements that have sparked great intellectual debate, which congaplace is great for and I think is healthy, but the comments are, as a rule of thumb, to a beginner, correct. The situations where they are broken will be encountered when they need to be and at the relevant and right time. This is not a matter of misinformation, it is the right information at just the right time, a large part of the skill of a teacher. As a teacher of 25 years I would be cautious to balance the relevance of materal over the confusion caused by presenting it at the wrong time. I have also addressed the other issue which sparked debate in the new thread.

The premise of the book was to present a single volume beginner to intermediate book which covers all the basic repertoire with some background information. It contains, among other things, rhythms that I collected from studying with Amado Dedue (clave y guaguanco), Emilio del Monte and Hermanos Bravo. And is very cheap at £6. I doubt this forum will help my sales but since you asked it is available from
http://www.playscottishmusic.com/PDShop ... temid=2830

Thanks
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby congamyk » Mon Oct 03, 2011 11:24 pm

edit
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Re: New Conga Book

Postby jorge » Mon Oct 03, 2011 11:57 pm

If the shoe fits...
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