African musical traits in African American music

[davidpenalosa]

This thread began in the thread "New Conga Book."

"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".

[davidpenalosa]

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).

"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.

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).

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

[davidpenalosa]

David~

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?

“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.

[davidpenalosa]

These styles are all uniquely American, thus my point that jazz is also uniquely American.

Well, that point was in my closing statement of my previous post.

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?

I'm more comfortable using the term traits, rather than styles. The blues exhibit definite tonal traits from the Sudanic belt (the southern rim of the Sahara, where micro-tonal Islamic music affected pentatonic and other sub-Saharan modal music). The blues cannot be explained exclusively in terms of European music.

Check out this traditional music from Mauritania. At 2:33 you can hear the blues traits very clearly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5ZPveeA ... ture=share

>>>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.

Are you saying the pattern we call tresillo was brought over by European immigrants? That rhythmic figure is undeniably African in origin. And speaking of rhythm, the rhythmic approach known as swing, is also something that came from Africa and is definitely not of European origin.

I don't deny the African inflections of jazz as African descendants created the style, but it is limited to romantic theories.

The African inflections of jazz are limited to romantic theories? you lost me there.
-David

[jorge]

This response to one of Congamyk's statements in the thread called New Conga Book is ported over from the original thread. Thanks, David for starting this new thread so it is not a hijack of the original thread.

...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.

[congamyk]

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..

Yes we agree, I'm only referring to the inception and formation of jazz in New Orleans.

This is an interesting discussion, but is off the topic of the new conga book, and should really be continued in a new thread.

Perhaps it is off-topic, my original post pointed out what I see as a flaw in the book. The author claims that "some African instruments" were used in the formation of jazz and rock.

I'm more comfortable using the term traits, rather than styles.

That's fine, and probably where we disagree. I tend to think that any new music genre or style began as the arist(s) drew from a previous style that they were already very familiar with.

The blues exhibit definite tonal traits from the Sudanic belt (the southern rim of the Sahara, where micro-tonal Islamic music affected pentatonic and other sub-Saharan modal music). The blues cannot be explained exclusively in terms of European music.

True, but I don't think descendants of slaves from Congo/Yoruba/Nigeria in central Africa now in N. America centuries later were drawing from Arabic/Islamic micro-tonal nuances. I think they were simply experimenting with bending European notes to create tension, inflect deep feeling and make soulful music.

Are you saying the pattern we call tresillo was brought over by European immigrants? That rhythmic figure is undeniably African in origin. And speaking of rhythm, the rhythmic approach known as swing, is also something that came from Africa and is definitely not of European origin.

No - the tresillo no. But the other traits (cross-accents, and call and response) existed in European forms of music.

[davidpenalosa]

. . . I don't think descendants of slaves from Congo/Yoruba/Nigeria in central Africa now in N. America centuries later were drawing from Arabic/Islamic micro-tonal nuances. I think they were simply experimenting with bending European notes to create tension, inflect deep feeling and make soulful music.

The first African-born slaves brought to the New World came from the Sudanic belt, where there is a great tradition of stringed instruments, and where one hears distinct blues traits. Those blues traits were well established in what is now the United States, by the time slaves from further down the West African coast, and from the central interior arrived. By the way, the African American banjo is an obvious example of the blending of European and African instrument construction.
-David

. . . other traits (cross-accents, and call and response) existed in European forms of music.

That's a bit vague. It's kind of like me saying melodies and singing are found in African music.
-David

[ricky linn]

Yes I removed my original posting.

On the issue of which African instruments became part of Jazz I am amazed that the answer 'drums' does not suffice. Surely no-one is suggesting that drums have anything other than an African origin. Yes, I know that the original instruments did not survive the slave trade as has been outlined above, however, no part of the European classical tradition used drums as a continuous 'ostinato' time keeper. Beethoven introduced the timpani to the symphony but it's use was limited to reinforce brass and for colouring, never as a time keeper. The use of drumming as a continuous time keeper and to provide 'feel' and 'swing/groove' surely has its roots in African musical concept. Yes, the drum kit is a purely American invention, as is Jazz, I would never argue otherwise, but the drum kit (and I know it is a hybrid of European military insrtuments) was used as it was what was available in the absence of African drums. Therefore drums (of African descent) and the concept of time keeping with drumming (African) could be said to be an African contribution to the developent of new world musical styles. Please remember that this quote has now been taken out of all context, it is meant as a beginners general introduction. I am aware 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 2 bar or vice versa, yes there are examples of this being broken, but when teaching a beginner these are not relevant and 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.. The comment I originally posted may be an area of great debate but as a general introduction to the concept of Afro-European music it is defendable. We all have to start somewhere and the level of intellectual debate currently being used on this forum would be out of place if it were presented to a young beginner.

[davidpenalosa]

Surely no-one is suggesting that drums have anything other than an African origin. Yes, I know that the original instruments did not survive the slave trade as has been outlined above, however, no part of the European classical tradition used drums as a continuous 'ostinato' time keeper. Beethoven introduced the timpani to the symphony but it's use was limited to reinforce brass and for colouring, never as a time keeper.

Good points about time-keeping in European art music. The first written European music (Gregorian chants) indicated pitch, but not rhythm. Rhythm has always been secondary in Western music.

The case could be made that European drums are descended from African drums. However, the orchestral timpani came directly from the military drums of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, an empire which occupied not only North Africa, but also Persia. There are indigenous drum traditions all across southern Asia, stretching from Turkey to Indonesia.

African retention in African American arts exists, but it certainly is less obvious than say, African retention in Afro-Cuban culture. It's kind of like the "blender" has run longer, and all of the divergent elements have been so well blended that it's more difficult to unpack them.

I recommend Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy:

http://www.amazon.com/Flash-Spirit-African-Afro-American-Philosophy/dp/0394723694

“In Ernest Borneman’s opinion, what preceded New Orleans jazz before 1890 was ‘Afro-Latin music’”— Kubik (1999: 51). What about the more isolated African-American communities—to what degree were African rhythmic motifs and sensibilities retained, without the benefit of continual “re-Africanization” from Caribbean influences? Drum and fife music offers us a glimpse (if you click on the image, it will appear clearly:

Photo from Africa and the Blues, by Gerhard Kubik (1999: 55).

Youtube clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6mRdPP6wRo&feature=share

[bongosnotbombs]

And European folk music? Did none of those feature the drum as a time keeper? There is more than one form of European music, as there is African.

[davidpenalosa]

Yes, the Irish have their bodhran drum. Surely, the drum is one of the oldest instruments.
-David

[davidpenalosa]

The pattern commonly known in Latin music as the habanera rhythm (tresillo + main beats), is one of the most basic rhythmic cells found in African music. This is a Ghanaian axatse (beaded gourd instrument) playing the "habanera." The part begins on bombo—the second stroke of the pattern.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJUdbfti7gE

I have been particularly fascinated with the ways in which African American music has been continually "re-Africanized" by the importation of Afro-Cuban musical elements. In some cases African elements that were not retained in the U.S. were introduced through Cuban music; in other cases, the Cuban influence reinforced traits that had been retained, and therefore were already present. Which were which can be difficult to say with certainty, but as I stated in an earlier post, the pattern we call tresillo (and its variant the habanera) has been present in African American music, at least as far back as the early 1800s.

In approx. 1906, the great American jazz pioneer W.C. Handy (1873-1958) noticed that African American dancers responded very favorably to the tresillo figure in the piece “Maori.” “When we . . . came to the habanera rhythm, containing the beat of the tango, I observed that there was a sudden, proud and graceful reaction”—Handy (cited in Latin Jazz by John Storm Roberts 1999: 17).

W.C. Handy.jpg (42.26 KiB) Viewed 8117 times

‎"Suspecting some kind of unexpected ethnic response, Handy had the band play 'La paloma' as a reality check and got the exactly the same response from black dancers. It was this experience, according to Handy himself, that led him to introduce the rhythm (which he called a 'tangana') into the instrumental piano version of 'Memphis Blues,' the chorus of 'Beale Street Blues,' and most famously the opening of 'St. Louis Blues'"—Roberts (1999: 17-18).

[jorge]

David is the bodhran drum used as a timekeeper for singers and other instruments?

Some types of flamenco and Sevillana music in Spain uses castanets, a hand percussion instrument, to keep time for singers and dancers. Although they are not drums, they are percussion instruments used for timekeeping that also can improvise and create complex variations within the timekeeping function. Also drumming on guitars is part of the music of Spain. The origins of the castanet are not clear, various sources speculate on similar precursor instruments used by the Phoenecians, Egyptians, Moors, Greeks, Chinese, and others. But no doubt castanets, along with palillos and other similar percussion instruments, were used in Europe before the Spanish empire colonized the Americas. So yes, it could reasonably be argued that the use of percussion instruments as timekeepers in folkloric music has some European roots as well and is not exclusively African in origin.

[davidpenalosa]

If there is an authentic African American hand drum rhythm, it would be the one you hear on Marvin Gaye's classic "What's Going On." You can clearly hear the conga drum on this version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9KC7uhMY9s&feature=share

You can also hear Bill Summers play the part at 2:35 on this version of Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon:"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hmVHhH96es&feature=player_embedded#!

"What's Going On" has 2-3 clave feel. The conga plays onbeat tones on the two-side and offbeat tones on the three-side. The backbeats are marked with slaps. R&B adaptations of clave, have tended to include both backbeats.

A friend once told me that he found a reference to this rhythm in a music encyclopedia. It was referred to as the 'boogalloo,' not to be confused with the 'boogalu,' which was a movement in NYC, in the late 60s where Cuban rhythms were fused with R&B. According to this reference, the rhythm originated in New Orleans. 30 years later, I asked my friend about the reference, but he couldn't remember the conversation. I'm still looking for whatever information I can find on the rhythm.

At this point, my best guess is that it is a New Orleans reinterpretation of the Cuban conga rhythm, created probably in the 1950s.

The links, graphics and a good deal of the text from my posts in this thread are taken from my Unlocking Clave Facebook page. I invite you to check it out.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Unlocking-Clave/164335963612731?v=wall

[niallgregory]

Yes, the Irish have their bodhran drum. Surely, the drum is one of the oldest instruments
-David

There are some who believe the bodhran,s origins are from the middle east or north Africa , it did have large jingles originally that where removed at some stage . Ireland has Spanish and also turkish links so that might explain that . The other theory is that the drum was originally used to drain turf and was placed on the wall above the fire in the kitchen and become used in sessions . No one knows for sure though .