is an ancient art passed down and preserved by drummers initiated into the enlightened circle. Through study and sacrifice, community drummers become initiates. These initiates, through further study, become drummer-priests, responsible for rhythms that possess powers to transform, heal, and intercede. African prayer is modeled on these rhythms. African-American worship draws upon this expressiveness, ectasy, and dignity as in its devotions and prayer. Individuals, collectively or alone, use these rhythms as a channel to a direct experience with God. (wr/griot)

Pan-African Drumming as a Sacred Archieves:  Footprints Upon the Earth and the Stairs to Heaven

Daisy is a walking drum tune. You can also hear it by looking at the way she walks.
--Zora Neale Hurston, "Their Eyes Were Watching God"

The easiest way to understand the tradition of African drumming is to listen outside to the rain falling, or listen to the flowing of a fast moving stream, especially over rocks. In the house, turn the water in the shower on, and listen. The water is a sheer cascade of pace and sound. The flowing, splashing water has mood and character, and a boundless energy impossible to count in western tempo. But the whole of the flowing, smashing, pelting, sparkling sound has  rhythm. The water's exberance is caught in time, bursting and splashing in a constantly changing pattern. This rhythm, with its fluid, space rills, can be heard and experienced and coveyed by the senses.

Like flowing water, from the shower nozzle to the great water falls, African drumming baffles the logic of separation. Its rhythms and melodies spring to life as they are joined together in complex, instinctive ways, just as a child in the womb is tied to a mother's own heartbeat, and yet is so much more. At its most basic level, the drum models the natural world, including the human community. The drum duplicates in its sounds the experiences of nature. African drumming reflects a time when communities acknowledged and respected nature, and feel deeply connected to the natural world.

African drumming requires high levels of hand coordination:  coopying the sound patterns of running water is not easy. To create the sound of rain on a djembe drum, for example, requires rapidly moving, almost floating hands, playing at several points around the drum head to vary and color the sound. Even the basics of African drumming require virtouso skill.

The first use of the drum, then, was to model nature. The drum and the community had to agree on a common language of sound to express the world around the community, from its cosmic levels to the grass roots. The drum noted the wonders and changes, the fears and grief, the joys and sorrows, the beginning and end of nature's cycles. The drum and the community also developed a performing aesthetic to express beauty, joy, mourning, and patience--for a full range of human emotions and activities.

For example, Funga, a very popular Liberian welcome rhythm (and dance) is perhaps the best known African rhythm in America. When a drummer plays the low part of this rhythm, he mimcs a cook pulling hot pieces of food from a steaming pot. Yes, welcome! Indeed!

As is seen in Funga, drumming combined its models of nature with human experience. Add the heart beat to the sound of rain, or add the feel against the skin of a blowing wind, catch the flairing peaks seen by the eyes in the images of fire, add joy to the taste of the meal, and the drum expresses the natural world and its felt human responses. The drum also express more complex interactions: it can tell present ideas. African communities were aware that they influenced the natural world, not only by the ways in which they used its resources, but also by the behavior, feelings, and attitudes within the community. Mahi, a 6/8 Haitian drum rhythm, has a complicated five part pattern which presents in rhythm--as did Hegel and non-drumming European philosophers did in logic--an organic view of  society. In Mahi, the five parts parts spread out and then converge to pulse together like a giant heartbeat. Unity is symbolized by this single, reoccuring powerful beat, and all the rhtyhms find their beginnings from it, and are unable to break away. Their diversity is an appearance of differences, but within these appearances, there is a common source. This, of course, recalls the family as well. The members have different gifts, personalities, achievements, experiences, but are joined in bond by blood and birth in a sacred act of creation. All of these ideas are understood without thinking by those listening to the drums, as they are living the experiences the drums represent. If the drums discover somthing new, it must pass review by the community. If it fails to win accpetance

Hence, drought, poor hunting, the lost of pastural lands for cattle could result from the actions of men toward themselves and each other, as much as from external conditions. During a drought, for example, the drums might express the cry of the land as well as the burdens placed upon the village.  Communities were also influenced by the forces of nature. A river swelling, a fire from thunder storm, a lion's attack were often seen as beyond the control of the village. The drum could sound the lion's fierceness and the village's fear. The drum recorded and spoke of both kinds of events--internal and external.

To achieve these connections, African drumming added layers of rhythms. the layers were called polyrhythms. A group or series of rhythms might have several beats in different time structures played together. The time within a beat might change--the beat itself might change. It's characteristic that ensemble rhythms from African traditions play patterns against one another that pulse at different speeds. the only governing principle was that a change had to make sense in terms of the whole of the beat, and to maintain its feel within the community's aesthetic. Within the musical and human groups, the drummer was free to create.

At this second level, the drums connected the community with the natural world, recording their mutual interactions, speaking of their multiple cause and effects, in the combinations of God, man, and nature that comprised the world.

 All of the interactions expressed by the drums, the cycle of nature, the unpredicted natural events, the occurence of good fortune, the tragedies of fate, whether internally caused by humans, or an external part of nature, pointed to a higher governance and authority, a prescence whose powers were unlimited, and whose guidance must be sought. In the world of the African drum, there was a force above nautre and man. God was the first cause, and power of his spirit could change the expected results of nature, and reward or punish the deeds of men.

Drumming, at the third level, the ritual community level, was a way of putting in a call to that higher authority. It became a non-verbal language which expresses a variety of human petitions for aid and intercession.

In its third level, the drum becomes a sacred object, an instrument that mediates between a community capable of inward grace and the unseen supreme being. The drum solicits this inner grace, by praise and petition. The drum is an instrument of influence. The God whose place is established  by a historic record of actions and intercessions within the community, is loved and feared--but can be called by the drum. In this view of the drum, God sits over and between the community and nature, regulating and restoring cycles of progress and harvest for both, separately and together, and the drum allows the community and individuals

The drum mirrors this, in its playing and in its construction. A drum is made from two life forms, plant and animal--wood and skin, or hide. The sound inside the wood is "released" by striking a tauntly strectched skin across the top of a cylinder whose size and shapes give it different tonal ranges and tuning.

At its highest level, the drum is using the abstracted elements of life to create sound experiences in time and space. Acess to the sacred depends upon connecting to eternity, bridging the dimension between time now and time beyond, or time eternal. But to use time itself to do so results in a closed cycle. The drum can call the past, or the present, or the future by its beats, but none of these measures are beyond or without time, or cease to be time. None of them encompass the source of time. None of them create time.

The drum models, then connects, then becomes an influence in human affairs. At each level, its time is changing, its essence is being altered. The poyrhythms filled with energy, tapping out sources of power that lie within the material world gave away to a new dimensions of rhythms as, at the sacred level, the drum moves beyond, outside of time. Here, the drum is sound. The sound emanates from and brings to life its sources, these drum rhythms are actualy creating time from its supremem source. As the rain creates sound, or the wind, so does sound itself have a supreme source, a place of and in the silence

the sacred drum steps into a new dimension of time whose source and home is space. Scientifically, in the early 20th centry, Albert Einstein creates the mathematical models that describe this relationship between time and space, and the infinity of their shared source. Musicians have made use of place where past, present, and future meet since ancient times.

But the ships came--sometimes announced by the drums. And the hands, hearts, and souls of those who had furnished this gift of the drum came to the New World.

Drums In the New World

In Brazil, especially in Bahia, and in the city of Salvador, drum corps modified the original rhythms which washed up on these shores. Especially in Salvador, the sacred rhythms became a part of Candomblé, a principal Afro-Brazilian ecstatic religion. In Candomblé, devotees, assisted by prolonged drumming and chanting, enter trance and become possessed by African gods or other spirits. Candomblé, the Bahian version, has the many purely African characteristics. Its liturgy is largely conducted in the Yoruba language and its gods are an exclusively African pantheon. Xangó and Iemanjá, for example, are Yoruba orixás (divinities), brought to Brazil by slaves from West Africa. Xangó (ne, Shango, Chango) is the god of fire, iron, courage; Iemanjá, his mother, is goddess of the sea, beauty, vanity.)

Brazil developed other African influenced, religious forms, most popularly, Umbanda, practiced in downsouth, in Rio. even the martial arts forms, Caireodo, (sp) developed by Africans, have rhythms played on a berimbau, a bow-harp made from a gourd and a single string, with metal rattles attached.

In New Orleans, the Africans had a section downtown set aside for musicians to gather weekly with their drums, a section called Congo Square. The Square drew the weekend's biggest crowds. But the square preserved an institution. It elevated New Orleans drumming and music making to society status by protecting it. Given an opportunity and sanction that existed nowhere else, New Orleans created a music that captured the wild American edge, from sacred to underground.

In New Orleans, the rhythms were shared by all the instruments and developed its most mature presence in the 1950's and 1960's. In New Orleans, the funk developed--a complex of off-meter rhythm accents that absolutely causes the body to move and dance--and flowed with mambo (a medium tempo Cuban rhythm with lots of sway and a heavy topping of latin beats). It was tingled with off-tempo boobie woogie, a steady pounding rocking triplets to each count with a mix of stride beats were set below the wide flat tang speechified rhythms of country blues.  Add in the french influence of Zydeco, the marching drum cadences of the school players, and the the New Orleans players who had a tradition of listening intensely and responding to each other, the music created as an avant garde sound, both simple and complex. It influenced groups from Smokey Robinson to the Rolling Stones.

The sacred priestess of New Orleans was the greatest gospel singer who ever lived, Mahalia Jackson. From humble beginnings, which included scubbing floors on her knees, she rose through her gifts to be the voice of the bright and morning star. Her voice used the elements of sound--time, color, space--to gave witness to the sacred blessings of music, and the power of rhythm to describe the experiences of living in the hands of the good sheppard.

Many recall Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C. in August 1963. But few recalled that before he spoke, Mahalia Jackson sang. She walked to the microphones and performed the Thomas Dorsey classic, "Precious Lord, Take My Hand," singing a capella in front off a crowd of a a quarter million people. Her voice did what the drums did. It changed the quality of time. The quiet hush that fell across the assembly had a deeply tangible presence. It was into this transformed space that Dr. King stepped to a group of hot microphones, and spoke his famous words.  

Among the places where the drum arrival in the New World, Cuba has the most complex and detailed collection of rhythms, both popular and sacred. Cuban classifications include a wide variety of rhythm for each of the Cuban orishas, male and female. To the Yoruba people, orishas are (a people from a geographic region of Nigeria) sacred figures and deities. Orishas are paired and identified with saints from the Catholic pantheon. Like the saints, each orisha, traditionally, has charge and responsiblity for activities that effect the quality of human existence, and received intercessions for their aid. Cuban drumming has special, specific, sacred rhythms (and sometimes special drums) for each of the orishas to be used in ceremonies and rituals.

Cuba preserves and creates a greater categoory of rhythms then elsewhere in the New World because slavery--the major source of African migration--begins earlier and lasts later then other locales. In Cuba, slavery ends in 1873. The sheer numbers of Africans that arrived on the island from the breath of Africa's western coast, has made the island a cultural resource, pointing backward and forwards from Africa, bridging the fragile place between life, history, geography, eternity, and the arts. Ricky Ricardo's famous shout, "Babaluye," was the name of the Yoruba supreme God. Abakua, a rhythm of a secret men's society in Cuba. According to Robert Farris Thompson in "Flash of the Spirit" it was brought to Cuba during the slave trade from the Calabar region where it was the rhythm of the leopard society of the Negbe people. A Bembe is an Afro-Cuban rhythm used in Santeria rites to evoke different Orishas of the Yoruban pantheon. Bembe Shango honors Shango, the Yoruban Orisha of Lightning, Thunder, Drums, Dancing and Yams.

Linjen, a West African rhythm played frequently by American djembe players.

Among modern musicians, a church pianist from Rocky Mount, North Carolina became one of the great jazz originators in Harlem. He emphasized "space" in his playing in a way that you could hear it. Thelonius Monk's bright, sprayed chords, with a minor, disconant feel, were off rhythm but in space. Monk's virtuso album, Monk plays Duke, recorded by Riverside in the mid 1950's, on which Monk plays sixteen of the compositions of Duke Ellington, either solo or with a trio, is the greatest use of space in jazz before Sun Ra, or the Art Ensemble of Chicago (the AEC). the AEC often performrd with conch shells, beaded gourds (shakeres), hadcrafted thumb pianos (kalimbas), cymbals, and talking drums, performing music from the dawn of creation. Their chants and whistles, and chimes call forth the early world of the drum.

The rhythms that change space and bridge time to enternity are protected by barriers to this knowledge and skill, in most cultures. These rhythms only taught and shared with musicians who have undergone a spiritual ritual that involves study and sacrifice.

 I experienced this change of state---really of place, once; inducing by drumming. It is was in Washington, DC, at a summer concert at Fort Dupon Park, in southeast Washington. the featured band with Tito Puentes, thelegedary latin performer, leader, and musciologist.  The gig, he had brought a slight, very slender tobacco-colored man with a thick, well groomed mustache. The man, maybe 5'3" or 5'4" had long, thin, loosely jointed smooth fingers. More than ten years later, I learned his name, "Patato," Carlos Valdés. (I found a CD of his in Litchfield, Connecticut, and recalled his picture. Patato was born in Cuba in 1926, and came to New York in 1954. He is revered as a performer and for his gifts of lyricism by percussionists and drummers, but relatively unknown to the public.  

This Friday night, Patato opened Tito's show, playing solo. His hands poised high above a single drum he begain playing a slow andante rhythm that was neither latin, nor jazz, nor American soul. Slowly his hands tapped and etched a sound from the drum that began to transform quality of space. Something opened up. (I remembered the new York Times describing this sensation at a Santana concert, the

The other musician I saw achieve these results in performance, was Chief Bey. Chief Bey performed in Charleston during the 1981 Spoleto Festival. He was a one of a group of musicians who premiered the  extended composition the Festival commissioned Randy Weston to write. That unrecorded suite borrowed from Duke Ellington suites, and from the music of Tangiers, the Algerian city where Randy Weston lived and performed for more than a decade. It also incorporated lowcountry blues. But one of high points of Randy's  "African Suite" was the drumming section. where duets and solos were performed by Big Black and Chief Bey. 

Chief Bey was born James Hawthrone, in Yemassee, South Carolina, a rural farming community. isolated from the urban scene. Somehow Chief Bey arrived in New York, and begin to play African percussion, performing with Art Blakely and Herbie Mann, among others, and working in theatre at Harlem's New Lafayette, where I first saw him in 1971. He taught in a variety of community schools, made movies, and accepted the chance to come to Charleston with Randy in 1981.

With my friends, Jarvis and Norma Martin visiting from Durham, I watched Chief Bey do what Patato did. With his hands beating the drum, he altered space. By making new divisions, he made new links. He reshaped the mental dimensions by the use of a code that few knew existed. But all witnessed it. Few understood it. It was easier to focus on the music. But the music was undergoing a change of plans, taking on a new meaning, opening and closing passages so fast that the journey was only glimpsed, but the territory expanded, connected with a echo which seemed to offer a whisper of the big bang, the noisy confusion at the beginning of time, or perhaps the shofar sounding the whirlwind. Time entered another dimension. A place of hallowed ground. Someone called it eternity. The constant, unvarying micro-beat of the rhythm found a path to its own source, and became enlightened.

The Breakdown of the Drum Line

When I was growing up in Summrville, S.C., a village with winding streets and houses under a canopy of old growth trees, I didn't know anyone who played congas or djembe. but our high school band, of forty members, was legendary for its marching cadences. These drum cadences were step and dancing rhythms passed down from drummer to drummer, their beginnings unknown. Cadences were modified, changed, and borrowed from other bands, player faster or slower, always trying to draw out of the beat a lively, infectious energy, filled with a strength and purpose you could veel from blocks away.

I remember in elementary school how we all listened for the band, straining to be the first to heard it, faintly in the distance. And as the sound came closer, recognition spread. The sound soon engulfed you, spread across thestreet and was picked up and increased by the store windows that lined the streets. Echoing off the glass were the reflections of the band and the crowds surging along to follow the sound. The youngest children ventured along the street's edge, weaving in and out of the outside ranks of the band, looking up to study the human performancers. Older youth circulated along the sidewalks. The crowd was a living phalanx, massed in celebration.

I can see Pete (Gordon Gibson) pounding the bass drum, his skin glissening, swet drops streaming from his eyes and cheeks. The huge head of the drum is reverbrating, snapping; his body is rocking and swaying to each side, the strap of the stick wrapped around his wrist as his hand flew through the air, deviating witht he slightest flick or change in speed to find the rhythm that would have the whole town dancing. Mel Harrison, our only girl in the drum line, and Kenneth Faison played tenor drums, adding blazing accents to the snare drums of Oliver Nolan and Otis Brown. The spinning sticks and shimmering alloys of the cymbals, strking the rays of the sun, flashed bursts of power into the crowd, all dancing inside the rhtym.

Across the railroad tracks, pass the town square, down pass the pharmacy and hardware, turning at the old post office. The town's buildings were set far back from the street, leaving a street cape of grass and shurbs. This area quickly filled as people followed the the parade. the rhythm was a musical dispatch that made official a people's right to celebrate in the grand estate of personal and communal liberty. the drums marked this freedon, calling to all along the way.

Beagle Eye--Anthony Elliott as the leader of the corp, by virtue of his unadulterated excerbrance and inexhaustible energy. He was also on the basketball team, had speed and a nice touch--he could shot a deadly medium range jumper. But on drums, he wailed. He added to each beat, his personal gift of living, a love without shame of fear, filled with pure, sweet joy.  the majorettes and the drum major, with his tall shako, long tails continued the tradition of the masquerade, whirling and channeling the energy and animating message of the drums.

Much later, the performance routines we did to the drum's cadence, were given a name: "the break down." We were more likely to break it up. We were stretching the boundaries of celebration, exploring personal routes, finding the harmony, as Mickey Hart, the Grateful Dead's drummer said, between "order and chaos." The "breakdown" was an invisible mirror of collective celebrations, a passage of images and customs, a mood-changing experience transcribed from villages whose names were lost, long ago. Even then, we did not know know that the name of the continent, "AFrica," summed the missing and recovered details. From what survived, communities remade what was lost.

Later I heard, sometime in the late 1990's, that city officials in Durham, North Carolina had banned this style of performance in its Christmas parade.the breakdown was prohibited. Having survivied African was not enough. Without an appreciation of its heritage, its place of srvice, civil forces killed an ancient, central tradition  that had spread joy for decades, so the year's Christmas parade could keep pace. 

After I left Summerville for college I heard African drums on the weekends in Malcolm X Park (ne, Franklin) in Columbus during the spring of 1968 and 1969. Later,while teaching at Howard University in Washington, D.C. I saw the Ronald Freemen picture taken in Baltimore's Druid Park that is the quintessential photograph of American drumming. A tall, lean, shirtless brother is looking into and beyond the crowd while blowing a whistle with a fierceness that represents trash talk in the face of a lion.

I found out about the drum when I first met Chuck Davis, one of the major American figures of African dance. Chuck was born in Raleight, North Carolina, attended Howard University, and joined Eleo Pomare two of the poineer African-influenced dance troupe. He moved to Brooklyn and founded the Chuck Davis Dance Company, specializing in African dance.

In the late 1980's, Chuck's Brooklyn company was the resident company for outreach at the American Dance Festival, a huge festival two week festival of dance, held on Duke University's campus every year. In he talked the festival into featuring African dance, and he summoned six of the nation's absolute best company's to perform on stage. the highpoint would be a gala performance and world premier featuring all six companies on sage. I showed up to hang out behind the scenes, to see therehearsals, and run errands, to soak up the energy and knowledge that flows from African dancers. Their energy has to be so high and positive, until their plane of existence is a golden place reserved for those who have achieved the level of sacrifice to allow their gifts to be supreme.  I am sitting in the folding seats in the wings when Chuch orders me on stage. My body has no sense of rhythm, beyond walking into a reception and looking cool. What am I to do on stage with the best of America's trained dancers who have studied African dance for most of their lives? In the dance, I am given the only role I can capably perform. My part calls for no dancing at all; I am a sentry and caretaker, posted to watch carefully those for whom the others are dancing.

Suddenly I am on stage. The house lights are up, and the audience is filled. Women in goregous evening gowns, men in tuxedos. And the drums are souding.