Yoruban drumming

Been awhile since my last post. Been sifting through a lot, tons of stuff being slowly filtered through my ears. Most of what I've been listening to are tunes I need to learn for bands that I'm in. The other stuff I've been compiling is thanks to Capt. Crawl.

The Yoruban stuff I checked out is from a CD that I actually purchased. Sometimes you just gotta have the extensive liner notes.

I've been checking out Yoruban drumming from western Africa, which is pretty much the basis for most of our beats in Western music, especially rhythms in South America, the Caribbean, and the US. Even when the types of drums and the people change, the rhythms remain constant. Maybe that's what Robert Plant meant by "the song remains the same"?

Basically, these are the roots of rhythm as we know it. (Traditions from India and the Middle East are obviously a different world. I'm sure I'll post about some of that stuff at some point.) The unique contribution to world rhythms that the Yoruban traditions offer us is a sheer abundance of polyrhythm.

I won't get too much into the cultural aspects of the music. Suffice to say, most of the drumming is rituals for orishas, or ancestral deities. It's sacred music, and its function is to induce trance (which the polyrhythms do incredibly well). When the rhythms are played correctly, sitting still is not an option.

The most common polyrhythms are 6 against 4. There's really no wrong way to feel the rhythm, because both are happening simultaneously. Part of the beauty is that you can get into the pulse of the 6 rhythm, and then forget about that and tune into the stuff happening in 4.

Many of the drums are pitched similarly, so sometimes it's hard to tell which drum is playing what exactly. I've found that part of the fun is focusing on one particular drum, follow what it's playing, then keep that rhythm in mind while you zone in on a different drum and compare what they're both playing. Sometimes there are as many as a dozen drummers playing at once.

The rhythms are based on simple patterns called "claves" (to use the Spanish term) that provide the basic foundation for all the other rhythms that are played around it. Clave is used heavily in this African style of drumming, as well as rhythms in Caribbean, South American music, and music of the US (especially the south).

An example of clave we all know is the "Bo Diddley Beat." In Afro-Cuban music it's called the 3 - 2 son clave.

To play something complimentary to the clave is to enhance and augment the groove, and thus the trance. To play something that doesn't fit with the clave is to kill the groove, kill the trance, and basically piss off a lot of musicians and dancers.

I guess the moral is, you can't outsmart a groove. These people have figured this out thousands of years ago. Trust em. They know.

To check it out, get a copy of

Yoruba Drums from Benin, West Africa (Smithsonian Folkways)