African music is a total art form closely linked to dance, gesture and dramatization. It permeates African life and has a function, a role to play in society; songs are used for religious ceremonies and rituals, to teach and give guidance, to tell stories, to mark the stages of life and death and to provide political guidance or express discontent.
I t also serves to entertain and is used in ceremonial festivals and masquerades to work up fervor from the spectators and participants alike. Singing, dancing and playing African musical instruments ensure a dynamic event transpires. The impact of the music is tantamount; the beauty of it, like African sculpture, is secondary to the primary function. Performances may be long and often involve the participation of the audience and much of it is associated with a particular dance.
There are some African musical instruments that cross boundaries and are found in varying shapes in the different countries but still have the same basic form. Some instruments have changed very little in years since they were first recorded. Africans have strong beliefs about the status associated with particular instruments and with the spirit of an instrument. The carver of the instrument is held in high regard in the community.
This is especially true with drums. The following are some of the African musical instruments used throughout the continent, primarily sub-Saharan:. African musical instruments also serve as works of art, carved into surprising shapes, covered with patterns and decorated with beads, feathers, paint or cloth.
Figures are sculpted into the instrument as spiritual tokens empowering the musician to filter the godly or ancestral messages. For a more detailed account of African musical instruments.. Saharan 'green' cultures left a legacy of rock art describing some are the earliest scenes of African music such as in the painting below. It is probably one of the oldest existing testimonies to music and dance in Africa and is attributed to the 'Saharan' period of the Neolithic hunters.
Traditionally, African musicians were not concerned with the impact of the music, nor its 'beauty', it had a specific function with dance being an integral partner to music and was used to entertain as well as to mark occasions and provide moral guidance. African singers use a large number of sounds, not all of them appealing to the ear; some are confronting or emotionally and spiritually charged.
Singing style can be loud and resonant but can also be constricted and accompanying sounds can be added. African traditions also emphasize dance and all the mime and props that go with it because movement is a significant form of communication.
Body percussion; clapping and foot stamping is also utilized. Improvisation is a fundamental element in African music. The musician's capabilities are measured by the community and his listeners, they must reflect his inventiveness From the 15th C onwards, our history of music making in Africa is mainly derived from studying representations of dances and making music with African musical instruments and scenes depicted in terracotta, stone or metal.
In Ife, Yorubaland we see footed cylindrical drums dating from the 10th to 14th century on terracotta artefacts. In Benin, pressure drums appear on brass plaques from the 15th C onwards. These plaques have proven to be a never-ending supply of information on the use of instruments like horns, bells, drums and bow lutes in ceremonial occasions. Migrations of tribes, movement of slaves and colonial porters and servants have all contributed to the wide dispersement of African musical instruments.
For example, lamellaphones with metal keys were a prominent feature in ancient Zimbabwe and spread through neighbouring kingdoms to Katanga and Angolan cultures, all the while becoming smaller and smaller for travelling purposes.
Zimbabwean 'mbiras' lamellaphone and 'ngomas' drums were first written about by Father Joao dos Santos, a Portuguese who travelled through the lower Zambezi in and recorded his impressions of the sounds these instruments made and the effects they had on their combined audience.
They sang spirituals of the American South, and influenced many South African groups to form themselves into similar choirs; soon regular meetings and competitions between such choirs were popular, forming an entire subculture that continues to this day.
African American spirituals were made popular in the s by Orpheus McAdoo's Jubilee Singers Enoch Sontonga, then a teacher, composed the hymn Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika God Bless Africa Early s In the early 20th century, governmental restrictions on black poeple increased, including a nightly curfew which kept the night life in Johannesburg relatively small for a city of its size then the largest city south of the Sahara. The Marabi music style formed in the slum yards that resulted from the increasing urbanisation of black South Africans into mining centres such as the Witwatersrand.
The sound of marabi was intended to draw people into the shebeens bars selling homemade liquor or skokiaan and then to get them dancing. Marabi was played on pianos with accompaniment from pebble-filled cans. Over the succeeding decades, the marabi-swing style developed into early mbaqanga, the most distinctive form of South African jazz South African popular music began in with the first commercial recordings.
Such bands, which produced the first generation of professional black musicians in South Africa, achieved considerable popularity, particularly in the s and s: star groups such as The Jazz Maniacs, The Merry Blackbirds and the Jazz Revelers rose to fame, winning huge audiences among both blacks and whites. This resulted in the growth of an indigenous recording industry and helped popularize black South African music.
The s also saw the spread of Zulu a cappella singing from the Natal area to much of South Africa. Gallo went on to begin producing music in South Africa. Solomon Linda's Original Evening Birds, recorded "Mbube" it was probably the first African recording to sell more than , copies.
The primary instrument of kwela, in the beginning, was the pennywhistle, a cheap and simple instrument that was taken up by street performers in the shantytowns.
Lemmy Mabaso was one of the most notable musicians of this genre. The older strains of marabi and kwela saw the birth of what is broadly thought of as mbaqanga, the mode of African-inflected jazz that had many and various practitioners, with a large number of bands competing for attention and income. Later in the s a new black urban music culture started to emerge in Sophiatown. Marabi met with traditional dance styles such as the Zulu indlamu and American big band swing.
The indlamu tendency resulted in the "African stomp" style, giving a notably African rhythmic impulse to the music.
The lawless domain which was Sophiatown was one in which black people could interact with the more adventurous, liberal whites drawn to the excitements of its nightlife, becoming a touchstone for the first real cultural and social interchange between the races to take place in South Africa. Miriam Makeba was a central figure in the African jazz scene throughout the s.
By the early s, she was an international star and brought attention to South African apartheid. Willard Cele is credited with creating pennywhistle by placing the six-holed flute between his teeth at an angle. The jazz club sponsored gatherings and from such meetings grew South Africa's first bebop band, the important and influential Jazz Epistles: The earliest members were musicians destined to shape South African jazz from then on: Dollar Brand, Kippie Moeketsi, Jonas Gwangwa and Hugh Masekela.
In , American pianist John Mehegan organized a recording session using many of the most prominent South African jazz musicians, resoluting in the first two African jazz LPs. They forcibly removed the inhabitants of Sophiatown to townships such as Soweto, outside Johannesburg. Sophiatown was razed and the white suburb of Triomf built in its place.
In the wake of the Sharpeville Massacre in and the subsequent State of Emergency and mass arrests, bannings and trials of activists challenging apartheid laws, more and more musicians found it necessary to leave the country.
Remmy Ongala tackles thorny social and political issues through music created in this style. In this track, he promotes the use of condoms to protect against AIDS. The song proved too much for Radio Tanzania, which refused to play it. But live shows and black-market tapes ensured that few urban Tanzanians missed the message.
Inkiranya is a drumming style which has its origin in Burundi. The Drummers of Burundi are one of the finest examples of this type of music. Their performances are a part of ceremonies such as births, funerals, and coronations of mwami kings.
The drums called karyenda are sacred in Burundi and represent the mwami fertility and regeneration. Palm wine music dates back to the days when Portuguese sailors first introduced guitars to West African port cities. Early African guitarists and bottle percussionists played at gatherings where revellers drank the fermented sap of palm trees, a traditional alternative to bottled beer.
Benga has its roots in the music of the Luo people of Kenya. The Nyatiti is an instrument of the Loo people, and is used in spiritual practice as well as to accompany historical praise songs. On his first visit to Real World Studios, Kenyan singer-songwriter Ayub Ogada refused to record inside the studio at Real World, instead playing a concert outside which took three hours.
By the end of his performance, the majority of his album En Mana Kuoyo had been recorded. The language and music of Somalia is a mixture of African and Arabic influences. A group of Sudanese people immigrated to the south of Egypt seven generations ago.
But one family of Sudanese origins, the Mataqil, have a long cultivated alliance with gypsy families who specialised in the art of singing.
Shamandi Tewfiq Metqal with his ensemble The Musicians of the Nile incarnates this form of traditional singing in epic poetic form. We're delighted to finally release the new album by Afro-Peruvian legend Susana Baca. Bitumba is the second release on our new imprint, Real World X, and features Congelese band Mbongwan Afro-Peruvian icon Susana Baca celebrates 50 years in music with this forceful musical statement.
Soukous Soukous is a form of music that stems from rumba. Papa Wema - Yolele. JuJu Juju style originally came from Nigeria, a country which has produced many styles that managed to spread all around West African countries, including juju, jaija, fuji, ozzidi, palm-wine, highlife and afrobeat. Voices of Africa Exploring the voice has always been an exciting part of the Real World Records catalogue and some ou Tue, 17 April Mbalax A style of popular Senegalese music known in the Serer language as mbalax , it derives from the conservative Serer music tradition of Njuup.
Mbaqanga Mbaqanga comes from South Africa.
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