Feeling Rhythms
In traditional African life the master drummer plays an enormous role in providing social cohesion. He is the keeper and transmitter of much wisdom. Besides generating a truly folk music for the whole community at festivals, weddings, funerals, or during communal work or play, he may also conduct musical duels or act as a healer of the sick. The music he masters is alive from within an imbued with a spirit that invites call and response, dialogue, and conversation among various voices, rhythms, and dancers. This spirit can also speak from the dead ancestors to the living. Master drummer Kofi Ayivor grew up in the Ewe region of eastern Ghana and western Togo, an area renowned for its knowledge of "syncopations" and cross-rhythms. Whereas in the New World, Africans were able, in the words of enthomusicologist John Collins, "to turn European rhythm inside out creating syncopated space for jazz and reggae," back in West Africa, at least, it had been syncopation itself that lay at the very heart of the musical culture. This is a key concept that recurred in my discussions with Kofi Ayivor. A selection follows from Kofi Ayivor's forthcoming autobiography. Scott Rollins, Amsterdam
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Walking Dance
I experiment with making new songs on the street. One was dedicated to my uncle, called "Shokolokobangoshe", another was a kind of original African rap called, "Dig It or the Walking Dance." They're a synthesis of traditional and modern styles. It's all from experience from the past forty-seven years of playing drums. All kinds of people listen. Rich people, street people, people who are judges, police, directors of business come to watch me play, they come and sit on the ground! Chinese, Korean business people all sitting on the ground! Listening to one drum and a voice. I can't believe that Kofi Ayivor can be sitting on the street with one drum and a voice and some two hundred people are sitting listening to him! But the Amsterdam audience is the hardest audience. Only recently have Western young people gotten into rhythms of the drum through house music and hiphop and rap. Now it's all rhythm. Have you heard chords these days? No sweet changes from B flat to C, no, it's rhythm. People in the West are just beginning to use rhythms now. They're on the way. But they have to get more in touch with crossing-rhythms. And syncopations. Kofi Ayivor |
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Syncopations
In Africa we believe syncopations are your feelings. When I sit to play, if something comes to me I have to play it, no matter how difficult. I have to, because spiritually that rhythm came to the mind and the hand has to find a way to play it. Some people might call it improvisation. But to me it is just saying what you want to say. African music wakes people up to their own rhythm. African music gives you messages, gives you strength, philosophical ideas, it manipulates your brain, it heals any part of your body. Even the heart. You can be in a coma. If you hear a certain kind of drums, and if they have to wake you up, they will. Kofi Ayivor |
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Feeling Rhythms
When I was eleven years old I woke up one morning and got this crazy idea that I had to start playing native drums. Most of our drumming is cultural. It's a kind of inheritance. Everyone feels the same way when they're growing up. They do everything that they have to do because they are chosen. You start feeling, "I might do that." My uncle played when I was little. I used to listen to him. His last name was Akakpo, Egle was his nickname. Anthony was his Catholic name. He is an Ayivor too. This uncle was very good. He was not only a teacher and a drummer, but a master of philosophy. He played all the Ewe drums. He played the abako, the ehue, the gahu, the agbeka, the agbadza - those are not the names of drums but of the interlocking rhythms he played on them. Certain of them can correspond to certain life cycles. For example, we play the agbadza, for the soul of the dead. We call these rhythms melodies. For us it is melody because each of the drums has a tone of its own. Especially the ashiwui drum. Then comes the small drum the akpagbang, then the gatingo, or cowbell, then the ayaya, which is the maraca. The mixture of tones and rhythms gives you a melody. Kofi Ayivor |
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KooKookunkun
My uncle didn't have to teach me to play. He just had to see if I had rhythm in me, the same as I do with my students in the school here. He gives you the cowbell and says, "Come on, go and sit with those boys over there." And then you go there, the guys start krashkakakrashkaka and you have to come in kunkunkun kunkunkun, kookookunkun. You always have to make sure you are in time with other people. That is his first priority. When you have no timing he hits you on the head because he feels you are destroying what is supposed to be a message. If you are going to be a cowbell player, you have to be the best because the cowbell player is like a bass player in a Western band. He keeps the time. Kofi Ayivor |
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Atopani
When I was with my father as a young boy, he was very strict. He was more like an Englishman, with a suit and tie every day. He died when I was ten. He did not want me to play the drum. He wanted me to become a doctor and my brother to be an engineer. My brother is an engineer. But I am a drummer, because my uncle said, "Your father is saying something that is not you. You are not going to be a doctor. I know you are going to be the master drummer of this village. The next one. So you have to work hard at it. Your daddy said what he had to say, but now he's gone and you have the time now to play." That was when I returned to Ghana from Nigeria. I was eleven. I went to Denu, where our traditional drumming goes on. That is also where we have our god's drum. It's called atopani, and it is not played every day. Maybe once or twice a year. I had to follow my uncle wherever he went because he was a master drummer. I played drums for special occasions, for births, marriages, and deaths. Kofi Ayivor |
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