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