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Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, and dance music. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation.
In jazz and blues, a blue note is a note that—for expressive purposes—is sung or played at a slightly different pitch from standard. Typically the alteration is between a quartertone and a semitone, but this varies depending on the musical context.
Given the vastness of the African continent, its music is diverse, with regions and nations having many distinct musical traditions. African music includes the genres makwaya, highlife, mbube, township music, jùjú, fuji, jaiva, afrobeat, afrofusion, mbalax, Congolese rumba, soukous, ndombolo, makossa, kizomba, taarab and others. African music also uses a large variety of instruments from all across the continent. The music and dance of the African diaspora, formed to varying degrees on African musical traditions, include American music like Dixieland jazz, blues, jazz, and many Caribbean genres, such as calypso and soca. Latin American music genres such as cumbia, salsa music, son cubano, rumba, conga, bomba, samba and zouk were founded on the music of enslaved Africans, and have in turn influenced African popular music.
Jean-Bosco Mwenda, also known as Mwenda wa Bayeke, was a pioneer of Congolese fingerstyle acoustic guitar music. He was also popular in other African countries, particularly in East Africa, and in the late 1950s and early 1960s was briefly based in Nairobi, Kenya, where he had a regular radio show and became a profound influence on a generation of Kenyan guitarists.
The Republic of the Congo is an African nation with close musical ties to its neighbor, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Democratic Republic of the Congo's homegrown pop music, soukous, is popular across the border, and musicians from both countries have fluidly travelled throughout the region playing similarly styled music, including Nino Malapet and Jean Serge Essous. Brazzaville had a major music scene until unrest in the late 1990s, and produced popular bands like Extra Musica and Bantous de la Capitale that played an integral role in the development of soukous and other styles of Congolese popular music. The Hip-Hop group "Bisso na Bisso" also hails from Congo-Brazzaville.
A level, also "tonality level", Gerhard Kubik's "tonal step," "tonal block," and John Blacking's "root progression," is an important melodic and harmonic progression where melodic material shifts between a whole tone above and a whole tone below the tonal center. This shift can occur to both neighboring notes, in either direction, and from any point of departure. The steps above and below the tonic are often called contrasting steps. A new harmonic segment is created which then changes the tonality but not necessarily the key.
Triple metre is a musical metre characterized by a primary division of 3 beats to the bar, usually indicated by 3 (simple) or 9 (compound) in the upper figure of the time signature, with 3
4, 3
8 and 9
8 being the most common examples. In these signatures, beats form groups of three, establishing a triple meter feel in the music or song. The upper figure being divisible by three does not of itself indicate triple metre; for example, a time signature of 6
8 usually indicates compound duple metre, and similarly 12
8 usually indicates compound quadruple metre.
Baganda music is a music culture developed by the people of Uganda with many features that distinguish African music from other world music traditions. Parts of this musical tradition have been extensively researched and well-documented, with textbooks documenting this research. Therefore, the culture is a useful illustration of general African music.
A bell pattern is a rhythmic pattern of striking a hand-held bell or other instrument of the idiophone family, to make it emit a sound at desired intervals. It is often a key pattern, in most cases it is a metal bell, such as an agogô, gankoqui, or cowbell, or a hollowed piece of wood, or wooden claves. In band music, bell patterns are also played on the metal shell of the timbales, and drum kit cymbals.
African blues is a genre of popular music, primarily from West Africa. The term may also reference a putative journey undertaken by traditional African music from its homeland to the United States and back. Some scholars and ethnomusicologists have speculated that the origins of the blues can be traced to the musical traditions of Africa, as retained by African-Americans during and after slavery. Even though the blues is a key component of American popular music, its rural, African-American origins are largely undocumented, and its stylistic links with African instrumental traditions are somewhat tenuous. One musical influence that can be traced back to African sources is that of the plantation work songs with their call-and-response format, and more especially the relatively free-form field hollers of the later sharecroppers, which seem to have been directly responsible for the characteristic vocal style of the blues.
Sub-Saharan African music is characterised by a "strong rhythmic interest" that exhibits common characteristics in all regions of this vast territory, so that Arthur Morris Jones (1889–1980) has described the many local approaches as constituting one main system. C. K. Ladzekpo also affirms the profound homogeneity of approach. West African rhythmic techniques carried over the Atlantic were fundamental ingredients in various musical styles of the Americas: samba, forró, maracatu and coco in Brazil, Afro-Cuban music and Afro-American musical genres such as blues, jazz, rhythm & blues, funk, soul, reggae, hip hop, and rock and roll were thereby of immense importance in 20th century popular music. The drum is renowned throughout Africa.
John Lloyd Chipembere Lwanda is a Malawian medical doctor, writer, poet, researcher, publisher, and music producer. He is a published author and also a publisher of books and music. He was an honorary senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow Department of Primary Care until 2005. Lwanda did his history and social science PhD at the University of Edinburgh's Centre of African Studies.
The Sanga people are an ethnic group that lives mostly in the Katanga Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Traditional sub-Saharan African harmony is a music theory of harmony in sub-Saharan African music based on the principles of homophonic parallelism, homophonic polyphony, counter-melody and ostinato-variation. Polyphony is common in African music and heterophony is a common technique as well. Although these principles of traditional African music are of Pan-African validity, the degree to which they are used in one area over another varies. Specific techniques that used to generate harmony in Africa are the "span process", "pedal notes", "rhythmic harmony", "harmony by imitation", and "scalar clusters".
The Oral Literature Research Programme is an independent research institution founded in 1989 by renowned Malawian cultural anthropologist Moya Aliya Malamusi, and his sister, the late Lidiya Malamusi. It is based in Chileka, Blantyre, Malawi, about a kilometre from the Chileka International Airport. Moya Aliya Malamusi is an ethnomusicologist and lecturer at the University of Vienna and Sigmund Freud University. Malamusi has done extensive research into guitar styles and techniques in southern Africa. He has also published a selection of his field recordings on CDs From Lake Malawi to the Zambezi and the DVD/CD Endangered traditions—Endangered Creativity.
Hauyani is a guitar tuning and method used in southern Africa, derived from the term "Hawaiian" .. It refers to both a trichord tuning, as well as playing the guitar using a guitar slide or similar improvised object. A common tuning is GECgec, and it is found in countries such as Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, and Mozambique. The technique may be related to indigenous techniques of playing local monochords with a smooth object to create glissando.
Donald Kachamba (1953–2001) was a Malawian musician, composer and bandleader.
George Herzog was an American anthropologist, folklorist, musicologist, and ethnomusicologist.
Helmut Günther was a German dancer, dance historian, and dance critic. He researched historic and contemporary African dances and introduced a novel approach to study them. He also worked in the field of sociology of dance and jazz dance. His works are frequently cited in literature relating to history of culture of Africa, particularly African dances.
Triple step, in music, represents a rhythmic pattern covering three dance steps done on music.
References
- ↑ "The Oral Literature Research Programme - Fieldwork with the Department of English at Chanco". Malawi Medical Humanities Network. 7 August 2017. Retrieved 8 April 2024.
