Issue 4, Article 3
What does it mean to play traditional music outside of your own tradition?
Highlife music had its beginnings in West Africa during the1960s as a blend of traditional music and modern guitar-based music coming from the West. While the sound of highlife in West Africa has been changed by the introduction of synthesizers and drum machines, its spirit survives here at Wesleyan with the help of Ghanaian master drummer Professor Abraham Adzenyah. In the 1970s, Adzenyah formed the Talking Drums, which performed a hybrid music of funk, salsa, highlife and traditional African rhythms. In 1993, Talking Drums was revived and recorded Abraham Adzenyah and the Talking Drums, a CD which included both traditional drumming and highlife songs composed by Adzenyah. After a few years of relapse, Adzenyah began a highlife tutorial in the spring of 1997 that eventually evolved into the current Wesleyan band, the New Talking Drums.
As a member of the New Talking Drums, I am often led to wonder "is this really highlife or just some bastardized, Americanized version?" Not that the band is ignorant of the cultural and musical influences in highlife. Many of the band's members are currently taking Adzenyah's West African drumming class and one musician, senior guitarist Mike Buescher, is doing his senior thesis on highlife music. But still, when listening to recordings of highlife music as performed by Ghanaian or Nigerian musicians, I hear a completely different sound. The music seems simpler; solos are short, horn lines are subtle with very few harmonies. When the New Talking Drums rehearse, there is often confusion over song structure, solo order, harmonies, and the constant deviations from the original melodies. It is not that the musicians do not know their parts, but rather that many of us are accustomed to the free improvisation and complex harmonies of our individual musical traditions, be they jazz, blues or rock.
So what does all this mean? Adzenyah admits that there is a struggle between wanting to maintain the cultural basis of highlife music and allowing us the freedom of self-expression. Much of highlife is rooted in the repeating, rhythmic nature of traditional drumming. In West African drumming, there is no improvisation. Anything that sounds like improvisation is actually a rearrangement of certain learned rhythmic patterns. Likewise, solos in highlife are not true improvisation as we know it, but rather are composed and then retained, or "put in your computer" in Adzenyah's words. Not that the solo becomes stagnant -- instead, the soloist embellishes the basic composition of their solo while still holding onto its overlying structure so as to orient the other musicians. In some ways this concept was initially a difficult one for many of the band's members to accept. Originally it sounded like a limit on our individual expression. Later, after some discussion, it sounded fair. Still, sometimes we struggle. Exactly how much of our solos should we retain? Forty per cent? Sixty per cent? Yes, we want to respect the traditions of highlife, but to what degree are we actually playing highlife, and to what degree have we altered the music so much that highlife is only one of the band's many musical influences?
Much of this debate centers around Abraham, since he is our major link to the traditions of West African highlife music. After teaching his music and culture to Wesleyan students for the last thirty years, Abraham is very adept at creating harmony between American and Ghanaian cultures. Since highlife originally took some of its inspiration from American guitar rock, it is perhaps not so strange to introduce highlife into students' musical lives. He readily brings reggae and funk-based rhythms into his compositions and doesn’t protest to Klezmer-influenced horn lines or Frank Zappa guitar solos. While solos can go on for over six minutes, and the whole band has occasionally been known to go silly, Adzenyah is still completely convinced that the New Talking Drums would be a huge hit with a Ghanaian audience, despite having drawn from so many different world musics. Not only is the music fun and makes you "shake your bom-bom," but, unlike much of the current highlife being played in West Africa, our songs speak not only of love but also have a moral content similar to the songs of early highlife ensembles Traditional West African music consists mostly of moral proverbs and historical anecdotes and is the principal manner by which African culture is passed down through generations. The lyrics Abraham writes for his songs perform a similar function. The title for the New Talking Drums CD, Mo Nyge Mo Ani, translates into "Enjoy Yourself"; Adzenyah means this phrase to function not only as a social instigation but also as a moral lesson for people who get too caught up in the fast pace of today's world. Likewise, another song, "Sankofa", reminds its listeners not to forget about what lies behind you because your future is always connected to your past. In these and other songs, Abraham Adzenyah never forgets that the music, however far it may stray from the authentic sounds of highlife, is still intimately tied to its West African origins.
Then, how much does it really matter? In some ways it matters a lot because we, as a band, are claiming highlife as our musical form. In other ways, when we are performing, there is not such a need for definition. We are simply playing music and helping people to shake their respective bom-boms.
The current New Talking Drums CD, Mo Nyge Mo Ani, is available at the Atticus Bookstore, located on Court Street in Middletown, Connecticut. The band will be playing on the Wesleyan campus later this semester. Stay tuned for more information.