Cool Stuff no. 3: Africa

 Time for another Cool Stuff Blog! This time, we're going to Africa. A few quick parameters for  this week's blog topics:

• All the rules from the last Cool Stuff blog are still in play--three separate lines of inquiry, two of which must be explicitly about a musical topic; each item needs to include a hefty paragraph (at the very least) of description/explanation; you need to let me know where you got your information from
• Scope: You may go anywhere in Africa for your topics as long as you are South of the Sahara Desert. If you're just dying to dive into, say, Morocco or Egypt, don't worry--we'll consider those places when we get to Arabic music in a few weeks.
• More Scope: You can consider any music of sub-Saharan Africa that you like. It can be traditional, modern, vocal, instrumental, formal, informal, and from any part of sub-Saharan Africa that you like. Wondering what goes on in Madagascar? Go find out! Wondering if they have any aerophones? Go find out! Want to see what other kinds of drums they have? Go find out! Want to learn about the music of the BaAka people in Central Africa? Please, someone, go find out!

For my entry, I'm going to tell you a bit about something I was interested about this summer. I'd hoped to cover it in class, but time is getting squished, and so I'm putting it here instead. (Important Note: This material is fair game for the Africa "After" Quiz. Anything I ask won't be terribly in-depth--it will just show me that you actually read this blog and watched the videos.) Thus:

One of the first history classes I found myself teaching at Converse on a regular basis is that of early European music history--essentially, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The music and culture of the Middle Ages was a natural for me--I'd learned to love the music in college. Too, my go-to reading-for-fun genre has always been Fantasy, and at least half of the fantasy books I've read are essentially set in a Medieval + Magic world. So when I started teaching Diverse Cultures and found musicians in Western Africa that were basically analogous to the bards of Medieval Europe, I was hooked--as you've learned in class over the past few days.

Now, as I continued to learn more about African griots, one of the things I learned was that, while there have always been female griots, they were almost exclusively singers--women griots just didn't play instruments. Being an instrumentalist myself, I always felt uncomfortable with that distinction. Over the past couple of years, though, a few of my students' Cool Stuff blogs have made reference to women griots playing instruments, and so this summer I decided to learn about one.

Sona Jobarteh is one of the pre-eminent kora-playing griots today, and she is fantastic! She comes from a griot family based in Gambia, one of the tiniest countries in Western Africa, and is an acknowledged kora virtuoso. You can see both her amazing kora playing and her love for her Gambia in this video--it's from a concert she played in the Netherlands, which apparently has a significant immigrant population from Gambia. (It's worth following the video over to Youtube where you can read the comments--the love from her fellow Africans is quite touching). 

(There's also a professional video of the song done here, but I just love the raw joy and celebration of this live performance.)

In addition to her beautiful playing and singing, though, I'm both intrigued with and impressed by the way that she interprets her role as griot in the modern world. She travels the world giving lectures on her music, using them to shine the spotlight on aspects of her culture and the griot tradition. She's both rooted in her traditions and thoroughly modern. She's even started an Academy in Gambia that teaches culture through the arts, including music and dance. She's one of my new heroes.