The soul-shattering abuses suffered by enslaved Africans, who were forcibly stripped of their languages, religions and other key aspects of their culture, were fortunately no match for their superpower — African aesthetics, the enduring, innate African way of life.
Despite all the odds, this cultural superpower was successfully used to introduce a bountiful new world of music to the Americas by rethinking how to play traditional Western musical instruments and reworking Western music with concepts from their African homelands.
Enslaved Africans seeking to reconnect with their lost cultural traditions brought African concepts to instruments in the American musical mainstream, creating popular new American music genres that have been adopted and replicated internationally. They also recreated some African instruments.
Master percussionist Chief Baba Neil Clarke explained that African musical traditions — which included African instruments and aesthetics — significantly shaped American music and led to the creation of genres such as gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and hip hop.
“What became known as the banjo here was a reinvention. There are many, many varieties of African stringed instruments that have wooden bodies and [animal] skin faces. Basically, their names depend on the culture and the language of the countries that the people come from,” said Clarke, a Schomburg Center Research Fellow who taught in the music department at the City University of New York and has performed with pianist Randy Weston, entertainer Harry Belafonte, jazz vocalist Dianne Reeves, South African singer Miriam Makeba and others.
“Same thing with the fiddle,” he continued. “You have an uncountable number of fiddles, most of the time with one string, sometimes with two strings. What happened was we commonly could not bring our instruments with us. So we had to recreate and redefine them.
“We forget the fact that prior to us coming here, we had longstanding music traditions on the thumb piano, on the balafon [a gourd-resonating xylophone], the various wooden key instruments, and on the string instruments. There were various horns that were played — made out of bone — and there were flutes. So even though we could not bring the physical instruments, we came with the musical heritage that we reinterpreted onto the European instruments that we found here, Clarke added.
“I like to say that the drum is the only instrument that we see today that’s a true African instrument, and that was outlawed in 1740 as a result of the Stono Rebellion of 1739” in South Carolina. On all of the other instruments, Africans reinterpreted performance on them. [Pianists] Oscar Peterson, Jelly Roll [Morton], [Thelonius] Monk, Randy Weston and others reinterpreted the playing of the piano. John Coltrane took the European saxophone and reinterpreted its performance on it.”
Clarke told of French audiences listening in amazement to James Reese Europe’s U.S Army’s 369th Regiment Band during World War I, and “how these brothers were getting these sounds out of the instruments.”
“So these Africanisms emerge, and they emerge because that is aesthetically what we do. So, the very same things that we would do in Africa — even though we’re here and even though we’re playing on different instruments — those African aesthetics still emerge.”
