Afro-sonics

• Right shout: Mclntosh County Shouters
• Underground Railroad songs
• Maroon music
• Blues
• Desert blues: Tishoumaren
• Afrofuturism

Looking at the linear ages of the Afro-sonic culture, because it had a huge impact on music.

The ring shout

• Survived from slave communities in the US, what happened is that slaves where restricted within their cultural life swell. Most slaves weren’t allowed to read, so they could develop so most the history is orally told through song and stories
• Slaves came from all over Africa so it was a huge mix of parts of Africa
• The ring shout was the main context in which Africans recognised values common to them, themes of ancestor worship and contact
• The Ring Shout is a rhythmic a beautiful sounding call and response chant, it had Christian connotations and could be triumphant, knowledge of these songs transmitted over generations

Common musical themes in The Ring Shout

• Calls, cries and hollers
• call-and-response
• Additive rhythms
• Off beat melodic phrasing
• Timbral distortions of all kinds
• Hand patting, foot stomping
• Constant repetition of rhythmic and melodic figures and phrases

The underground railroads

There where routes where slaves could take to be set free, as slavery was abolished in some states so you could escape to some states. Songs where made to motivate people to escape and take these routes to escape slavery

Marvin Hayes- Follow The Drinking Gourd

The musical tone is similar to the call and response of The Ring Shout, uses off beat melodic phrasing and calls.

Maroon music

Maroons where escaped slaves who started their own communities, they even fought back from slavers in Jamaica

“The word maroon comes from the Spanish word ‘cimarrones’, which meant ‘mountaineers’. They fled to the mountainous areas of Jamaica, where it was difficult for their owners to follow and catch them, and formed independent communities as free men and women.” (www.discoveringbristol.org.uk, n.d.).

Smithsonian Folkways – Drums of Defiance: Maroon Music from the Earliest Free Black Communities of Jamaica (1992)

You can still hear the African rhythms within maroon music, you can hear the defiance in the way they plan confidently and fast

Blues

Traditional African music compared to some blues, and they can manifest in themselves. Blues music falls heavy on African style music, with its call and response and off beat rhythmic hooks

Wavering melodies, and free singing song forms hold a sort of ancient secret

Afropop Worldwide – Africa and the Blues (1974)

This podcast goes into the talk about how to roots off Blues has origins in Africa, Arial Burnside from the Mississippi is the earliest form of blues music. Africa and the blues, its impossible to find the exact time that the music content of African music came to American and was processed into Blues but you can obviously see the resemblance

Tishoumaren (desert blues)

Actively picked up on American blues and merged it into their own style, they started in 1979 as they are a collective. They where formed in a refugee camp, the whole genre has become an international thing, the blues trailing from Africa to America then back to Africa.

Tinariwen (+IO:I) – Sastanàqqàm (2017)

Dub

Channel One and Aba Shanti-I are the best dub sound systems around, sound system culture has a very strong presents in UK. Jamaican immigrates came to the UK became hugely influential. Drum and Bass came from dub, when the band stops and its just the drum and bass.

Been transmitted from culture to culture, people who construct sound systems are quite secretive about how it’s built. Goes back in history, strong roots in Jamaica, grew up in a house with a sound system. “You cannot buy, it’s history for sound systems”. It was a way to get away from racist UK, it was educational for young kids good for the youth. The feeling of oneness and peacefulness goes beyond race.

Channel One & Aba Shanti-I: UK Soundsytem culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjczxwdyNGU

Afrofuturism

This idea of to imagine a future that is not racist and not anti-black, that we have all the rights as one another. When people where slaved, their history was abolished so there are people without a history. So they have to create their own notion of culture, one of those was is Afrofuturism.

How can they reinterpret technology as it being a westernised technology, how to recreate that as a history of forgotten culture.

Sun Ra

He created a space around himself that he embodied that he wasn’t from this earth, he thoughts was he’s not from this place he is from somewhere better.

Created a film called Space Is A Place, in it he plays an out of planet black man that teleports to Earth. “This music is all about tomorrow” gives show to Afrofuturism and the reinterpretation of music.