African Musical Symbolism In Contemporary Perspective - Saoas.org

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Indeed it is these two African rhythmic features of swing 22
and syncopation that helped enable slaves from Africa overcome
the problem of having to play the music of their white masters
in the New World, particularly in Protestant North America
where indigenous African music and drumming was completely
banned. It was the acute awareness of the swinging offbeat
musical spaces that Europeans largely ignored that enabled
African slaves to maintain their polyrhythmic patterns: even
when boxed in musically by the mono-rhythmic duple and
quadruple time of white Americans. For instance the ability to
stretch and generally swing musical time permitted the slaves to
squeeze and transmute their 12/8 African Signature Tune
pattern 23 into one of the 4/4-clave rhythm found Afro-Caribbean
and Afro-Latin music. 24
The African feel also survived slavery when African
Americans syncopated, offbeat, ragged, or jazzed their music.
For instance African Americans emphasising the second and
third beat, largely ignored by the whites, transmuted Western
brass band marching music (with its emphasis on the first and
third beat of the bar) into jazz. Likewise Jamaican offbeating
involved into the skanking guitarists and back-beat drummers of
ska and reggae. I would also suggest that this idea of black
musical offbeating against Western tempo could even be
extended to the realm of language, for the African American
practice of giving English words such as “bad” and “mean” an
opposite positive meaning can be treated as a form of black
linguistic syncopation. 25 Amiri Baraka believes this inverted
English was a code used by black slaves to hide things from their
masters, for when they were forced to use their masters
22 The name swing was actually given to the big-band jazz music of Fletcher
Henderson, Duke Ellington (and their white imitators) which featured highly
improvised solos.
23 See Figure 1 (Ewe children’s song): a pattern comprising three equidistant
pulses, followed by a gap, then two pulses and another closing gap.
24 This somewhat resembles the gahu bell pattern discussed earlier, but the last
stroke is played on the onbeat time-interval thirteen instead of the offbeat
fifteen. This black diasporic rhythm is found, for instance, as one of the Afro-
Cuban clave rhythms, in the Brazilian samba, the Trinidadian calypso and a in a
rhythm popularised by the American rhythm ‘n’ blues musician Bo Didley.
25 See for instance Thomas Kochman (1972).