JATA Mande Drum Workshop

Posted by admin on Oct 30, 2011

An adult ensem­ble groove

Since Papa Ladji Camara intro­duced authen­tic Mande jenbe drum­ming to Amer­ica in the mid-1950s, play­ing with Fodeba Keita’s Les Bal­let Africains, the instru­ment has made its emi­nence known world­wide to the point of being a com­mon sight from small town USA to rural China, and world major cities. Across the board, peo­ple have found the jenbe to be a strong and res­o­nant vehi­cle for voic­ing their self-expression.

Papa Ladji toured the US in the late ‘50s with the Bal­let, and in 1959 met the leg­endary Chief James Hawthorne Bey. After Bal­let per­for­mances, Papa Ladji would meet Chief Bey at the “African Room” at 44th Street and 7th Avenue in Man­hat­tan, NYC, where they would play till the wee hours of the morn­ing. Together they pop­u­lar­ized the jenbe and Mande music among Afrikan Amer­i­cans who dur­ing the period were re-exploring their Afrikan identity.

Today, through­out the world, drum­ming is a com­mu­nal event where every­one present takes part and par­tic­i­pa­tion in the form of clap­ping, danc­ing and singing accom­pany the drum­ming. That com­mu­nal cir­cle is cru­cial to feel­ing the pulse of the music and the com­mu­nity of drummers.

So join our cir­cle on Wednes­day evenings, 6–7:30PM, at TRIAAC, 501 E. Brack­en­ridge Street, Fort Wayne, IN.

To reg­is­ter fill out the form and bring it with you to class. Each ses­sion lasts 7 weeks, and dur­ing that time we’ll work on improv­ing your lis­ten­ing, time, hand­ing tech­nique, and build­ing a vocab­u­lary of sounds and pat­terns that will increase your abil­ity to play.

See you Wednesday.

For more infor­ma­tion call TRIAAC.

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