Akontings and the banjo-playing white guys who love them

Last night my lady friend and I attended a concert as part of the University of Florida’s AIM for Africa cultural exchange program. The event’s key figures were a group of ethnomusicologists who’ve been tracing the history of the banjo through the Senegal/Gambia area of West Africa. A few years ago they discovered strong connections between a stringed gourd instrument called the akonting and the modern banjo. The vid below shows akonting master Sana Ndiaye showing North-Central Florida why they call him “Mr. Akonting”.

Normally this kind of ethno-academic show doesn’t appeal to me. You take an exceptionally honest secular music out of its context (small African villages) and suture it into a sterile museum-like environment (the Thomas Center). Much of the experience feels lost in translation.

But at this point anything to do with banjo to me had the immediacy of an erupting volcano, thanks to the excitement of my upcoming journey into the woods to study banjo with the masters. Sana will be teaching the akonting there, and maybe, just maybe, tomorrow night I’ll be sitting around a fire playing with him. What luck to get an early glimpse.

Sana’s traditional songs are rhythmic at heart, and made distinct by haunting, repeated melodic riffs. Pretty similar in character to certain modern American music that I fancy. But using the word melodic with the akonting may be misleading. The akonting is not a melody instrument - the “notes” just aren’t thought of the same way. Instead, the akonting is thought of as a complex rhythm instrument, like holding a drum circle in your hands.
I think that this way of thinking, of rhythmic elements with melodic quality rather than vice versa, has had a profound influence on Western music’s transformation into modern popular music. Compare the pulsing, repetitive melody lines of rock and hip-hop to the more sinuous melodies of Western classical music - see what I mean? I guess you can’t overstate the African influence on Western music.

Banjorama Freakout…

I got a chance to have a go at playing the akonting during one of the intermissions. What caught me (and probably the white guys who first saw the akonting in West Africa) was that the playing technique was almost identical to the clawhammer style of old time banjo.

The akonting has three strings tied at different lengths along the neck - the two higher strings are used to break up the rhythm just like the high string on the banjo, the longest string is stopped to play the melody. Although it’s a pretty simple instrument, the emotional rhumination that it invokes is remarkable. There’s a soothing heartbeat like quality to it.

Did I mention how much I enjoy instruments that I have absolutely no idea how to play?

Like Tom Waits so craggedly said -

“Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they’ve been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don’t explore, you only play what is confident and pleasing. I’m learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know absolutely nothing about, like a bassoon or a waterphone.”

Also, for me too much technique often plugs up my personal connection with an instrument.

I’d like to write more, but I’m prepping right now to head off into the woods to learn the zen of banjo. More on that when I get back. Peace my brothers.