[HN Gopher] Louis Armstrong shaped the sound of Ghana
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Louis Armstrong shaped the sound of Ghana
Author : CapitalistCartr
Score : 32 points
Date : 2021-12-08 12:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| 1cvmask wrote:
| I actually wondered if there was an uptick in boxing after
| Muhammed Ali had his fight in Zaire.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rumble_in_the_Jungle
|
| Here is a great documentary on that fight:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Were_Kings
| fiifiappiah wrote:
| Great article. Recently been ruminating about the influence of
| West African culture and it's influence on the Western art vis-a-
| vis music like Jazz and and even Caribbean music and how it finds
| it's way back again on the continent as "foreign" music or art.
| seanhunter wrote:
| It's really big. If you listen to Bembe or High Life music, you
| realise the whole 6 vs 4 rhythmic thing that is a fundamental
| crossrythm in Jazz and a big part of the Swing thing as well as
| being at the root of "Afro-Cuban" music is fundamentally West
| African. As well as Louis, Dizzy Gillespie, Coltrane, Mingus,
| Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra, Miles and many others explored this
| African connection a lot.
|
| If you're interested in studying this further iirc Gunther
| Schuller discussed it in "Early Jazz" (one of the first books
| about Jazz History that actually isn't terrible from a
| musicological point of view) and Nicholas Cook also discusses
| it in "Music, Imagination and Culture" (which is an amazing
| book). Both of those will give you a "Western" perspective of
| the influence. I don't know a great reference I can recommend
| from an African point of view unfortunately.
| kingcharles wrote:
| This is great. My father spent 20 years in Ghana starting in the
| 1950s and married a local tribal woman. Louis Armstrong was my
| father's favourite musician, and now I have some idea of how that
| came about.
| prmph wrote:
| What does "tribal" mean in this context? Would any Ghanaian at
| that time have been considered "tribal"? If not, what made this
| particular woman "tribal"?
| kingcharles wrote:
| You make an excellent point. Sometimes we use words out of
| habit. That is how she always refers to herself. Now that you
| bring it up and I have to consciously think about it, I
| wonder what the term really means in this context? Really,
| that she came from an un-Westernized part of the country and
| lived without the modern technology found in the cities at
| the time? That cannot be the whole story because I've heard
| her mention railways from her childhood.
| dghughes wrote:
| Not OP and not Ghana but I saw this and it seems to partly
| answer your question.
|
| https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/7/8/being-ijaw-in-
| th...
| prmph wrote:
| The point I'm making is that it's a racist term,
| irrespective of whether someone chooses to use it to
| describe themselves. People are downvoting when their
| world-view is questioned, without taking a moment to
| reflect on their assumptions.
|
| I'm Ghanaian myself, and at a loss as to what qualifies one
| as "tribal", when the same term would not be applied to
| people in other parts of the world in exactly the same
| circumstances.
|
| It's the same thing with African art being classified as
| "tribal" art, their languages considered "tribal"
| languages, when in actual fact it's just plain old art and
| language.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| I would say that someone who is _not_ tribal would be more
| likely to live in a larger town or city, have more formal
| education, speaks a "foreign" language such as English,
| French or Arabic, may have parents who come from different
| villages, and even different different ethnic backgrounds
| (Wikipedia lists about 9 local languages and similar number
| of ethnic groups in Ghana) (1).
|
| Someone who _is_ tribal is well, not detribalised (2). And is
| able to say which specific tribe (geographic area, language,
| customs etc) they were raised in.
|
| 1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghana
|
| 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detribalization
| prmph wrote:
| So an American who does not speak a foreign language, who
| lives in a small town, who has never been outside the
| county he was born in, and whose parents are from the same
| county, can be referred to as "tribal"?
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > and whose parents are from the same county
|
| With the vast majority of Americans, a few generations
| back the ancestors are are immigrants, and they can
| usually tell you from where.
| dghughes wrote:
| You can probably use the term clan as in Scottish clan in
| place of tribe.
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