Togo - West Africa - page 898

The young band leader took time out to study music in England, just as his father had done. After which,
armed with an arsenal of Fela Kuti standards, Seun Kuti started performing and touring in earnest.
So does it bother him to be continually assessed in terms of what his father did? 'Being in my dad's shadow is
a good place to be,' he says with a shrug. 'He was a very great man.'
'I'm an artist in my own right, of course, but ultimately it's Afrobeat that matters. Afrobeat is the truth.'
West Africa has a phenomenal variety of drums. Kettle, slit and talking drums; water,
frame and hourglass-shaped drums; log, goblet and double-headed barrel drums. Drums
used for ritual purposes, like the dundun drums of the Yoruba, which communicate with
the orishas; drums made from tree trunks and used for long-distance messages; drums that
mark the major events of one's life - baptism, marriage, death - and drums for entertain-
ment. 'Talking' drums, such as the Wolof tama, a small, high-pitched instrument clamped
under the armpit and beaten fast with a hooked stick, or the djembe, the chalice-shaped
drum ubiquitous from Ghana to Senegal, and in the West's endorphin-inducing African
drum circles.
There's a diverse array of string instruments too, from the one-stringed viol of the Niger
Tuareg and the 13-string obo zither of the Igbo in Nigeria, to the 21-string kora - the
harp-lute of the griots and one of the most sophisticated instruments in sub-Saharan
Africa. Kora players are usually virtuosos, having studied their craft from childhood.
Mory Kanté's amplified rock-style kora helped establish its reputation as a formidable
solo instrument, while kora master Toumani Diabaté, son of the virtuoso Sidiki Diabaté,
displayed its crossover potential by collaborating with everyone from flamenco musicians
to African American bluesman Taj Mahal.
Regarded by some as the precursor to the banjo, the ngoni ( xalam in Wolof, hoddu in
Fula, konting in Mandinka) is also popular with griots . A feature in the 14th-century
courts of Mali, it has between three and five strings that are plucked, and is tricky to play.
Another well-known griot instrument is the balafon, a wooden xylophone with between
18 and 21 keys, suspended over a row of gourds to amplify the sound. The balafon is of-
ten played in pairs, with each musician - one improvising, one not - striking the keys with
wooden mallets. The Susu people of Guinea are renowned balafon experts.
Stephen Feld's Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana (2012, Duke University Press) combines
memoir, biography, ethnography and history in a compelling and accessible look at Ghana's coolest cats.
There are other xylophones with different names in West Africa, xylophones fashioned
from huge logs, or xylophones amplified by boxes and pits. There are wind instruments
(Fula shepherds play melodies on reed flutes) and brass instruments (the Niger Tuareg fa-