Traditional Music of Africa

• Ceremonial rites (birth, death, marriage, succession, worship, and spirit invocations) - where African music is largely functional
• African music - has a interlocking structural format, due mainly to its overlapping and dense texture as well as its rhythmic complexity.
• Genre of African Music:

  1. Afrobeat
  2. Apala (Akpala)
  3. Axe
  4. Jit
  5. Jive
  6. Juju
  7. Kwassa Kwassa
  8. Marabi
• Afrobeat - a term used to describe the fusion of West African with Black American music
• Apala (Akpala) - a musical genre from Nigeria in the Yoruba tribal style, used to wake up the worshippers after fasting during the Muslim holy feast of Ramadan.
• Rattle (sekere), Thumb Piano (agidigbo), bell (agogo) and two or three talking drums - percussion instruments used in apala
• Axe - a popular musical genre from Salvador, Bahia, and Brazil. It fuses the Afro-Carribean styles of the marcha, reggae, and calypso, and is played by carnival bands.
• Jit - a hard and fast percussive Zimbabwean dance music played on drums with guitar accompaniment, influenced by mbira-based guitar styles.
• Jive - a popular form of South African music featuring a lively and uninhibited variation of the jitterbug, a form of swing dance.
• Juju - a poular music style from Nigeria that relies on the traditional Yoruba , where the instruments are more Western in origin.
• Drum kit, keyboard, pedal steel guitar, accordion, dundun (talking drum or squeezed drum) - instruments used in Juju
• Kwassa Kwassa - a dance style begun in Zaire in the late 1980s, popularized by Kanda Bongo Man. In this dance style, the hips move back and forth while the arms follow the hip movement.
• Marabi - a South African three-chord township music of the 1930 s-1960s which evolved into African jazz. It makes use of the keyboard style that combines the American jazz, ragtime, and blues with African roots.
• Marabi - characterized by simple chords in varying vamping patterns and repititive harmony over an extended period of time to allow the dancers more time on the dance floor.