PA&E staff pounds the beat

Performing Arts & Entertainment in Canada, Autumn, 2002

It used to be enough to be able to tell a bass from a snare, but with the growth of African and Latin music in Canada, we're hearing more shapes and sizes of percussion instruments than you can shake a drumstick at. PA&E stopped in at Toronto's Muhtadi International Drumming Festival last June to brush up on our drum talk, and here's what we found out.

You can stand up to play the djembe, like the members of Bolo Kelen, or sit, like Njacko Backo. This powerful, resounding drum from West Africa - also used in the Caribbean - has acquired the cool quotient with a young generation of urban buskers that the bongo did with the Best generation.

Most of Njacko Backo's students prefer the main drum of his homeland of Cameroon, the angular toumkak. You may have noticed that the second from the left favours the djembe, though.

The cylindrical dunun is used in the traditional Malinke-style percussion of Guinea, the form favoured by the members of Bolo Kelen. The group's name means "one skin" in the Malinke language.

Next time you bump into a Brazilian-style samba band (like Escola de Samba, directed by Alan Hetherington, pictured here), you'll be able to tell that the folks at the front of the pack are producing that high-pitched rat-a-rat on tamborims. Just behind, the ding-ding-ding sound comes from the clustered bells of the agogo, and that rhythmic metallic rattling is the sound of the chocalho. Last to pass will likely be the bigger drums: the repique or repenique, worn on a shoulder strap, and the big booming hipslung surdo that you may have seen in soccer rooting sections.