Study Music in West Africa...
Advertisement
Study
Music in The Gambia
A complete understanding of how 800 years of African music arrived in the U.S.A in the person of Miles Davis.
Gig with Tata Dinding-Salam Band
Play Kora-Balafon-Djembe and many more.
A
working holiday with live performance, good food and some of the world’s
finest musical experience.
In
the first instance contact Paul Hill at Musicman 1
Musicman
1
Bakau
The
Gambia
West
Africa
....................................................................................................................................................................................................................
My name is Paul Richard Hill..............Welcome to The Gambia West Africa.
Musicman 1 is the result of 40 years of musical adventure. I left Liverpool in 1962 just as The Beatles were making themselves very much at home. I spent the next 7 years at school like a musical fish in a vaccuum-sealed, waterless pond; consuming every morsel of radio and TV coverage of the explosion that was the "Liverpool Sound" ; it became known as Beat music. Then something extra-ordinary happened. It was 1966, and I rolled the dial on my radio............15 years old and adolescent! The music snaked out of the speaker and into my ear like a viper's tongue!. To this day I can remember the realisation that the columns of sound, the rain like sheets of it that splattered all over me, made me feel that the inside of my very soul was being exposed.
Just as my brain dissolved into a myriad of small unsympathetic parts....a voice announced.........
"that was John Coltrane....live in Antibes"
" A Love Supreme" ....
Coltrane is now featured in the Eclectic African American section of the Video Archive
40 years later, I begin to understand exactly what John Coltrane was doing, but I am still completely unable to do it myself. And neither can you. But you can fill in a few gaps in the bigger picture.
The result of the greatest explosion in creative thinking in the 20th century could be personified by Miles Davis. Have a look at the remarkable similarity between him and the watchman at the National Council for Arts and Culture in Fajara, The Gambia, West Africa. Those Mandinka folk have a point! There are people living here today who are the image of Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus and Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk and Duke Ellington and Count Basie and Fats Waller and Ben Webster and Dexter Gordon and Max Roach and Jack De Johnnette and a whole lot more! Coltrane has that Jola smile! Or is it Wollof?
see also......
Cultural
Values and Role Models
Miles Davis' final years are testament to a complete understanding of harmony built on modal playing. The Kora has been played that way in the villages of West Africa for more than 800 years. In fact it pre-dates the European guitar and lute by 200 years. It is more likely related to the Celtic harp.
The word "jazz" is pretty much acknowledged as deriving from a wollof word "jahass"..... meaning ..... "a big mix"...."un melange".... so that is what awaits you ; music that is played on the up side of fast, and is as unpredictable as me and you.
The structure of thought that you are reading ends here. From now on ..you are in African time and the philosophy is etheric!
We provide a place to stay and a Musician's Guide to West Africa.
And so to work!
I began my study in West Africa after a chance meeting with Rishala Njie. He was buying a new Kora to take back to Sweden. We travelled to Brikama together to the Jobarteh compound. Tata Dinding was rehearsing his band in the front room.....where else...?....and I immediately fell into the melange that is African rhythm.
What I was not prepared for was the blistering onslaught at pace, and with precision, that I experienced...!
Working with Tata and Salam Band has been a complete revelation. If you would like to enjoy this opportunity, follow the links. I would recommend that you go back to your scales and paradiddles for a while before you come to play in The Gambia!
So your check list is Personal Profile, Music Profile, Useful Information, FAQs, Musical Ground Rules, and then you can e-mail me. For those of you that make it, you will find a World of Passion, Presence and Productivity!
Good Luck!
.................................................................................................................................................................................................
Personal Profile
You are going to be a long way from home so we need to make sure that we provide the right back-up!
Please follow this link and provide as much background as will suffice. Then you will feel "at home". The only rules are musical. Time was invented to stop everything happening at once.
.................................................................................................................................................................................................
Music Profile
I like eccentricity in musical composition I have recently been working on some arrs. of John Lennon and The Rolling Stones. These are curious vehicles for a West African feel, but make the music accessible to Western musical and non-musical ears.
Please follow this link.