african instruments

Mark's African drumset is a percussion kit made principally of instruments from West and East Africa. It includes a Ugandan Engalabi, a lizard-skin hand drum with a deep bass tone, and a gome, a square frame drum (originally from Sierra Leone) played either as a kick bass, or with its traditional hand-and-foot technique. A Nigerian oyo rattle of shellaqued nuts replaces the standard hi-hat. And a range of metal tones come from two Turkish cymbals and three bells from Ghana, an Ashanti adawuraa, an Ewe gongkoqui, and a Dagbamba double-bell.

Ankle bells are often worn by dancers in African music, to add an extra rhythmic layer tying their steps to the music of the instrumentalists. Mark wears them to add rhythmic emphasis when playing the gyil.

Ensasi are Ugandan rattles made of hollowed, dried gourds filled with dried seeds, and are shaken in counterpoint to provide polyrhythmic accompaniment to African melodic instruments such as fiddle or mbira.

Frechiwaa is a cast iron castanet of the Dagbamba people, often used by dancers to add a rhythm to their singing and accompanying drums.

The Gyil is a xylophone played by the Dagara people at funerals and seasonal festivals. It is made of tuned wooden keys suspended on a wooden frame above guord resonators. A spider egg-sack casing is stretched over the gourds to add a buzzing color to the sound. Each Dagara community tunes its own gyils to match the intonation of their particular linguistic dialect; this gyil was made by master gyil maker Ngmen Barru of Lawra. Both Mark and David have studied the gyil and its music in Ghana with master musicians Bernard Woma and Rallio Yiryelle.

Kparo is a style of rhythmic stick playing employed in gyil music when a musician strikes the lowest two keys of the instrument with the back (wooden) end of his mallets, to create a sharp clicking polyrhythm.

The Lunna is a talking drum of the Dagbamba people, made with an hourglass shaped wooden shell, with two goatskin heads bound by leather laces. The lunna is used in Ghana at funerals and history ceremonies where its elaborate rhythms and inflected pitch speak proverbial drum poetry, telling the history of its people. David and Mark have both studied the lunna and its texts in the home of master drummer Dolsinaa Abubakari Lunna.

Lunndogo is a large-sized lunna with an especially deep tone, used for special repertoire of the Dagbamba people.

The water drum is a common instrument of northeast Ghana, made of two calabash hemispheres, the larger one filled with water, and the smaller one floating face down in it. Played with sticks, it makes a sharp percussive sound; by hand, it produces round, resonant tones.

Wrist bells are worn by xylophonists and drummers in many African cultures, to add a buzzing sound to their playing. This sound is sometimes described as adding a "spirit" to the music, or as appealing to the spirit world of the ancestors.