Post by ignatiusjean on May 14, 2013 16:53:30 GMT -5
youtu.be/omgbPPk7w7Y
Hot Air and Breezes
By Simon Lee
On a recent peregrination in the Lesser Antilles I met an implanter (teeth not cane) from Gwadloop who caused me to review several situations. My boy Marius lives by the mouth, fixing the mouths of others helps him to feed his own. Tin tin-bwa sec (let’s get this crick crack monkey cracking).
But Marius is truly a master of the oral tradition with some oraliture thrown in for good measure; I hear when you’re squirming in his chair to the beat of the gwo ka drums, from your horizontal position you can read the poem of the day floating on the ceiling. Tin tin! Bwa Sec!
Marius not only likes to talk plenty and sing in a plangent tenor, but he’s also a master of mouth play: bouladjel, which roughly translates as drum mouth, or drumming with your mouth. While some devotees of jazz scatology may admire the vocal acrobatics of Rachelle Farrell, Al Jareau or even Bobby (Don’t worry be happy) McFerrin, they would be totally gobsmacked to hear the gwo ka markeur drum rhythms (piTAK, piTAKTAK pi tak tak tak piTAK) emanating from Marius’ lungs and larynx.
It certainly came as a shock to me as Marius negotiated his jeep in total darkness, down a precipitous decline ruled by potholes and vicious pothounds above the fishing village of Labowi in southwest St Lucie. I didn’t really need to close my eyes to separate the rasping propulsive rhythm welling up from his ribcage from the higher pitched beats he layered over the top.
I did need to adjust my brain to realise that this was no more than some yogic breathing combined with extraordinary motor muscular development of the vocal chords, the larynx and throat, rather than three men, one on a trap set, another on a gwo ka drum and the third on assorted percussion. Tin tin-bwa sec! Pitak pitak piTAK TAK TAK.
All of which had me thinking next day when I saw and heard him in blazing sunlight repeat the same performance. “But Marius,” I mused, “the voice is really our first instrument.” Even as he smiled quizzically I felt my heart beat questioning my proposition. Which came first: the heartbeat of the drum, or the voice as nascent orchestra? Tin tin-bwa sec.
One theory of human language development has always intrigued me. When all our Central African ancestors (and yes, I do mean everybody’s, from Odessa to Shanghai) were transferring their own heartbeats to hollowed logs in the forests of the future, or fooling with the earth drum (prototype of the Brazilian berinbeu) they may well have felt a scratching in their throats, accustomed so far only to grunting or moaning.
Is it really beyond the realm of possibility (and all things are possible in the kingdom of this world) that our forebears may have tried to imitate the sounds of the already complex language of their primitive drums? Ki sa? Mwen pa sav. Who knows, but either way heartbeat, drum, the breath of life, voice and vocal chords (first string instrument too?) are all inextricably connected. Which had me musing again, on the derivation of the bouladjel tradition of Gwadloop.
Those of you with a better memory than me (tout moun) will remember when the tambu drum and dance of Curacao was banned, only to resurface as the tumba; when the drum and percussion-led carnival comparsas of Cuba were banned from the streets, or the Code Noir regulating the treatment and behaviour of slaves in the French Caribbean posted a similar ban on the tanbou which accompanied drum dances like the boula and juba.
If Trinidadians faced with the same ban on drums turned to tamboo bamboo for their essential rhythms, then maybe the gwoka drummers of Gwadloop used their mouths (which need not be concealed, only closed in a hurry) to keep their heartbeat going. Tin tin-bwa sec.
Without causing every reader’s mouth to yawn wide or to lose myself in time or the Amazon rainforest like the protagonist of Alejo Carpentier’s Los Pasos Perdidos, let’s go with the voice and the respiratory system. Wind and reed instruments undoubtedly mimic the human voice, which is why the saxophone in the hands of a master like Coltrane, or the trumpet in the hands of a Miles Davis can make big men weep and women swoon.
The day after Marius gave his interactive demo of bouladjel I walked through the grounds of the old Balenbouche estate in St Lucie. Through massive mango and burgeoning bougainvillaea came the plaintive call of a saxophone, rippling leaves and melting every vertebra in my spine. Stepping out into a clearing where families picknicked and children ran, I saw the familiar form of my old compere Luther Francois centre stage conjuring emotional landscapes from his sax.
And when I thought it couldn’t get any better, the Cuban conguero Pedro Martinez proved a packing case sounds better than a bass drum and Zouk Queen Tanya St Val opened her set with her bassist playing his mouth bouladjel style. Tin tin-bwa sec.