Drumroots to the Kontaani Workshop Group: FINALLY! (Video)

This has been a long time in coming, and much looked forward to! We’ve known Marie and Debs who organise and run Kontaani for quite some time now, firstly though our workshops and the festival network, but increasingly for their massive support for what we do, attending many of our events, workshops and private lessons, but they most notably stand out for their huge enthusiasm for this music on a scale on a par with our own and it’s something we rarely see. Over all this time getting to know them, and more recently some of the other Kontaani team we’ve talked and enthused much over the idea of going along to lead a workshop at one of the regular Kontaani public workshops. Having found a date that we’re all free, last night Jamie and I travelled up to quiet and peaceful Langley Village Hall, above Macclesfield to deliver a Drumroots Djembe and Dundun workshop and to temporarily make Langley not quite so peaceful! With Marie’s worries that many of their enthusiastic regulars were unable to make it, we were expecting a fairly small class but were happily surprised to receive a room full in which there wasn’t space for many more.

The mixed experience and ability of the class (including some complete beginners) meant that we were to start from beginning; Jamie leading the djembe players through all of the basic technique, showing the participants how to mark time over various time signatures, using call and response and warm up games, whilst I with my dundun team took them from the most basic of bass lines right though to much more complex parts and trying to push them individually with more and more testing rhythms.

After the group were warmed up we moved to teach a full traditional West African piece of music; the piece we chose to deliver was ‘Soli Woullen’, arranged as it was taught to us by our teacher Namory Keita in the Guinean Village of Sangbarala, Hamana. By the end of the session we had the full piece up and running, including several djembe supports, an arranged break in the music, djembe solo and a dundun bass line plenty of variations to challenge all.

We were made to feel very welcome by all the Kontaani guys and everybody who attended the workshop and we’d very much like to return to teach the group again and hope that this is the first of many trips up to Langley.

For those who attended the class, I’ve linked to a Youtube clip of a Soliwoulen mask dance filmed in Guinea Conakry. Enjoy and thanks.