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Kofi Ayivor

In traditional African life the master drummer plays an enormous role in providing social cohesion. He is the keeper and transmitter of much wisdom. Besides generating a truly folk music for the whole community at festivals, weddings, funerals, or during communal work or play, he may also conduct musical duels or act as a healer of the sick. The music he masters is alive from within an imbued with a spirit that invites call and response, dialogue, and conversation among various voices, rhythms, and dancers. This spirit can also speak from the dead ancestors to the living.

Master drummer Kofi Ayivor grew up in the Ewe region of eastern Ghana and western Togo, an area renowned for its knowledge of "syncopations" and cross-rhythms. Whereas in the New World, Africans were able, in the words of enthomusicologist John Collins, "to turn European rhythm inside out creating syncopated space for jazz and reggae," back in West Africa, at least, it had been syncopation itself that lay at the very heart of the musical culture. This is a key concept that recurred in my discussions with Kofi Ayivor. A selection follows from Kofi Ayivor's forthcoming autobiography.

Scott Rollins, Amsterdam

FEELING RHYTHMS

When I was eleven years old I woke up one morning and got this crazy idea that I had to start playing native drums. Most of our drumming is cultural. It's a kind of inheritance. Everyone feels the same way when they're growing up. They do everything that they have to do because they are chosen. You start feeling, "I might do that."
My uncle played when I was little. I used to listen to him. His last name was Akakpo, Egle was his nickname. Anthony was his Catholic name. He is an Ayivor too. This uncle was very good. He was not only a teacher and a drummer, but a master of philosophy.
He played all the Ewe drums. He played the abako, the ehue, the gahu, the agbeka, the agbadza - those are not the names of drums but of the interlocking rhythms he played on them. Certain of them can correspond to certain life cycles. For example, we play the agbadza, for the soul of the dead. We call these rhythms melodies. For us it is melody because each of the drums has a tone of its own. Especially the ashiwui drum. Then comes the small drum the akpagbang, then the gatingo, or cowbell, then the ayaya, which is the maraca. The mixture of tones and rhythms gives you a melody.

KooKookunkun
My uncle didn't have to teach me to play. He just had to see if I had rhythm in me, the same as I do with my students in the school here. He gives you the cowbell and says, "Come on, go and sit with those boys over there." And then you go there, the guys start krashkakakrashkaka and you have to come in kunkunkun kunkunkun, kookookunkun. You always have to make sure you are in time with other people. That is his first priority. When you have no timing he hits you on the head because he feels you are destroying what is supposed to be a message. If you are going to be a cowbell player, you have to be the best because the cowbell player is like a bass player in a Western band. He keeps the time.

Atopani
When I was with my father as a young boy, he was very strict. He was more like an Englishman, with a suit and tie every day. He died when I was ten. He did not want me to play the drum. He wanted me to become a doctor and my brother to be an engineer. My brother is an engineer. But I am a drummer, because my uncle said, "Your father is saying something that is not you. You are not going to be a doctor. I know you are going to be the master drummer of this village. The next one. So you have to work hard at it. Your daddy said what he had to say, but now he's gone and you have the time now to play." That was when I returned to Ghana from Nigeria. I was eleven. I went to Denu, where our traditional drumming goes on. That is also where we have our god's drum. It's called atopani, and it is not played every day. Maybe once or twice a year. I had to follow my uncle wherever he went because he was a master drummer. I played drums for special occasions, for births, marriages, and deaths.

Spirits
In our village culture, if somebody comes to sacrifice some animals, or they are wishing for a certain herb, or if a person is very ill and someone else wants that person to get better and come to the stool, they pray in front of the stool. That comes before Christianity. By stool I mean just an ordinary chair but it is from our great-great-grandfathers, who used to sit on it. Instead of believing in dead bodies, we believe in the seat the person used to occupy because we believe it still has a message. There is power within that stool that no human being has. The drum has power too. Because the drum talks things over with this very stool, and those drums they sleep in the same room with the stool. They are never separated from one another. There is healing power in the drum. If people wanted to make a sacrifice they came let me and my uncle know in advance, say on a Friday, that on Monday this or that man is coming to the stool. When you come to the stool, maybe you're coming with two goats, three sheep, two cows, and chickens. Before everything we take them to the room where the stool is. The chickens and all sat in the room, except the cows. We provide water for the chickens and a special place for the goats, so the spirit of the people will bless the animals.

Trance
We have special rhythms for that. I had to study them by hearing them, not writing them down. When I go and play my cowbell with my uncle he knows I will play the cowbell right. Like I said, he is a very good drummer, and if you make a mistake he hits you on the head. Because if you play wrong you can hurt someone. They can go into the wrong trance. If you play the wrong phrase you can drive people crazy. They just grab a bottle and hit somebody. Or they can be very wild. But you see, we feel and see the message between the dancer and the drummer. You don't even have to be a dancer, you can be a stranger. You can be from Europe, or anywhere. If the spirits are going to take you, they are going to take you. They will just start and you will go into a trance without knowing how it happened.

Positive
I was an apprentice for at least ten years. First you know how to play the cowbell and then you move to the ayaya, the maraca, and then after to akpagbang, one of the little drums. Then you have the ashiwui; but if you can play the cowbell, the maraca and akpagbang that means you are good already because these are the basis ingredients in our Ewe music.
The akpagbang keeps one rhythm. You play this all day long and your timing has to be positive. And the man next to you, on the ashiwui, starts with a cross-rhythm. Now two ashiwuis are mixing with the cowbell, and the maracas all drop in one after another. Then the master drum, the atshigo, joins in; that man improvises. So from all those steps you come to the master drum after ten years, and that is only if you are good. You have to remember everything you learned to play. You can't write it down and say, "Let's rehearse this." No, you have to be able to chew it and pour it out when it comes.

Anticipate
A master drummer also knows when not to play. It depends on the atmosphere or the dancer dancing in front of you. If your cowbell player is playing positive rhythms then the phrases you are going to provide will be good ones. The master drummer will also pick it up when it's dropping. He will cool it down when it's too hot. But when the dancer is really going into a trance the master drummer will roll a phrase and repeat it and the dancer will react to the drummer's improvisation. With their feet dancers can improvise with what the master drummer is doing, as long as there is a solid, positive rhythm.
To be a master you also have to hear what is not being played. When you play like that you might go into a trance yourself. Because it becomes more like predicting. You have to anticipate that this or that rhythm might be something the dead person likes, certain kinds of phrases. You know that he liked certain phrases when he was alive. He would just get up and dance. A master drummer has to know what people like, because you play for the spirit of what is happening at any event, for the living and the dead.

Coma
I had to study herbs with my uncle. I followed him when he went out. He would say: "Do you see this? Don't walk on this. If you step on this you will get elephantiasis. Don't piss on this because you will get bad blood. If you take this, you will get wise in the brain; you will get excited and energetic but you can try to do too much. Especially when you are playing drums." So I said to myself when I was fifteen, "Oh, that's good advice. I'll try this and that to see." I learned a lot about herbs.
My uncle died. He received a challenge from a master drummer from another village, and they had to fight to see who was stronger spiritually. Power- and herb-wise. And my uncle finished off that guy. The guy was dead, it seemed, but after being unconscious, in a coma for months, he came back and struck my uncle. My uncle went ill and fell into a coma, then came out of that and fought the other guy. The other guy passed away in the next few months and so did my uncle.
In those days, it was too much. People could take a common herb, burn it, and put the ashes in front of your house to make you get elephantiasis of the foot. So many things can happen! That is why I decided not to stay an be my uncle's successor. I left my village when I was nineteen to go to the city and play with trumpet player and dance band leader E.T. Mensah. I let go of my traditional way of living and drumming and played only highlife, which is similar to calypso and played in posh dance halls. It is a popular smooth dance music and more commercial. I traveled around West Africa, seeing other peoples, different mentalities, eventually forgetting about all that voodoo, most of it anyway. But I still protect myself. I have to.

Osibisa
After touring all of West Africa, I went to Europe, playing first in nightclubs in Italy. Then I toured the Middle East and Southeast Asia with a Turkish belly dancer, Princess Amina, learning local rhythms along the way. Then I settled in Sweden, playing with my own band, the Modern Sounds. We did jazz and classical music. I did some film music for Ingmar Bergman and played timpani for a Swedish classical orchestra and sat in with visiting American jazz-musicians. Then in 1973 I became a member of Osibisa, an Afro-rock band made up of Ghanaians and West Indians living in London. We had a string of successful records, mixing African rhythms and Western chord progressions. All this time, especially on our United States tour, I began to critically examine the difference between our native African music and the element of it that had been incorporated into popular Western music. And so my search began to find a modern African sound. I feel I can play a popular music more directly based on my African roots.

Agbadza
Rhythm is feeling. Rhythm is also melody. The cowbells and the four different drums do not play the same notes. Our drums are like the human voice, they echo our tonal language. We call some drums talking drums and others voodoo drums because of the melodies the drums are singing. If you play agbadza, it is not the cowbell's basic pattern that tells you it's agbadza; it is the formation of the melodies of all of the instruments together.
It's like singing in a choir. You might have a falsetto, alto, baritone, and bass. We have them in the drums. We have to listen to the melodies the drums are singing. In Africa, rhythm is of primary importance, not of secondary importance as in the West.

Central Station
For many years I traveled the world and listened to and learned the rhythms of other people. After that I didn't want to travel or be a on a train or plane or boat. I wanted to be home with my children and wife. So the man who traveled around the world decided to sit down and watch the world travel past him. For about four years solid I played almost every day on the street in front of the Central Station in Amsterdam. And it turned out to be the best experience of my whole life. Playing in the street. Which I never did before. I had played on all the big stages of the world - in Madison Square Garden with Osibisa, for example - but the Central Station was the best stage I've ever been on. The most critical stage I have ever been on, playing alone without a guitar player, bass player, or drummer, trying to convince people that rhythm is just as important as chords and progressions, that rhythms are feeling. Some people say, "Oh that's a nice rhythm but that's not music!" But good rhythm is feeling rhythm.
That's why I was on the street. Playing alone and researching the kinds of rhythms people react to, the kinds of beats they feel and the kinds of beats they hear. To me the street is a laboratory where I make all the songs and rhythms that come to me. Rhythms come from my watching people. Their reactions. How they walk. Most people are kind of one, two, one, two, But a guy who was passing walked kind of majestically, you know, so I said this is nice, maybe I should try to play something for it.

Walking Dance
I experiment with making new songs on the street. One was dedicated to my uncle, called "Shokolokobangoshe", another was a kind of original African rap called, "Dig It or the Walking Dance." They're a synthesis of traditional and modern styles. It's all from experience from the past forty-seven years of playing drums.
All kinds of people listen. Rich people, street people, people who are judges, police, directors of business come to watch me play, they come and sit on the ground! Chinese, Korean business people all sitting on the ground! Listening to one drum and a voice. I can't believe that Kofi Ayivor can be sitting on the street with one drum and a voice and some two hundred people are sitting listening to him!
But the Amsterdam audience is the hardest audience. Only recently have Western young people gotten into rhythms of the drum through house music and hiphop and rap. Now it's all rhythm. Have you heard chords these days? No sweet changes from B flat to C, no, it's rhythm. People in the West are just beginning to use rhythms now. They're on the way. But they have to get more in touch with crossing-rhythms. And syncopations.

Syncopations
In Africa we believe syncopations are your feelings. When I sit to play, if something comes to me I have to play it, no matter how difficult. I have to, because spiritually that rhythm came to the mind and the hand has to find a way to play it. Some people might call it improvisation. But to me it is just saying what you want to say. African music wakes people up to their own rhythm. African music gives you messages, gives you strength, philosophical ideas, it manipulates your brain, it heals any part of your body. Even the heart. You can be in a coma. If you hear a certain kind of drums, and if they have to wake you up, they will."

Kofi Ayivor