This month we continue with our excerpts from Jonathan Joseph’s book Exercises in African-American Funk: Mangambe, Biktusi, and the Shuffle. We began with last month’s exploration of the three-against-four polyrhythm, the next step in our exploration of African polyrhythms is to learn to hear and play six-against-four. This polyrhythm is very prevalent in West African music, and there’s a direct relationship between it and “the long three” that we discussed last month. This is the basic six-against-four polyrhythm. The upper rhythm consists of quarter notes in 4/4 meter, and the lower rhythm is quarters in 6/4. This is the same rhythm written a different way. Here, the lower rhythm is written as quarter note triplets. Still another way of notating this polyrhythm is to write the lower rhythm as eighth note triplets with every other note being played. Now we’ll apply the method that we used for hearing the long […]

February 2023 Issue