An elderly black man sits astride a
large cylindrical drum. Using his fingers and the edge of his hand, he jabs repeatedly at the drum head -- which
is around a foot in diameter and probably made from an animal skin -- evoking a throbbing pulsation with rapid,
sharp strokes. A second drummer, holding his instrument between his knees, joins in, playing with the same staccato
attack. A third black man, seated on the ground, plucks at a string instrument, the body of which is roughly fashioned
from a calabash. Another calabash has been made into a drum, and a woman beats at it with two short sticks. One
voice, then other voices join in. A dance of seeming contradictions accompanies this musical give-and-take, a moving
hieroglyph that appears, on the one hand, informal and spontaneous yet, on closer inspection, ritualized and precise.
It is a dance of massive proportions. A dense crowd of dark bodies forms into circular groups -perhaps five or
six hundred individuals moving in time to the pulsations of the music, some swaying gently, others aggressively
stomping their feet. A number of women in the group begin chanting.
- Benjamin Latrobe,
February 21, 1819 |
|
 |
Congo Square, now known as Louis Armstrong Square, is
arguably where jazz and blues music began. Once an open space where a native American tribe held ceremonies, it
became Congo Square when French colonisers set up the city of
New Orleans; a marketplace where, from the late 1740's, slaves and people 'of colour' were permitted to meet and
trade every Sunday. They also sang and played their kind of music on homemade drums and stringed instruments, and
hundreds danced. Later Spanish colonisers kept up this tradition. In fact, it died out only in the 1880's - when
the first Ragtime and Jazz bands emerged.
We call ourselves
Congo Square in homage to the very Afro-American, very
multicultural, well springs from which all jazz and blues music ultimately flows.
|
|
