Talking Drums in Los Angeles: Brokering Culture in an American Metropolis

Abstract

My mission in life is not only to make the dundun a universal instrument, but also to transmit the family aspect of African life to all the people of the universe. I am interested in using this medium to unify the people of all races and colors. My students at present are reflecting this dream, because I have students from all ethnic groups learning to play the drum. Francis Awe, liner notes to Oro ljinle (1997) Nigerian musician Francis Awe has been performing and promoting dundun, a family of Yoruba "talking drums," in Los Angeles concert halls, communities, and classrooms for over twenty-five years. Awe exhibits a persona both rooted and worldly: a Yoruba talking drummer on a mission to bring his music to the people of the world. Adopted as his home in 1983, Los Angeles would come to embody this world--a global metropolis in which he would realize much of his life's work. Performing in American film and television, and recording with major-label stars like Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson, Awe adapted dundun to new idioms and contexts. He used the instrument to enter into cross-cultural dialogues with Cuban and Indian musicians, and opened up new creative and commercial potential by designing a signature drum for Remo World Percussion. Awe's expansive vision is evident, as well, in the multiethnic composition of his Nigerian Talking Drum Ensemble, an accomplishment about which he expresses great pride. In pedagogy and performance, Awe aims to make Yoruba music accessible and meaningful in new contexts while at the same time retaining the particular symbols and organizational principles that ground it in Yoruba musical heritage. Whether working with public school students or prison inmates, Awe tries to articulate the social and cultural dimensions of his music in ways relevant to the diverse audiences he encounters. In this way, he seeks to "universalize" the Yoruba talking drum tradition and weave African cultural wisdom, as he interprets it, into the fabric of American life. Awe's work is more than savvy cultural marketing; it is grounded in a sense of mission and commitment to human emancipation. This global musician, then, not only adapts music to foreign contexts, but also uses music to transform those contexts. The concept of the culture broker is useful in highlighting Francis Awe's self-defined role as both culture bearer and cultural mediator. As one who was, in his words, "born into a drumming family," Awe may be viewed as a culture bearer; that is, an embodiment or representative of a Yoruba performance tradition. At the same time, he is reflexively engaged with this tradition, idiosyncratically interpreting it and mediating its reception in new contexts. More generally, the idea of culture brokering begs attention to individual agency and its conditions of possibility in the global remapping of musical traditions. Cosmopolitan musicians like Francis Awe may be creatively reformulating tradition, but they are doing so, as anthropologist Paulla Ebron (2002, 15) puts it, "dialogically ... within multiple arenas including local, regional, and global politics and culture." Their agency, in other words, is historically produced, socially situated, and culturally inflected (for recent discussions of agency, see Ortner [2006] and Werbner [2002]). This is a key insight of recent literature on the twentieth-century globalization of African performance traditions: as they are innovatively reshaping their music to meet a wider range of contexts and expectations, African musicians are also reproducing their own culturally particular models of patronage, musical organization, and musical transmission across wider domains. And they are doing so within and against a variety of global and local discourses, such as images of African difference and imaginings of African authenticity. These global musicians, in other words, both reproduce and transform tradition in dialogue with the people, places, and ideas they encounter (see, especially, Ebron [2002] and Klein [2007]). …