Aaron Mitta
Equinox Staff
Last Thursday, October 20th, Ghanaian musician Saeed Abbas held an afternoon drumming workshop and evening performance in the Alumni Recital Hall in the Redfern Arts Center.
The events were put on by KSC Music Professor Julian Gerstin – and sponsored by the Keene State Music Department and campus-wide multicultural organizations – in hopes of spreading West African culture to the campus.
Abbas moved to the United States in 2002 after teaching music in England. “I moved here to share my culture,” he explained.
Teaching, according to Abbas, is his life’s passion and his instructional catalog spans from Ghana to America to more than a handful of European countries.
At the beginning of the 4:30 p.m. workshop Thursday afternoon, Abbas laid down the primary rhythms for the first song as Gerstin and the workshop participants followed along.
Gerstin, who teaches African Music and Dance classes at KSC, has a strong background in traditional music of different cultures.
He spent two years studying music on the Caribbean island of Martinique, but most of his cultural music experience has come from playing Cuban music with natives in groups here in the United States.
Gerstin invited Abbas to his drumming classes earlier Thursday to give demonstrations and workshops. And while the workshop turnout was small, Gerstin explained that in his classes “we had all of these drums taken up. There were a lot more people.”
The songs played on Thursday were mainly performned on Abbas’ primary instrument, the Kpanlogo drum.
The Kpanlogo drum comes from Abbas’ native country of Ghana, West Africa and he explained all of the instruments were handmade, and the Kpanlogo skin comes from the hide of an antelope.
Some of the other instruments demonstrated on Thursday were the djembe, the balaphone and the axatse.
“You don’t want to get blood on your hands,” he said while instructing a woman to take her ring off while drumming her Kpanlogo.
After jamming on a repetitive, interlocked drum rhythm for a few minutes, Abbas would close his eyes and break off into a higher-pitched solo.
The constant and head-nodding drums smashed into the walls and dispersed throughout the empty Alumni Recital Hall.
Instead of leaving the members of the workshop in the dust, Abbas would occasionally slow down the rhythms until everyone could catch up.
There is a strong sense of community within these drum circles, and according to Abbas, “If someone doesn’t get it, I take my time to teach the person.”
“Some people get it quick and some people don’t get it as quickly,” he said.
Despite a quiet turn out for the afternoon workshop, by the time 8 p.m. rolled around, there were people lined up outside the auditorium.
Abbas, with his drum clutched in hand, lead a thunderous march onto the stage from the left side, followed by Gerstin and Massachusetts musician Richard Adams.
After a brief introduction of the instruments and Ghanaian culture, Gerstin invited students from his drumming classes up on stage to perform.
Throughout, the drummers would communicate non-verbally by smiling, nodding or staring.
Abbas’ fingers seemed to fly effortlessly over the antelope skins of his 4 Kpanlogos. As he swayed his head back and forth gently, he appeared to exert the same amount of energy furiously beating the drums as when he is calmly playing along with the main pattern.
When performing, Abbas is visually collected and casual, but his style is downright infectious.
During the sixth song of the evening, Abbas called out the shy and stagnant crowd and requested people move up to the front to dance. KSC student Felix Seidel indulged in the invitation and started a chain reaction of dancing on the floor in front of the stage.
For the next song, more KSC students filed up onto the stage to perform with the rest of the drummers.
“That was incredible,” KSC junior Kyle “Mitch” Michaud recounted after the performance. “Every time Saeed plays, he rips it apart. He basically had an entire drum set to himself.”
Michaud, a student of Gerstin’s African Culture class and a former student of Abbas’ drumming class, explained the highlight of the entire performance was the balaphone.
“The cool thing [about the balaphone] was that when Saeed hit it, there was a bass sound and a higher buzz sound, kind of like natural overtones,” he said. “It’s something you don’t hear every day.”
For the last song of the evening, Abbas’ face lit up when students formed a conga line and snaked their way all the way up and around the isles of the auditorium.
“I thought the performance was a great display of Ghana traditional music and culture,” Aaron Bystrom, a former drumming student of Abbas, said. “And the great thing about Kpanlogo is that it’s for pure recreation.”
Aaron Mitta can be contacted at Noraamitt@gmail.com