Where Do Dreams Come From?

How it is that I am headed to Senegal to learn West African music

I am going to Senegal. It is a dream come true.

It’s funny the things we grow to desire in our lives, when they start, where they come from. Sometimes we have to piece it together for ourselves.

I remember coming upon a little djembe shop, Keur Djembe, on Union Street in Park Slope many years back, meeting Senegalese drummer and drum-maker Ibrahima Diokhane and walking out with one of his beautiful handmade drums. I went back multiple times, picking out a new drum or two and sitting down to chat and play with him a bit in his low-slung chairs. One day Klezmatics drummer Richie Barshay walked in to get a drum fixed. It felt like the beginning of something important.

What brought me there? I’d picked up a cowhide drum at a flea market and walked around beating it all through Brooklyn. I’d been in a band class with some Mom friends where the teacher started out the lesson with a drum circle. That drum circle fairly changed my life from the outset: the way the teacher had each of us set a beat, and instructed us to listen closely to one another and try to follow and play along…It was the most basic of rhythm lessons but, more than that, it seemed to be a lesson in how to really connect, how to take turns listening and leading, how to get along. We were given the chance to be ourselves, and have everyone try to understand.

On evenings we ran late and rushed to practice the songs we had chosen for our recital gig without stopping to sit in a circle and drum…on those nights, tempers tended to flare a bit more, each of us stuck in our own mind, in the trials and tribulations of our own day, without the ability to tune in to everyone else and find the empathy that doing so brought.

This understanding led me to start collecting drums and percussion — from Ibrahima and elsewhere — and to develop a “Get in Tune” percussion workshop at the elementary school in Bed-Stuy where I’d started a small nonprofit to run arts classes. I have continued to offer these drum circles/improvisational percussion-playing jams over the years to various audiences, recently mostly in temporary housing shelters in Brooklyn.

For my trip to Senegal, I have found a variety of music teachers, of djembe but also of a beautiful stringed instrument played there called the kora.

I am so looking forward to being in a country where the culture of collaborative music and dance is celebrated and revered. I am hopeful that I will find obvious signs that the Senegalese have maintained much of their beautiful cultural heritage and are passing it along, although I know it is likely that there, like in so many parts of the world, the global reach of technology and other things has created a kind of cultural convergence and homogenization that saddens me. The continuation of these important community-building and healing practices seems far too crucial to lose.

Where did my interest in West African rhythms stem from? I remember in the early 90s hearing a song, not from Senegal but from the fellow West African country of Sierra Leone, that I became obsessed with on a CD-ROM encyclopedia called Encarta, a precursor to online Wikepedia. My husband remembered that it was “My Lovely Elizabeth” by guitarist Sooliman Ernest (S.E.) Rogers “Rogie”, born in 1926 in the town of Fonikoh to community leader Mboima Kpaka.

Listen here to this beautiful song...

I remember listening to it on a loop, over and over again. It moved something in me, as if maybe something familiar from another lifetime. It felt so good in my soul, so tender and lilting and true despite not understanding the words being sung, maybe because of that. Sometimes words don’t work. Rhythms can say so much.

I listened to a playlist of Senegalese music on my way to facilitate drumming at the shelter recently and no doubt it influenced the depth and tenor of the rhythms I helped shape with the residents and staff who joined me. I am excited to see the influence of hearing and playing this beautiful music live during my stay in Dakar and in the Casamance region to which I will travel by overnight ferry (which I hope will prove as romantic as it sounds to me, but then expectations are dangerous things…)

This trip feels like a natural extension of my great desire to expand rhythm-making into communities beyond the stage. Passive listening to amazing paid performers will always be an important deeply inspiring thing. My learning the kora will in no way stop me from going to see masters like Yakouba Sissoko from Mali, who plays around New York City frequently. It only expands my appreciation of incredible musicians to try my hand at different instruments, and to offer bits of their beautiful resonant sounds to my meditative sound baths.

I will try to offer you a glimpse of my travels and pass along some of the teaching imparted to me by the beautiful people of Senegal. People keep asking me if I’m traveling alone and I laugh. When I start to feel strange about being a woman “alone” in a foreign land I remember how connected we humans really are despite outward differences of skin color and religion and language. It is the main reason that travel is such a draw for me, to remind myself how amazing it feels to make strangers friends wherever I should find myself in the world, to rely on their patience and kindness, and to offer my own in turn.

“We have little but what we do have we share,” my host Magueye in Dakar told me on the phone recently. For that I am grateful. As they say in the local language of Wolof, jamm rekk, peace only.

In peace and harmony.

XX

Steph