Y is for Yoruba, Music and everything in between.

I'm not happy about the quality of this post but I had to make do with a desktop that takes 5 min to open a page. My laptop decided to go on holiday during the night. It won't switch on. Apologies. :( - fact remains, I am not missing a post a day before the end of the challenge, lappie or no lappie 

I couldn’t come up with an interesting Y inspired letter so I decided to continue with my Africa theme. This time talking about Yuruba music a bit. The Yoruba people by the way are one of over 250 ethnic groups living in Nigeria. I just took the world population figures off the net and divided it by the Nigerian figures and came up with 43. For every 43 people in the world, one of then is Nigerian (did you know this?)…well not as bad as the Chinese for whom there is 1 Chinese person for every 6 but worse than the South Africans are 1:137. . This is staggering. No wonder they’re everywhere. My husband who is a Nigerian (Igbo) knows at least one person in every continent. He usually says to me, if you go to the remotest parts of the earth you are bound to bump into someone who will say to you: “How far na” (Nigerian Pigeon English for “hi, how are you”)

 Before I met my husband I used to be one of those people who carried prejudices about the rest of West Africa (I confess), and I supposed that’s because from the few that I got to know about I thought this is surely the pits that there can be of humanity. One of the questions I and those around me frequently asked and some probably still asking is: What good can come out of Nigeria.” I think its no secret that this nation has a notorious reputation because of a few rotten apples. Now I can tell you (well well) what  good can come out of Nigeria: Nigeria blessed me with the most wonderful man in the world. I won’t dwell too much on his attributes, although I’m sorely tempted to. I would marry him 10 times over. The other thing is music, I was introduced to Nigerian music by my  Igbo (tribe) husband and I really love the Yuruba and Igbo variants.

And since this is a Y post I’ll focus on the Yoruba music and its influence around the globe. Wiki tells me that this music genre is best known for an extremely advanced drumming tradition, especially using the dundun hourglass tension drums. Yoruba folk music became perhaps the most prominent kind of West African music in Afro-Latin and Caribbean musical styles. Yorùbá music left an especially important influence on the music used in Lukumi^[1]practice and the music of CubaEnsembles using the dundun play a type of music that is also called dundun. These ensembles consist of various sizes of tension drums along with special band drums (ogido). The leader of a dundun ensemble is the oniyalu who uses the drum to "talk" by imitating the tonality of Yoruba. Much of Yoruba music is spiritual in nature, and this form is often devoted toOrisas.

Yoruba music traditionally centred around folklore and spiritual/deity worship, utilising basic and natural instruments such as clapping of the hands. Playing music for a living was not something the Yoruba's did and singers were referred to in a derogatory term of Alagbe, it is this derogation of musicians that made it not appeal to modern Yoruba at the time. Although, it is true that music genres like the highlife played by musicians like Rex Lawson, Segun Bucknor, Bobby Benson, etc., Fela Kuti's Afrobeat^[3] and King Sunny Ade's juju^[4] are all Yoruba adaptations of foreign music. These musical genres have their roots in large metropolitan cities like Lagos, Ibadan, and Port Harcourt where people and culture mix influenced by their rich culture.