Drumming It Into the Kids

I took three of the Jones kids to the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday to listen to Mande music of West Africa. We sat three rows from the stage.

"Are they from Africa?" the seven year old asked me.

"Yes," I said.

"Even the white ones?"

It was the second question of the evening.

I told him that the white ones were students from the University of Illinois who had been trained by a West African master drummer, Moussa Bolokada Conde, a visiting lecturer at the Robert E. Brown Center for World Music.

"Is that guy old?" the same child asked me pointing to a musician playing the kora.

"He's older than your parents," I replied.

The graduate student who opened up the show told us that the music wasn't black or white but happy, as demonstrated in this short clip.

The drumming is also very fast, as seen in this video clip of Bolokada Conde drumming.



At one point, a family member of one of the musicians got on stage and danced.


The kids really loved it!



The little guy fell asleep in my arms for half the concert. Photo was taken by Emily who pleasantly surprised us when she appeared.

I didn't return the children to their parents until 10:45pm. I don't know what impression this experience left in their hearts and minds, but one of the things I wanted to do was to expose them to another art form and to impress upon them that they had just been on the campus of the University of Illinois and that its vast resources were something they had access to and perhaps one day they might become U of I students.