A quick update on the Singapore camp...

I got there on the morning of the first session and met Mamady outside the venue. He looked a lot more lively and happy than he did last time I saw him at the end of April. He's smiling a lot and the spring is back in his step. Good to see!

About 48 people are attending the workshop. Not all of them will be there for the entire time--some people are leaving early, others are arriving late. So far, numbers seem to be stable in the high fourties.

Day 1

Mamady did the usual thing of spending the first day with everyone together, to sort people into intermediate and advanced groups. He did four rhythms in the first two sessions: Liberte (4/4), Djansa, Garangedon, and Saranken. Saranken is one of Mamady's compositions. "Saran" is the name of a woman, and "ken" means "beautiful". Mamady explained that he wrote the rhythm in homage to everything that is beautiful in women. Not the beauty on the outside but, as Mamady put...

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So, here is an update from Mamady's Mini-Guinea camp in San Diego. I'm jet-lagged as all hell, so this is going be quite brief...

Linda and I got on a plane Saturday evening, after teaching two drum classes and a dance class in the morning. Flight was uneventful. The most notable thing about it is that it takes about 20 hours door-to-door to finally get there

We arrived 5:30pm and got to our truly shabby and awful (but cheap) hotel near LAX by about 7:30pm. Looking for dinner, we ended up at a strip mall that appeared to be the only available option within walking distance; the kind of place with about six different food outlets, all of which have "cholesterol overdose" or "food poisoning to be expected" somewhere in the fine print. In the end, we settled on the least-dangerous looking place, a small Indian restaurant. We ended up getting one of the best Indian meals I've had in...

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Day 5 (Friday) of the camp.

Group 1 did two new rhythms, Dubalen and Karinkadjan.

Dubalen is a species of tree. Dubalen are large trees, about the same size as a Baobab. The trees have a large presence in the village--they are the trees under which elders make decisions and where festivals take place.

When Mamady first started drumming, he spent a lot of time under a particular Dubalen tree in Balandugu; the rhythm (a 6/8) is one of Mamady's compositions and named in honor of that tree. Mamady was blessed by many fetishers (male and female) under that tree.

The tree eventually died and, on Mamady's last visit to Balandugu, was no longer there. Mamady cried when he saw that the tree was gone.

There is also a non-profit association of the same name that is doing projects in Balandugu to help the village. I'll post more info about that as I get it. (Update: details of the association can be found in this...

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Well, here I am in Queensland (the Sunshine State), and three quarters of the state have been declared a disaster area. The recent floods are the worst natural disaster in Australia's history (in extent, not in terms of loss of life fortunately).

Queensland is a large state. To give you an idea how large, take Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. All together, they are not quite as large as Queensland. You need to add Massachusetts and Connecticut to make up the difference. Or, if you want to put it differently, Queensland is has almost exactly 20% of the land area of the entire United States. Three quarters of that are flooded or severely affected by flood.

Queensland has experienced very serious losses of crops and livestock. Infrastructure is seriously damaged everywhere. Roads, bridges, water supply, electricity, communications, etc. It is difficult to ensure supply of essential goods to many areas that are cut off by the floods. Supermarkets are low or empty...

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When I started out playing Djembe, I remember scouring the web and finding many wonderful sites full of great notation. Where have most of them dissapearing to. Where are all the notation libraries gone are they only up for profit now?
Wap pages still there...great
Where did Djansa.be go??. This was the most informative site ever.
Did djembefola.com also have lists once upon a time?.
Or did I imagine all these wonderful pages on the web in a dream.