i apreciete it ...those concepts were always in play in our cultures in the americas that brought the people these concepts come from , with the mixtures of the european concepts and indiginous concepts of music dance.
i arrived at ketu candomble because first and formost, ive worked with an afro brazilian dancer for thirty years , samba, candomble , afro bahian , and, in brazil, those who know , know that the wonderful brazilian popular rhythms like samba, frevo, baiao , forro, coco, etc etc, have powerful roots in candomble. candomble has various nacaos / nations, and i wanted to push my brazilian knowledge as hard as i could so , thanks to my son and the late bira reies , i dived into learning the ketu nation version of candomble , that uses sticks, two drums use two and the lead soloist uses one and the hand, and there is a bell. for sure, my understanding of brazilian rhythms went up in a big way , which i already knew some from another nacao with hand drums. but, to my amazement, the stickings started hitting lots of jazz things i use , in a way that gave me goose bumps. there is one rhythmn , bravum, that the opisite hand is playing the exact splang a lang and the strong hand plays a triplit like art blakey or philly jo jones. same for any american pop idiom, hip hop, rock, funk , blues, they all have ketu codes, not the whole thing, but some things, and some things are really blantently strong.
well, i started hearing these things in jazz, maybe catching the ken burns docu, id hear some older styles and i flashed , gees, that is opanije on louis armstong hot fives, the one they say is one of the most important jazz records. or i heard it on jelly roll mortons, king porter stomp....really, these realisations started hitting me like "make me weak in the knee" bombs. i would play these rhytms right handed left handed, slow , fast, and put them on to drum set , that just rang home more and more how these ketu codes are seriously in american culture and our history, the missing history of our music. the blues? take the bravum , put a back beat on it and it kills as a blues shuffle...blues didnt get drums until the 40's, so it just was a slower cousin to jazz, and these ketu codes are all over it, which means rock
its all over the melodies of our great jazz masters, their solos and compositions. nows the time has the jinka/bravum bell all in it, satin doll has it in it, jingle bell rock has it all in it, as a sax or trumpet soloist composer, all the slick tricks of how to swing like crazy and write killer swinging groovy melodies is all in there, its in bell parts, its in the opisite hands of the stick parts, upside down, righjt up, add a beat to the jinka bell part , keep the sticking the same on the drums , but it goes from duple to triple , and it becomes sato, like from freddie the freeloader to all blues, this tremendous inter connection , but also the slick tricks that lead to evolution . which is what happened all in the americas , right? with all this jazz, gua gua co, funk, samba, rock, rumba, hip hop , reggae , haitian , trinidad etc that is why its so alive and we love it , right?
and it sent me scrambling back to check out the hostory of jazz like i never have before, i mean, ive listened to more armstrong, joplin and morton than i have in my whole life, and wow, isnt that sometjhing , that there is more, much much more that we might not know about these wonderful idioms that the whole world recognises as our american genius , that is worth going back and checking out again...for me anyway, that is what is happening...and im blown away