A traditional expression of West African Mande culture holds that “the drummer’s hands are the heartbeat of the village.”
The Ohio State University School of Music’s World Music Showcase will feature music, stories and dancing from West Africa and around the globe Monday, April 20 at 8 p.m. in the Timashev Family Music Building, Room 160, on OSU’s Columbus Campus.
The concert is free and open to the public and will feature performances by five ensembles, including the African Drumming Ensemble, the Carmen Steel Band, the Andean Music Ensemble, the newly formed Buckeye Stringband—performing a range of genres, including Bluegrass, old-time, country and more—and an Iranian dance ensemble.
Jason Buchea, a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology and associated faculty at OSU’s School of Music, organized OSU’s first World Music Showcase in 2023, featuring the School of Music’s then three world music ensembles. Since 2023, each semester’s World Music Showcase has been organized collaboratively by the ensemble directors, who include Dr. Michelle Wibbelsman, associate professor of Latin American Indigenous Cultures, and graduate students Liz Rockwell, Isaac McCarthy, Fateme Monsef Marani and Buchea.
A specialist in the musics and cultures of Senegal, in particular the rich history and contemporary presence of the tama drum (“talking drum”) in popular media, Buchea directs the OSU African Drumming Ensemble. He says the organizers of the World Music Showcase aim to make the event a lively and spontaneous interactive experience.
“We really focus on audience participation and being close to the audience, and sharing the same space as the audience is a big goal. You get people clapping along, get people singing, sometimes you get people up there dancing with you. You just never know,” Buchea said.
Audience participation could include call-and-response singing—much like the student musicians in the OSU African Drumming Ensemble do in the video of a recent rehearsal. In that video, Guinean master drummer and guest artist Mamady Mansare teaches the musicians the traditional Mande song Mali Sadio, a tale about a hippo who befriends a village girl.
The Mande culture is the vibrant, multilayered culture of the Mali Empire, which, between the 13th and late 17th centuries, was the wealthiest empire in West Africa. Mande culture lives on today in present-day West African nations—including Mali, Guinea, Gambia, Senegal and Ivory Coast, among others—once united socially and politically in the Mali Empire
The rich Mande tradition of djembe drumming is the mainstay of the OSU African Drumming Ensemble’s repertoire. Students in the ensemble learn to play the ensemble’s lead instrument, the goblet-shaped djembe drum, along with the dunduns, a set of three cylindrical drums of different sizes.
“We look at it as a family. There’s the mother, the father and then the baby,” Buchea said. “They traditionally always go together.”
High-pitched bells silver the drums with a tingling brightness.
Along with the drumming and singing, Mansare and the African Drumming Ensemble will offer a window into Mande history and contemporary culture with a telling of the centuries-old tale of Mali Sadio. The griots, or traditional Mande storytellers and oral historians, passed down that story from one generation to the next.
Even today, it resonates.
“If you go to Bamako, the capital of Mali, there is a statue of the girl and the hippopotamus,” Buchea said. “So, this is a very rich, meaningful tale that really goes back to the origins of this culture.”
