Kam der Swing aus Afrika?
Zum Mikrotiming in afrikanischer Musik
Is it possible to trace the “swinging” phrasing so characteristic of the jazz idiom to African origins? At the beginning of scholarly research into the principles of timing in traditional musics of sub-Saharan Africa stood the need to develop an understanding of some basic principles concerning their temporal organisation. In many but of course not all of these musical traditions we find smallest units of time (pulses), which form the basis for cyclical patterns whose length can be expressed as the number of pulses they contain. Ever since Richard Waterman’s landmark publication on “African Influence on the Music of the Americas” (1952) the existence of a so-called “metronome sense” had been assumed. On the other hand the microtemporal shifting of impacts has been described by several scholars particularly regarding xylophone playing in north-western Ghana (Godsey 1980) as well as jaliya music in Gambia (Knight 1973). Only recently several studies especially on jembe drumming have tried to systematically explore this phenomenon of “inflected pulsation” (Polak 1998). Due to methodological considerations, however, a direct link between African ways of microtiming and US-American swing cannot be safely reconstructed. Taking into account that similar musical behaviour regarding timing can also be found in other musical cultures (cf. Kerschbaumer 2001), the hypothesis of a polycentric development of this sys-tematic use of microtiming seems advisable.