Dr. Sandra HamiltonOlive Lewin FellowACIJSearching for the ram goat:Interrogating TAMBU

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Difference

LanguageSimilarities

ConnectionsKongoSaddle me ram goat mek me ride, Browns Town inna fire yea, Tambo, me tambo, me tambo yea,Tambo ya ya

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Was a rhythm and melody that I grew up hearing my mother sing as she worked, or rocked us to sleep in upper Manchester, near the Trelawny border. Here I am several years later researching the history of the very tune that was so familiar to me in my growing years. So what is Tambo? I set out to find out.

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Geographical location of the study

Major research questions

Cultural affirmation/ expression have the Tambo have maintained? identifying features

forces that allow the perpetuation of this subculture self-perception, values, and life skills

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Irish reggae film wins awardBY CECELIA CAMPBELL-LIVINGSTON Observer staff reporter livingstonc@jamaicaobserver.comSunday, September 21, 20141 comment

Drummers and dancers display traditional Maroon music and movement for Ray MacDonnacha, Irish TV director of photography, in Wakefield, Trelawny.

CEOLCHUAIRT lamaice, an Irish documentary filmed in Jamaica this year, copped the award for Best Documentary Series at the first Sky Road TV & Film Festival in Galway, Ireland on September 5.

Major themesDanceMusicLocation.

What is music?language. communication. It translates what we are feeling but cannot vocalize. It emotes for us. Music also has the unique ability to convey memory through the feelings it arouses using structure, pace, pitch, tone and volume, as well as the lyrics

Music affects each individual in personal ways. locate us in time and place. offers a record of history and human experience that may have been missed by the written word or images. conveys more than the written word.repository of meaningsimportant to people who have limited means of self expression and transmission of history messages and communiqu.

Nketia (1970)Music bears more than a surface relationship to language. A culture's music has a phonology of aesthetically permissible notes, a vocabulary of acceptable scales and rhythms, and a syntax of customs and rules that govern the largely unconscious ways people represent themselves through these notes, scales, and rhythms to produce what they recognize as music. These ways are conditioned by the cultural community-in the case of settled cultures, by means of tradition and adaptation; in the case of displaced African ethnic cultures, by means of negotiation.

The music of the Tambu consists of:the Tambu drumthe catta sticks andthe human voice.

Tambu drum

Packing pickled fish for export Scotland, 1855

One drum

Or Two drums?

Playing the catta sticks

Catta stick played from behind on either side of drum

Catta stick played from side

Learning TAMBU

Untying Meaning

Dr. Olive Lewin and the Jamaica Folk Singers

Thoughts circling

Thank you

Tambu Akwaaba DrummersketenetworkiTunes 12.2.2.25