logo
logo
Sign in

Online African Drum Kit Lessons | Congolese Drumming Classes

avatar
World Music Method
Online African Drum Kit Lessons | Congolese Drumming Classes

why should i

Learn African Music?

 

The story goes that in the late 1960s, Meri Djo Belobi, drummer with the pioneering Congolese band Zaiko Langa Langa, travelled with his fellow musicians from Brazzaville to Pointe Noire on the coast by train. The band spent the entire journey singing to the rhythm of the wheels on the track. Back home, they asked Meri Djo to invent a drum pattern that mimicked that sound, and the result was cavacha, the heartbeat of soukous music. 

Meri Djo later claimed that cavacha was actually based on a traditional rhythm from one of regions of the Congo that he had heard in a bar. Whatever version of the story you believe, cavacha certainly hurtles along like a train on a track. In the Congo, it’s known as ‘machini ya Kauka’, the ‘Engine of Kauka’, Camp Kauka being the downtown neighbourhood of central Kinshasa where Congo’s main transportation company has its headquarters, and where many of the founder members of Zaiko Langa Langa lived. Over the past half century, cavacha has become the most influential rhythm in African music.

Africa’s most influential and exported rhythm of the last 50 years; Cavacha from Congo, holds the key to unlocking and understanding the full story of a continent’s worth of African groove.

collect
0
avatar
World Music Method
guide
Zupyak is the world’s largest content marketing community, with over 400 000 members and 3 million articles. Explore and get your content discovered.
Read more