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Rhythm Exchange Breaks Cultural Barriers
By Linda A. Annan
Music has always had the ability to create channels that lead to some form of cultural exchange –one of its most universally appealing qualities. Hip-hop for instance has taken over the world's youth with its “cool vibes” while spreading part of the African-American culture. For many years traditional African instruments have been used by artists to create music usually doused in African mores.
Such movements, like Rhythm Exchange, still exist. This band comprises of three Americans: Scott Hanna, leader and master teacher of the group, Graham Taylor and Mike Esterson, whose masterful command of African instruments has created beautiful melodies that have received nods from many African dignitaries.
Scott Hanna
The name of the band “Rhythm Exchange,” though often used to communicate the idea of transcending cultural boundaries through music is also used according to Hanna in the context of two drummers exchanging rhythms, something the group often engage in with other artists, be it an African master drummer or a local percussionist or horn player in an open forum.
Hanna, a 42 year-old Connecticut native whose mother grew up in South Africa, was introduced to various instruments including African drums at a very young age. While living in France where he met and studied with an Egyptian drummer –including other masters from around Africa, the drums proved to be his instrument of choice and became an integral part of his life. Hanna eventually made it a profession 20 years ago, not too long after studying and playing with Babatunde Olatunji, a Grammy Award winning maestro of West African percussion, one who advised him to start his own group. “That was a real education as well,” he said of his experience with Olatunji.
After years of performing for numerous West African ambassadors and dignitaries from the U.N. and other high profiled shows he took a trip to Ghana to study some more traditional African music. While there he stayed in the cities of Accra, Tamale, and then finally traveled to a village in Wa to study the xylophone. Undergoing comprehensive training by tribal coaches expanded his understanding of the African culture. “It was starting to understand the tribal migration and tribal history and the cloth that was made and the food they would eat and prepared and who was the chief and king and who dominated and traded…that was when it got a little deeper for me,” he says of his learning experience during the trip.
“I started to learn to play little phrases on the drum at the time and began realizing [that] a great deal of African history is encoded in drum beats essentially,” he says.
Though most of his stay in Ghana was spent learning and playing music, he managed to sing in a few local languages which seemed to marvel bystanders, something he says he greatly appreciated. “It kind of made the whole thing have a lot more meaning to me,” he reminisces.
“There's such a need for it,” he says of such traditional music. “Everywhere I went I got a standing ovation not because it was flashy or fabulous butbecause it was so real and so needed. I think people are hungry for that kind of music,” he adds.
During his stay at Tamale, Hanna played for some local chiefs whose probing questions about his motive to learn their music helped clarify his own mission in their eyes: as one who was going to make the rest of the world know of their existence and what they had to offer. And yet another: to remind the youth in Tamale by showing such an interest in the music, that they needed to keep their traditions alive and not migrate to the city and abandon their heritage.
Sometimes after studying and playing, they would gather around and listen to him play, he says. “A smile was as good as a standing ovation at that point, just the smile,” he laughs and adds, “It was really humbling.”
Hanna performs at world music concerts, though he also does shows for kids and college students in the form of ethnomusicology, an attempt to explain the cultures whose music he creates. “I try to introduce people to different traditional cultural music and we do our compositions based on those traditions,” shedding light to the band's reason for going as far as they do with their music.
The newest incarnation of Rhythm Exchange has not yet traveled around the world, Hanna says, but will be doing so eventually. “They've really been a support group for doing this,” he says of his other two band members.
Hanna, Esterson and Taylor are currently working on stirring up their groove again before touring.
For more updates about Rhythm Exchange visit www.myspace.com/skothanna
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