African music has inspired an exhaustive list of genres that span continents, including some of the most popular, like jazz, blues, rock and roll, hip hop, and samba. But for some artists, the allure of African influence doesn’t stem from listening to music that is simply inspired by it — it’s about uplifting the original talent that represents African heritage.
Joel LaRue Smith, director of Tufts Jazz Orchestra and professor at Tufts University, and Kwame Yeboah, Ghanaian musician and producer, are those types of artists.
On Friday, Smith and Yeboah brought African culture to the stage at Tufts for the college’s free and public music event “Homecoming,” at the Perry and Marty Granoff Music Center. With their respective bands — Smith with a Ghanaian band he had never played with before, and Yeboah with the Afrofusion band Ohia Beye Ya — the musicians played a number of cultural rhythms in hopes of bringing the diverse Boston community together through the music.
“Most of the time the concerts are so isolated, so I wanted to do something where people could get together and celebrate African-derived music,” Smith said in an interview with The Beacon.
Smith, a longtime world-traveling musician, is ardent about sharing the history behind different genres and the inspiration they have taken from African music.
Structures like polyrhythms and call-and-response patterns originated in West and Central African music, and were carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans, ultimately creating genres like jazz, blues, and later, rock and hip hop. Even genres often labeled by the general public as “Latin,” such as samba and salsa, are actually Afro-diasporic, blending African rhythms with Indigenous and European influences.
“It’s called Latin music, and that negates the African root of it. You have to say Afro-Latin. So that alone is disregarding, and kind of an erasure,” Smith said.
Taking the stage after Smith, Yeboah brought his own musical talent from the country of Ghana. Throughout his career, Yeboah has performed for leaders like Barack Obama and Queen Elizabeth II, appeared on shows such as “Saturday Night Live” and “The Tonight Show,” and is a member of The Recording Academy, which is widely known for their Grammy Awards.
While Smith’s music is purely instrumental, Yeboah’s music includes vocals. He, his band, and singer Nana Yaa sang in the multiple languages of Ghana, including Twi and Gha, so those who could not understand their words focus more on the instruments. But beyond words, the performances by the two spoke to the audience.
“There’s tons of music in nature, in other situations, and there are no words. That’s poetic. It’s like a natural sense. It’s like the wind,” said Smith.
Smith said the music is what moves listeners, who understand the feeling being portrayed through the rhythm. When writing, he said this was his intention, to let the sound carry the story he is trying to tell when he plays.
“Like the expression: ‘I just have no words.’ That’s real. It’s tender, but it’s strong at the same time,” he added.
Yeboah echoed this sentiment, despite including vocals in many of his songs.
“I think the mood, the harmony, and the rhythm. They speak to people without even having the lyrics. When the music moves to you, you don’t hear lyrics, really,” said Yeboah in an interview with The Beacon.
These ideas shared by the two artists inspired the name of the program: “Homecoming.” Smith, who composed a track with the same name, explains that the show follows the idea of going back to your roots, connecting with your culture, and connecting with those around you.
“We both have the music, we’re both touching the world with our music, and there’s a shared history,” said Smith. “There’s a separation that occurred through a kind of upheaval, like enslavement. So I brought these guys here because I wanted to have a communion, and I wanted the world to see us on the same stage.”
And sharing culture through music is one of the most effective ways to do so; music is universal. The rhythms, the beats, and the movement that music offers are able to bring stories to life, unite people, and reflect the history of a people.
“The pivotal point for me was just hearing the difference between all different genres, and how they all come back together at the end, because it becomes one piece of music,” said Yeboah. “If you hear one person play Latin American, African, American, whatever, from wherever, we all have the same heartbeats. So, at the end, it all comes back to one place.”
