2010 Banjo Roots Festival Workshops
2010 Jalopy Banjo Roots Festival Workshops
Sunday, January 10
Show starts at 1:00
$10
About 2010 Jalopy Banjo Roots Festival Workshops
The final day of the Festival will start off with an afternoon of workshops and presentations on the history of the banjo in New York City; early banjo playing styles and music from the 19th century; and the banjo's origins as Afro-Creole folk instrument in the Caribbean and its roots in the family of more than 60 traditional plucked lutes found throughout West Africa. It is $10 for all the workshops, $15 for workshops and night of music.
1:00 - 2:30 pm: The Banjo in the Big Apple, 1736 -1940 (Panel Discussion)
On Monday, March 7, 1736, John Peter Zenger (1697-1746) published an anonymous letter as the lead article in his newspaper, The New-York Weekly Journal: Containing the freshest Advices, Foreign, and Domestick, that vividly described African Americans playing the "banger" at a fair held in a "Field, little Way out a Town" to mark an unspecified holiday. The "banger" was the early gourd banjo, the original kind of banjo, a gourd-bodied Afro-Creole folk lute of West African heritage first documented in the Caribbean during the 17th century.
The 1736 New-York Weekly Journal piece was the first mention of the instrument in North America found thus far. It may also be the only period report of a fair in early New York City devoted to Pinkster, the African American springtime festival of New York and eastern New Jersey that had evolved from the traditional Dutch celebration of the Christian festival of Pentecost (Dutch: Pinkster; English: Whitsuntide). In addition to Pinkster, he early gourd banjo figured prominently in the celebration of other African American festivals throughout the Northeast. including Negro Election Days in all over New England .
From the early 1840's, when the early gourd banjo's American offspring, the wooden-rimmed 5-string banjo, debuted on the professional minstrel stage in New York City's popular theatres, on through the Big Band Era of 1930s and '40s, the Big Apple had been a major center of banjo music, innovation, and manufacture.
Shlomo Pestcoe, The Early Gourd Banjo in New York and New England, 1736 - 1840
Bob Winans, Early 5-string Banjo Makers in New York City during the 19th Century
Peter Kohman, Modern Banjo Manufacturers in New York City and Brooklyn, 1900 - 1940
3:00 - 4:00 pm: Nineteenth-Century Banjo Playing Styles: 'Stroke-Style' Down-Picking & 'Classic' Finger-Style Up-Picking
The two principal styles for playing the 5-string during the 19th century were 'Stroke-Style' (c. 1840 - 1870) and 'Classic' Finger-Style. (c. 1865 - 1920). 'Stroke-Style', the antecedent of folk styles like clawhammer and frailing, is a form of down-picking that can be traced back to West Africa. It's the oldest documented technique for playing the 5-string banjo. This is what the first European American minstrel stage performers had learned directly from African American folk banjoists in the 1830s and '40s. 'Classic' Finger-Style is a three-finger up-picking technique that first appeared in the late 1860s as 'guitar-style'. It was the most popular style for playing the 5-string banjo the world over during the instrument's Classic Period (c.1880 - 1920).
Greg C. Adams and Bob Winans present and demonstrate theses two playing styles using historic period instruments and accurate reproductions.
4:30 - 6:00 pm: Banjo Roots: The Banjo's Afro-Creole Origins and West African Heritage
The story of the banjo begins in the Caribbean in the 17th century. This is when the first documentation appears in the historical record of enslaved Africans and their Afro-Creole descendants making and playing unique plucked spike lutes with drum-like gourd bodies and fretless necks. These instruments were strikingly similar to the many different traditional plucked spike lutes with gourd or calabash bodies still found throughout West Africa today.
We now recognize these instruments as early gourd banjos, the progenitors of the modern banjo family we know today.
That said, the early gourd banjo did not come across the Atlantic from Africa 'as-is' and unadulterated. Rather, it embodied a syncretic synthesis of traditional West African form and design with Western European-inspired innovations and accoutrements resulting in a uniquely African American construct and creation.
Shlomo Pestcoe and Greg C. Adams of Banjo Roots Research Partners, http://www.myspace.com/banjoroots, will explore the early history of the banjo, its Afro-Creole origins, and West African heritage in an audio visual presentation, Shlomo will perform examples of early African American music on 4-string and 5-string early gourd banjos, while Greg will offer appropriate selections on an 1850s-style early 5-string banjo and an 1890s classic 5-string banjo, as well as on two West African relatives of the banjo: the 3-string gourd-bodied ekonting of the Jola of Casamance (southern Senegal) and the 4-string wooden-bodied n'goni of the Bamana and Maninka griots of Mali.