As Monge (2017) mentions, the musical traditions of West Central Africa are the ones that, as a result of the forced slave migration, have had the greatest influence on the construction of the musical grammars and repertoires of America. There is also a great diversity of cultures that contributed to the same musical forms and traditions of West Africa.
This led me to explore in the first stage some rhythms coming from regions such as Senegal and Guinea. Precisely in Guinea, I found a rhythm that caught my attention called “Saa”. This song has a rhythmic structure very similar to the son de toros, however, it starts in a different part of the beat, as follows:
The first thing you may notice is the difficulty in identifying where the “one” is. Personally, it took me several times to understand what was going on, as I naturally felt the “one” as the pattern I know from son de toros. This made me reflect on the concept that Konaté and Ott (1996) talk about called Beat change, beat shift. When listening to the Saa recording, one can easily feel the “one” either on the high note (slap) of the djembé, when it is actually accentuating the third note of the triplet, or on the lower drums (sangba/dununba).
Even so, I noticed that the low voice of Saa's pattern is the same as the bass line and bass drum variations also found in the parrandera.
