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The trans-Saharan routes

node · earth · Sahara — North Africa to the Sahel

The caravan corridors linking the Mediterranean and North African coast to the Sahelian cities of the Niger bend and Lake Chad, in continuous use for gold, salt, books, enslaved people and ideas for well over a millennium. They belong in a Journey about Atlantic music because they are the mechanism by which the Arab-Islamic musical world — the world of the ʿūd, of Arabic music theory, of the long-breathed melismatic call and the ornamented solo line — reached the West African savannah centuries before any European ship did. That contact is the reason the interior sounds different from the coast, and it is the reason the two corridors in this Journey are not independent. The same broad musical culture that reached Iberia across the strait and became the lute reached the Sahel across the desert, and it is the Sahelian version that Kubik identifies as one of the two strands feeding the blues. A listener who hears something Saharan in a solo Delta vocal is not imagining a resemblance without a route; the route runs through Timbuktu, not through Andalusia.

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Connections · 2
Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 21 blocks · 1 evidence · 19 related

  1. Story
  2. The caravan corridors linking the Mediterranean and North African coast to the Sahelian cities of the Niger bend and Lake Chad, in continuous use for gold, salt, books, enslaved people and ideas for well over a millennium. They belong in a Journey about Atlantic music because they are the mechanism by which the Arab-Islamic musical world — the world of the ʿūd, of Arabic music theory, of the long-breathed melismatic call and the ornamented solo line — reached the West African savannah centuries before any European ship did. That contact is the reason the interior sounds different from the coast, and it is the reason the two corridors in this Journey are not independent. The same broad musical culture that reached Iberia across the strait and became the lute reached the Sahel across the desert, and it is the Sahelian version that Kubik identifies as one of the two strands feeding the blues. A listener who hears something Saharan in a solo Delta vocal is not imagining a resemblance without a route; the route runs through Timbuktu, not through Andalusia.
  3. Knowledge
  4. West Africa
  5. The trans-Saharan routes
  6. Connections
  7. West Africa
  8. West Africa
  9. Kora
  10. Ngoni
  11. Akonting
  12. The West African drum ensemble
  13. The Middle Passage
  14. The trans-Saharan routes
  15. The trans-Saharan routes
  16. The Kru seafarers
  17. Highlife
  18. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
  19. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
  20. Evidence
  21. Kubik traces the blues principally to the west-central Sudanic belt rather than to the West African coast, identifying an "ancient Negritic" and an Islamic strand, and characterising rural Deep South blues as solo, string-accompanied, percussion-free, pentatonic and marked by wavy intonation. V55 verification basis: the book is cited as the standing authority and is named in the Journey's own declared references; it was NOT read in this session, and the account of its argument comes from retrieved summaries and reviews.
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/atlas?object=ROUTE_TRANS_SAHARAN&experience=ROUTE_TRANS_SAHARAN