Jaliya — the Mande hereditary musician tradition

Assembled from 18 blocks · 2 evidence · 22 related

1. Story
2. The profession and social institution of the jali — plural jalolu, and often called griot in French and English — among the Mande peoples of Mali, Guinea, Senegal and The Gambia. A jali belongs to a hereditary lineage of specialists in speech and music whose work is genealogy, praise, historical narrative, negotiation and public commentary, and whose repertoire is attached to named patron families and to episodes of Mande history reaching back to the founding of the Mali empire. The institution matters to this Journey for a mechanical reason: it is a transmission system. Repertoire, tuning, instrument-making and playing technique pass down inside families over generations, which is why the practice is stable enough for organologists to compare instruments across centuries and across an ocean and expect the comparison to mean something. It also sets the terms of what an instrument is for. In jaliya the plucked lute or harp-lute accompanies a voice carrying information, and the singer is not primarily an entertainer but a professional keeper of record — a role that has no European equivalent and that survives, altered, in several of the vocal traditions this Journey follows west.
3. Knowledge
4. Jaliya — the Mande hereditary musician tradition
5. Kora
6. Ngoni
7. Connections
8. Kora
9. Ngoni
10. Jaliya — the Mande hereditary musician tradition
11. West Africa
12. Oud
13. Jaliya — the Mande hereditary musician tradition
14. West Africa
15. Banjo
16. Evidence
17. The kora is a twenty-one-string Mande harp-lute with a halved calabash resonator, cowhide soundtable, a neck passing through the gourd and a tall notched free-standing bridge carrying two parallel ranks of strings plucked with the thumbs and forefingers; it is played within the hereditary jali tradition and spread west into Senegambia with Mandinka movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary; the AMIS article was not opened and no instrument in a museum collection is cited by accession number.
18. 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.