Lamine Touré, director of Rambax MIT, leads drum observe in Grand Mbao
I am Odhiambo ’25
Touré, a Senegalese grasp drummer and an MIT lecturer in world music, cofounded Rambax in 2001 with Patricia Tang, an affiliate professor and ethnomusicologist who focuses on West African music. It started as an extracurricular group to show college students and different members of the MIT group the artwork of sabar, a vibrant West African drumming and dance custom. As we speak, Rambax is a credit-bearing class (21M.460) enrolling as many as 50 college students a semester, and its ensemble’s performances draw audiences from MIT and the broader Boston group.
Throughout Impartial Actions Interval (IAP), 16 members of the ensemble joined Touré and Tang on a two-week examine tour in Senegal, the birthplace of the music that evokes Rambax. Along with performing, the scholars attended drumming courses and dance workshops taught by knowledgeable Senegalese drummers, they usually skilled sabar drumming inside its conventional and cultural context in Dakar and Kaolack.
A sabar celebration, generally known as a tanibeer when held at night time, is a lavish show of dance music, an important neighborhood carnival.
“Rambax is exclusive,” says Touré, whose household of outstanding griot percussionists had him drumming from the age of 4. Touring to Senegal allowed the scholars to expertise the cultural significance of the music—and Touré says their Senegalese audiences have been actually impressed with their enjoying.
Poster for the tanibeer in Kaolack, Senegal, that includes Rambax MIT.
COURTESY OF RAMBAX
A sabar celebration, also referred to as a tanibeer when held at night time, is a lavish show of dance music: an important neighborhood carnival, jammed with lights, blaring audio system, griots, costumed dancers, drums and drums and ever extra drums, and—after all—dancing.
On the night time of the Rambax tanibeer in January, the sky is obvious and chilly breezes waft throughout the sector, the place throngs of individuals, some wearing colourful Senegalese conventional garb, collect underneath fluorescent lights perched on lampposts, chatting and gesticulating whereas ready to observe the efficiency.
Because the MIT college students stroll in, carrying their vivid yellow, inexperienced, and purple knee-length dashikis, the gang erupts into applause.
Standing in entrance of his hometown viewers, lengthy darkish dreadlocks spilling to his shoulders, Touré takes a microphone and introduces the ensemble in his native Wolof. He explains that his college students are lovers of African music and, underneath his tutelage at MIT, have been studying the artwork of sabar. He pauses for a second and leans in shut to start out conducting.
Then Rambax begins to play.
