Hurray!! Now we're two! Hopefully more people will join in
I started a thread long ago, might dig it out and try resurrect it, or we could just continue on this one. One of its main conclusions from the other thread was that there isn't enough Africans on UU if I remember well haha. (UPDATE: here's the thread
here)
Yes, I love High Life music, it's the soundtrack of my childhood! I've been experimenting with some ukulele tunings and been playing along with songs to see what worked best for the uke, but I haven't gone very far yet.
I have a few pro musicians in my West-African side of the family, but they live in other countries so I don't get the opportunity to learn things from them very often. And I currently live in the least African-populated region of England it seems, haha. So instead I just listen to lots of records, read books and go online. I have a book called Guitar Atlas that describes how to play all kinds of guitar styles from around the world, including the African continent, and I'm slowly trying to translate it into how to play the uke that way: desert blues, griot-style, high-life etc. This website has some interesting info about typical african guitar-playing and tunings too:
http://www.alisdair.com/africanpages/africanguitar.html and this video shows some picking technique:
Here's a sample of more videos I like. All with guitar though, somehow the uke doesn't seem to be used much over there.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-OYI51CU_g
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3s5M-VC8R8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oifrfSzfenI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZCGxW59Kbk
We had some discussions on the
Appalachian Music thread a while ago about the banjo and about how the instrument and some of its playing technique come from Africa (reminds me I should update that thread's summary. Whoops!)
Then there's my other favourite instrument alongside the uke (and the drums): the
ngoni, from Mali. I don't play it (yet) but I've been trying to see how ngoni playing can translate into uke-playing. I'm not skilled enough to make anything interesting out of it though lol That instrument has funny tunings as well, see
http://www.kora-music.com/d/familie.htm and scroll down to "Ngoni / Konting / Xalam". It's hard to find more info online or in books because most of the knowledge about this type of instruments and music is transmitted orally, there's not much written about it. But I could share some findings about ngoni > uke as I go along if anyone is interested.
Here's a great website:
www.sahelsounds.com, and a great youtube channel:
ngoniba
What about you? What have you been playing and looking into?