w.o.f. 10 DJEMBE!!!!

This kid at our church was having a fundraiser, a spaghetti dinner, last Sunday, and he also had one of those silent auctions going on, raising money for a mission trip to Nigeria. I put a bid in on this week's weird object, then hovered around to see if I got it. I got it!

This is a Djembe, pronounced gem-bay. This one was hand crafted in Ghana. It is a wildly great percussive instrument. You can actually tune it by playing with all the strings on the side. It is also, to my thinking, a piece of art. I like the looks of it. The djembe is an integral part of west Africa's musical tradition and culture.

Playing it well takes some skill, and you can get differing sounds depending on where on the skin you hit it, and with what part of your hand you strike it, and how you either focus or disperse your hand's energy. There are three basic sounds: the bass, slap (high and sharp sound), and tone (more round and full sounding).

The djembe is popular in drum circles all over the world now. Traditional djembes are carved out of a single piece of hollowed-out hardwood. This Ghanaian djembe may be made of their often-used Tweneboa wood, which unfortunately is not as resonant as some of the harder woods, but it sounds good to me and banging on it is quite fun.

Drum heads are typically goatskin, and sometimes antelope, zebra, deer, or calf. Sorry, unknown animal used to make mine.

Djembes are said to contain three spirits: the spirit of the tree, the spirit of the animal of which the drum head is made, and the spirit of the instrument maker. A masterful djembe player (to which I can only aspire) may be referred to as a "djembefola", or "the one who makes the djembe speak".

Anyhow, this is way more than you want to know, most likely, if you are in fact still reading! I should note that you can search for "djembe" on Youtube and you'll come up with several choices of folks playing these things.
Thanks to Wikipedia for much of the information...

Have a great weekend!