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express his phenomenal way with the drum [Blackwell had recently fallen off a
motorcycle and broke his shoulder. This concert marked his first performance in
several weeks]. He started out the rhythm on cowbell, the crowd giving a shout of
astonishment when they realized he planned a one-handed solo. His pattern was
simple, effortlessly alternating from cowbell to tuned side-drum [tom-tom]. Then
he switched from side-drum to bass drum and snare, making the skins shout and
setting up a polyrhythmic conversation with himself that drove the crowd over the
edge ( Mama Said There d Be Days Like This. p.183).
Blackwell s numerous tours of Africa exposed him to many varied traditional musical
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styles, heightened his general appreciation of African musics, and fostered his understanding of
their organization. In particular, he was very impressed with the multi-layered, polyrhythmic
drumming he heard. Regarding various performances he witnessed, Blackwell recalled that:
individually they were very simple rhythms that would become complex when they
would merge. If you had the chance to walk around the group while they were
playing, you could see each cat playing a different rhythm. It was a very simple
rhythm that they played, but when you hear the overall thing, man! It reminded me
so much of the way guys used to play in New Orleans (Fish. p.88).
Blackwell also made field recordings and took extensive notes as a way to preserve the
practices he would adopt himself:
I was able to tape some of the stuff on my tape recorder until I ran out of
batteries. It was difficult finding batteries around Africa! Some of the things I
taped I was able to retain, but after traveling to so many different places, you hear
something new and it would just wipe out what you d just heard. I was exposed to
so much stuff that I was able to retain very little. I was able to retain the overall
effect of the African drummers [italics mine] as far as how the rhythms would
affect an individual, and how to try to relate my own rhythm to that way of
playing (Fish. p.88).
The majority of the transcriptions selected for this chapter reveal Blackwell s manipulation
of polyrhythms, his use of syncopated ostinatos and drum-based beat patterns (i.e. as opposed to a
conventional ride cymbal pattern), and his understanding of the drumset as a  family of rhythms.
These transcriptions reflect how he retained the overall effect of African music within his
drumming style. Discretion must be exercised, however, when analyzing these transcriptions.
The fact that Blackwell played a syncopated drum pattern on a particular tune does not necessarily
define that performance as  West-African, nor does it indicate his conscious adaptation of an
African rhythm. Along these lines, Conrad Silvert stated that Blackwell merely reinforced [italics
mine] the African elements of his playing when he toured the African continent with Randy
Weston ( Beauty is a Rare Thing. p.19).
Before considering any African-inspired transcriptions of Blackwell s drumming, it is first
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necessary to outline a few elements which characterize traditional African rhythmic structures,
namely divisive rhythms, additive rhythms, cross-rhythms, and syncopation. According to the
prominent Ghanaian ethnomusicologist Kwabena Nketia, divisive rhythmic phrases are  broken
up into an equal number of segments (The Music of Africa. p.130). Figure 3 features divisive
rhythm in 12/8 meter:
Figure 3:
In this example, the eighth-note groupings and the accent pattern correspond directly with the
underlying pulse of the music, the dotted quarter-note.
By contrast, note values and phrase groupings within additive rhythmic structures do not
correlate with the regular divisions of the given time span. In other words, additive rhythmic
patterns are broken into an unequal number of segments (Nketia. The Music of Africa. p.129).
Figure 4 depicts additive rhythm within a 12/8 time span:
Figure 4:
In figure 4, the eighth-note groupings and the accents do not coincide with the dotted quarter-note
pulse.
The term cross-rhythm refers to  a rhythm in which the regular pattern of accents of the
prevailing meter is contradicted by a conflicting pattern and not merely by a momentary
displacement [italics mine] which leaves the prevailing meter fundamentally unchallenged
(Randel. The New Harvard Dictionary of Music. p.216). One of the defining characteristics of a
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