Ethnically and Culturally Inspired Music
About "2020 Visions"
The batá, an asymmetrical hourglass-shaped drum that powers the rites of the Afro-Cuban faith known as Regla de Ocha or Santería, opens the dance. The piano jabs, tentatively at first, like a bird circling a fruit. The kora showers it with charm, and they leap and dance down a cobbled street toward the sea. Seckou wrote this at home in the UK, reflecting on the way lockdown dismantled the normal patterns of life. Days, weeks, weekends, months dissolved into each other. “It became so mixed together,” he says, “every day the same. But we’re only human, we have to adapt. We have to dance through it.” When he played the melody in Menorca for the first time, Omar said ‘Oh man! You’re going jazz!’ Seckou looked at him and said, ‘The world is jazzy at the moment, so I’m following the world.'Omar sees arcane signifiers in the number 2020: “In my tradition, 2+2 is 4, and 4 is a number related to Obatalá [orisha of the sky and the human body], because 4+4 is 8, and Obatalá’s number is 8 and 8 means infinity.” Lockdown sometimes mirrored that feeling of infinity, of being stuck in a loop with no end in sight.