World Beat Ambassador
Robert Jospé Plays and Teaches About African Rhythms and Their Influence
Editor
Drummer, percussionist, and educator Robert Jospé is a world beat ambassador.
Through the World Beat Workshop, Jospé and fellow percussionist Kevin Davis teach seminars about the influence of African rhythms on American music to students of all ages. And in his group Inner Rhythm, Jospé blends jazz with African rhythms and their Western-hemisphere offspring.
"The rhythmic aspects of folk music around the world lend themselves to improvisation and to dance music," said Jospé when JazzWeek caught up with him by phone recently. "As a drummer, I think of myself as a dance drummer as well as a jazz drummer. When I'm playing jazz, I'm thinking a lot of times of the dance aspect of the groove and the music, and I think I approach my group and the repertoire that we play with that aesthetic in mind."
Jospé was exposed to world rhythms at an early age. "My father listened to a lot of world music when I was growing up. He'd come back from New York City (to Connecticut) and he'd have music from Africa, he'd have Middle Eastern music, he'd have Eastern European music, along with classical music in the house a lot."
His latest album, Time To Play, combines a decidedly hard-bop repertoire with those African-influenced grooves. Jospé is strongly influenced by the composers of the hard bop era; songs from people like Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, and Wayne Shorter are included on his latest CD, and on his previous, Blue Blaze. Jospé also has a project in the works for Random Chance that's due later this year.
"As a teenager I just collected a ton of Blue Note records and besides being great music, it's just a wealth of knowledge as well for anybody who's trying to learn to play, and aspire to play as well as the great players of that era," said Jospé. "You just have to listen to the music and immerse yourself into it."
Jospé came to New York in his late teens as an NYU student in 1969.
"I felt like I was experiencing the reverberations from the Big Bang of jazz, the second wave of influences after hard bop and after Charlie Parker," he recalled. "It was two years after Coltrane died and there was still this very strong influence. And I just love that music. I studied with Tony Williams for a while after he left Miles. I was very good friends with Elvin Jones when I lived there. I used to hear Elvin all the time at the Vanguard, I used to hang with him.
"Dave Liebman — who is a good friend of mine and I've played with him a lot — was working with Elvin. I actually knew Miles to a certain extent and Chick Corea and all these guys and I was hearing these bands, and that was even a little bit later than when Horace and Lee Morgan were playing, but the masters of this music were from that era, and that's where my main influences are in jazz."
Jospé's original compositions have the strong melodic content typical of the Blue Note hard bop heyday. "I just am always looking for a good groove and a melody that will connect and will be something that people can remember or sing back to a certain extent," said Jospé. "When I'm looking to cover a tune from that era, or any era, if I'm going to do a Lee Morgan tune or a Horace tune, it's what kind of adaptation can it have groovewise in terms of the kind of approach, whether it's going to be Afro-Cuban or Brazilian or swinging or whatever, and also the melody, something that could relate and connect with people that don't listen to jazz as much as I do or others do."
While there are forms of jazz that have become very sophisticated, or more atonal, according to Jospé, he said he is drawn to a more melodic and perhaps simpler approach to jazz.
"I'm not saying that's in any way the best way to do it in any sense. I think it's great that there are so many aspects to jazz and so many players doing challenging music and different approaches. I just do the best I can with what I know about music and what turns me on," Jospé explained. "I've noticed since I've had my own group for many years, that what I generally like to play, and what I like to write, and what I like to cover does seem to connect with a wide range of listeners, a broad range of listeners, different kinds of people who maybe don't listen to jazz all that much. I'm grateful for that. It's not something I contrived; it's kind of the way I go, probably due to the fact that my roots in music are not just in jazz, they're as much in pop and funk and R&B."
Jospé does more than just bring his music to jazz and non-jazz listeners alike at festivals and concerts around his home base of Charlottesville, Va., where he teaches jazz drumming at the University of Virginia.
Jospé and Davis, who have played together for 20 years, spread their knowledge of world rhythms to students from preschool to college through the World Beat Workshop.
"Kevin and I are very comfortable with these different age groups, and we can make it pretty sophisticated for adult audiences so it's very engaging, but then when we get down with the little kids, man, we teach them just how to groove and talk a little bit about the history, and how the Africans came over and how they had all this rhythm, how these rhythms became dance rhythms of different countries," said Jospé, enthusiastically.
"In the World Beat Workshop, we see this as a musical journey from west Africa and central Africa to the Americas. And when you look at music from west Africa and central Africa, where most of the Africans who came to the Americas were originally from, it's that use of polyrhythms that identifies so much the African rhythmic approach, the use of three over four, and 6/8 over 4/4 and the concept in musical time signatures of multiple time signatures over the same pulse," he explained.
From that start in Africa, the program pretty much follows the same course for any age group: Jospé and Davis demonstrate the Afro-Cuban groove, starting with Rhumba, the early folk music, and then on to Mambo and Salsa.
They also include different Caribbean rhythms like Calypso from the Virgin Islands and Trinidad, and the Meringue from the Dominican Republic. After that, they move down to Brazil and talk about the Samba.
Participants in the workshop do more than just listen, though. "It's also interactive; we get people to join us and kind of play with us a little bit," said Jospé. "(We show how these rhythms) had their effect in the early days of jazz and funk and R&B and just how the different dance and popular music from North America has influences from Africa via the Caribbean," said Jospé. "The information is not that available in classrooms, in college curricula, although I think it could easily be put in that format, but they don't include it."
For more about Robert Jospé, performances by Inner Rhythm, and information on the World Beat Workshop, visit Jospé's web site at http://www.robertjospe.com/. 
