Different Kinds Of Musical Instruments From Jamaica
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The music of Jamaica is greatly influenced by the African culture. This is because in the year 1494, when Christopher Columbus arrived on Jamaica, the third largest island of the Caribbeans, it was declared as a Spanish colony.
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The indigenous inhabitants of Jamaica, the Arawaks and their culture could not influence the Jamaican culture because they perished owing to the hard slavery and the diseases contacted from the Spanish colonists. To compensate for the lost labor, the Spanish brought in more slaves from Africa.
Even after the British seized Jamaica from the Spanish colonists, they brought in more enslaved Africans to serve in their sugar plantations. Slaves were also brought in from Asian countries like India and China. As a result, almost 95 percent of Jamaica’s population comprises of African Jamaican people or of people from African descent mixed with European or Asian descent. This is the reason why the dance, music, culture, and most of every other aspect in Jamaican lifestyle was hugely influenced by the African culture.
Jamaican music is therefore characterized by call-and-response singing. The oral singing is always accompanied by dancing and instrumental accompaniments. The drums form the chief instrument in all forms of Jamaican music. Ceremonial drumming and dancing is considered sacred and used in almost all kinds of religious occasions. Drums were not only used as musical instruments but also as instruments of communication between the enslaved Africans brought to Jamaica for slavery.
Most drums have goat skin heads. There are many kinds of drums, ranging from the long, one-headed cylindrical drums to the square frame drums. There include varieties like maracas, mbiras, rhumba boxes. Music is also produced using graters, triangles and glass bottles which are struck with a stone or any hard object to produce a typical sound.
A lot of different music styles like the ‘Ska’ and the Reggae music evolved in Jamaica and in all of these styles, drums, guitar, bass and electronic instruments such as synthesizers are considered prominent.
Another popular Jamaican instrument is a stamping tube which is known as the boompipe into which air is blown from one end using the lips by simply stamping one end of the boompipe on the floor.
Different kinds of musical instruments from Jamaica include the bamboolin, the benta, bamboo saxophones, tumbas (a drum similar to the conga), rumba boxes (also known as marimbulas), lamellaphones (related to the African mbira) and side blown diatonic bamboo flutes.
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