Beat the drums loudly

“Eastern African Music, and especially Burundian music, is very complex,” says Gabriel Ntagabo, leader of the Royal Drummers of Burundi. “This kind of music may be unique in Africa. We have big drums, which are beaten with sticks, different from West African music with smaller drums beaten with hands.” The Royal Drummers perform the 500-year-old music tradition at the Rialto Center next week along with Kenyan world-music group Mombasa Party.

“When we play our music, we don’t only beat drums, we jump so high and we sing. When drumming, you must follow the dancer. Because today he may do something two times, another day three times, so you must exactly follow. It’s a very special music which is [learned] when you are still young, between 5 and 6 years old, [taught] from grandfather to father to son.”

Ntagabo hopes this year’s tour by the Royal Drummers will move American audiences to take an interest in his homeland. Landlocked and geographically isolated, Burundi is poised on a hilly, rolling plateau a mile above sea level, on what is both a geological and metaphorical rift between East and West Africa. Often called “the heart of Africa,” Ntagabo describes it as “very small, like a point on the African map, only 28,000 square kilometers.” It is densely populated, almost all native Hutu, Tutsi and Twa peoples, and one of the world’s poorest countries (the gross domestic product per capita is less than the price of a single ticket to see The Lion King on Broadway). Yet it has a rich and unique cultural history, and the “royal art” of drumming, traced back to the first Burundian king, remains one of last links binding the nation with its origins.

Travel directly east out of Burundi to the Indian Ocean, and you will land in the city of Mombasa, the second-largest city in Kenya and a center for the tourism, with a major shipping port and a significant international airport.

A crossroads of wildly diverse and contemporary cultures, Mombasa is home to many types of music, both traditional Kenyan styles and contemporary trends from Afro-fusion to local underground hip-hop.

The group Mombasa Party performs a century-old popular style known as “taarab,” a creole with influences from Arabic cultures, India and Mijikenda (a collective term for nine coastal ethnic groups). Legend attributes the 19th-century origins of taarab to the luxurious Omani sultanate of Seyyid Barghash bin Said on the islands of Zanzibar, from whence it spread to the African mainland.

Taarab continues to evolve, and has picked up features of popular styles over time, such as Bollywood singing and use of Indian harmonium in the 1950s. Today, contemporary pop “world music” music continues to influence groups such as Mombasa Party.

“Some is traditional taarab music,” says Columbia Artists Management Inc. production manager Michael J. Panvini, who is traveling with the two African groups, adding that Mombasa Party’s style will strike listeners as familiar. “You hear it in The Lion King — some songs that are akin to that sound.”

Panvini says that Columbia Artists Management deliberately put the groups together on the same tour, in part to demonstrate the variety of East African music. “These are two entirely different sounds,” he says. “Like night and day.”