Jazz in the Jungle

The drummer was from the jazz caves of Broadway, the skins from the jungles of Nigeria, some of the audience from the green hills of Rhodesia. But the message needed no translation: when Drummer Carlos ("Potato") Valdes started slapping the taut "talking" drums in a syncopated rhythm, eyes rolled, lips moved, bodies swayed in time to the beat. Had the air been a little bluer and the babble a little louder, it might be any weekend night back at Manhattan's Village Vanguard.

That is how it went all during the four-month, ANTA-sponsored African tour of Herbie Mann's Jazz Octet. From Liberia to Uganda to his stop last week in the Sudan. Flutist Mann and his men played to a steady succession of sold-out houses, jammed with both European jazz enthusiasts and native tribesmen who recognize in Mann's percussive style the distant echoes of their own primitive jungle beat. To make the similarities more apparent, Mann incorporated a raft of native instruments into his group. And the octet learned from the natives as it went along.

In a jam session with Haile Selassie's Imperial Guard Band, the octet brought down the house playing I Can't Do It and You Pretty Baby. Mann himself so delighted the King of Buganda's royal flutist in a joint jam session that he received a flute as a prize. Many a fan asked: "Where did you learn our rhythms?"

The natives seemed lost at only one point--in the more advanced sections of Mann's The Evolution of Jazz, which traces jazz development from the hottest New Orleans to the coolest of the cool. The Africans decidedly did not dig modern jazz. Recalls one critic: "It was almost like watching a class that had mastered the trick of counting in cowrie shells being whisked by rapid stages through the intricacies of higher mathematics to Einstein's theory of relativity."

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