Jamaican Instruments

Jamaican Instruments and Characteristics

African Jamaican musical characteristics include call-and-response singing, prominent use of drums, reliance on oral tradition, and the use of song, dance, and instrumental accompaniment in religious expression. This religious expression often involves healing and cleansing, and worshippers’ appeal to ancestors for help. Ceremonies also exist for weddings, births, anniversaries, deaths, and to express gratitude.

The drum is central to all Jamaican music having ties to Africa. There are many kinds of drums, though most have goatskin heads. Several African Jamaican religious groups use a long, one-headed cylindrical drum and a square frame drum, with variations of each. Many village bands use maracas, mbiras (and a bass mbira called a "rhumba box"), graters (cheese graters scraped with a nail), triangles, and glass bottles (struck with a stone or any hard object). Some groups also use a bamboo stick beaten with two other sticks and a machete struck with a metal beater. The "boompipe" is a Jamaican stamping tube. The player may buzz the lips while blowing into the tube to produce notes or simply stamp one end of the tube on the ground to produce a note. An animal horn was played like a trumpet hundreds of years ago to send signals, but is no longer used much.

Jamaican Instruments