Rediscovering My Judaism—in Africa
Just after we got married in 1997, my wife Ingrid and I traveled to Ghana on an extended musical honeymoon, to study a style of traditional West African drumming performed by an ethnic group known as the Akan. Four years earlier, while still single, I’d joined a drumming troupe in Toronto made up of Akan immigrants, led by master drummer Kwame Obeng. Before he returned to Ghana, Kwame invited me to train with him there, where he led a royal drumming ensemble in the court of an Akan chief. A few years later, I met Ingrid, a professional percussionist who was as excited to go as I was.
While we stayed in Ghana for four months, the honeymoon ended almost immediately—and not just because we both got sick. (Ingrid suffered a near-fatal case of amoebic dysentery, while I acquired something that looked suspiciously like malaria.) The rhythms we were expected to play with the royal drummers—at funerals and festivals, for massive crowds of dancers and chiefs—were fiendishly difficult, and neither Ingrid nor I could figure them out at first, resulting in a lengthy series of botched performances and public humiliations.